How do we replace YouTube?

I refuse to accept that there is nothing we can do about it.

I don't think you quite understand just how stupendous the amount of data Google processes from YouTube alone is. There is basically no way for hobbyists to provide an equivalent service. Very few companies have those kinds of resources. If you want, you can of course try running a PeerTube instance, but you rather quickly run in to problems with scaling.

I find it almost miraculous YouTube exists to begin with. It is no accident Google has very few competitors on that front, and I don't think YouTube is even profitable for them. Without Google's deep pockets and interest in monopolizing the market, YouTube would have withered a long time ago.

Trust me, I want a solution too. But 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute. All of that is processed, re-encoded, and saved with multiple bitrates. You can't compete with that. YouTube might eventually keel over from Enshittification and its own impossibility, but replacing it with anything meaningful will be a challenge.

Peertube exists. Use it.

now I will admit that peertube is lacking content, but when you make something put it there. When you want something search there first and check out youtube last. This rewards those who publish there with your eyeballs

Torrents solved this problem (big data distribution) over 20 years ago now, and is still a sizeable chunk of all internet media traffic.

All that's needed is for people to actually create torrents for their content, and a user friendly way for people to post and view magnet links.

I'm trying to integrate them into lemmy in various ways: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4204

I'm not sure if you can replace YouTube. It's too popular and has been a mainstay of the Internet for 19 years. We won't be able to convince people to just up and leave YouTube.

Best case scenario is to lead by example and start sharing videos from PeerTube.

Video hosting/streaming is the hardest use-case to replace due to infrastructure costs. PeerTube exists, which works like torrents and is probably the best solution that we're gonna get for this. I don't see it replacing YouTube though, since decentralization fundamentally limits reach (and potential income as a result) and a lack of data collection makes it harder to accurately profile viewers (both of which professional content creators care about). It's probably fine for hobbyists and FOSS projects that want to distribute videos though.

The technology mostly exists. The most important question is always how do you get people to use it.

The only way I see people using decentralized solutions is by having one interface where you can watch decentralized content as well as YouTube. That way they don't loose any of the content or convenience.

No one ever bothers to open up two apps for videos, that is why a single app solution is the only way.

The unique selling point of decentralized video plattforms atm is 1) you can watch what is banned on YouTube 2) you are not beholden to the YouTube algorithm for conent.

So if we can sell that to users and not have them loose any convenience or UX, you can slowly start replacing YouTube.

Monetization is also an important point, but others have addressed this.

Ok so first let’s go over what YouTube provides: Storage, community tools, search algorithm, add sense, authority over copyright, front end.

Realistically you could probably cover the front end, search algorithm, and community tools with FOSS collaboration.

Everything else gets harder.

For storage, the VAST swaths of data, and forever growing nature of YouTube storage nearly guarantee its market dominance alone… if they can contain that infinitely growing monster forever. Its their greatest strength and can also be its Achilles heel. I would propose that video hosting would be covered by the creatives. This change creates a ripple effect that effect all the other challenges, but immediately raises the bar for entry, and with the exception of the highest earning creators, videos would have to be cycled out when their earning capability falls below cost to host. But! This has good sides, like the best videos would linger and bad videos would fall off increasing the quality of what remains. Creatives would have more control over their videos. You could also have a system that rotates videos between a cold storage and live videos, where cold storage would use a torrent like system vs the streaming of a live system, which would allow cheap storage of low earning videos to still have them available for those who could wait.

Copyright, so with the creatives holding the keys to the content, this new youtube would only facilitate the connection and front end, but would not regulate it. So copyright claims would have to be handled by the creatives. This is a sharp as hell double edged sword! You won’t be copyright trolled as successfully any more BUT your odds of ending up in court could be higher as there is no way to appease the record labels and what have you so readily. There would also not be a method to scan the videos to easily find other people who are stealing YOUR content either. And you would have to deal with the person stealing your content directly.

And ad sense. Without a unifying front to bargain with advertisers, it will be like the Wild West. Most advertisers don’t have assurances of enforced standards and will be very timid to employ this new system. They would all have to vett creatives separately, and it would work allot like Sponcers do now, but ultimately i think it would be a boon, but for a wile the money won’t be there.

Honestly the biggest thing all of us is missing to take it down is financial capital.

To get the kind of capital you need to take down YouTube, you need investment money from the kind of investors who will force you to enshittify to afford paying them back.

The financial issue is the biggest one, when it comes to any and all of these.

I'm not as optimistic as you.

Hosting video is really expensive. Making video is really expensive. YouTube was losing money for about 15 years despite having a monopoly on online video for most of that time and the best advertising tech in the world. I don't think it's possible to make a free competitor to YouTube.

On the paid side, there's plenty of streaming services that are making money. But you have to be already established in order to get a contract. And since you will typically have to use social media in order to get past that initial barrier, it might as well include YouTube.

However, my guess is that YouTube makes the majority of it's money from larger channels. If the larger channels all join paid streaming services(e.g. Nebula) then gradually that may be able to bring YouTube down.

I was just reading this issue on Github last night and I really don't see how PeerTube is any better than a traditional server for hosting videos. The peer part of it seems to have such a miniscule impact on the whole thing that it just feels like a gimmick. I've read that the biggest problem for PeerTube instance hosts is storage and not the bandwidth. The only thing that peers can save you is tiny bit of bandwidth from what I understand.

So from what I've gathered, relying on peers only for hosting the video is completely unviable. And that makes sense, especially for old, unpopular videos, there will be no peers to begin with. Even if every video on the site is being "seeded" by viewers, the reliability of connection and bandwidth would be very bad because you can't know if the peer is some guy on the dial up connection. Even in the perfect scenario where everyone had very reliable connection and good bandwidth, the fact that browsers don't support p2p protocol and rely on a hack/workaround to use it, will mean that there will be delays. So starting the video and rewinding would be painfully slow.

Is there something that I'm missing, or is PeerTube really not that much better than a "normal" video hosting server?

Pray that Google enshittifies YouTube enough for any amount of creators to migrate to Peertube

I wish people would start uploading their videos to Pornhub so I wouldn't get embarrassed whenever someone sees the app on my phone.

/s...or am I?

As nice as an idea as it is, it will never be feesible for one reason: buy in. You would have to get everyone on youtube to migrate to the same platform. Just about everyone who uses windows has gripes about it, but the masses don't migrate to Linux. Because it is change at all, and there are too many choices. I like anyone else here, would love for folks to even consider an alternative, it's a losing battle against human nature.

Money. Lots and lots of it.

Hosting video on a significant scale is very expensive. Stupendously expensive.

Convincing people to join is also going to cost a lot of money. Consumers are on YT because creators are there, and they are already used to the platform. Creators are there because the consumers are there. And there is a robust infrastructure to make a living from content creation.

Financing is especially difficult for such a project, because companies are willing to pay way more for targeted ads. For which you need some data about your users. The more data you collect, the better the and targeting can be, the more companies are willing to pay.
Assuming there are enough users for companies to pay for advertising at all.

Easy solution: host an FTP with all the videos. It has existed long before YouTube was a thing.

More advanced solution: Torrent ala Pirate Bay. High quality videos have been distributed this way long before YouTube even supported 1080p. Peertube is based on similar solution as this.

The main problem is to attract content creators to the platform. The problem isn’t technical.

This seems like one of the few problems where crypto might actually be useful. It would allow people to automatically and anonymously pay both the creator and the host of that video. Maybe make it a federated system and every host gets paid based on how many Bytes they send. The creator gets a share of that money and the whole system uses something like Monero or whatever. Not sure what the costs of that would be, but I assume its not too outrageous. If it was, YouTube wouldn't be able to exist.

The key problem that needs to be solved is the monetization problem. Nostr has a potential solution though. Over the last two months alone, their users have "zapped" (tipped/donated) other users around 950K (nearly 1 mil!) USD worth via lightning and that number continues to grow. And it doesn't just make it easy to pay content creators, but to also put a portion of your "zaps" towards the relay you use or development of the software if you want. If you have a nostr account, you can easily tie it to a lightning address to send/receive tips, nostr doesn't take a fee. Relays can also portion out a bit of their zaps for the people who publish the most engaging content on their relay. The possibilities are quite extensive. And because it's over lightning, zaps happen instantly and for pennies or less in fees. Though, you can use nostr without zaps at all.

For those unfamiliar with nostr, it's a decentralized social media software much like ActivityPub/mastodon, the main use right now is as a twitter/instagram clone but there's also a reddit-style section being built up as well. Video hosting itself could be done by relays or through a P2P system similar to IPFS. Moderation abilities from the perspective of the instance/relay are identical to activitypub/mastodon. But one bonus if that if your relay goes down, you don't lose your identity, since your identity and relay are separate. And if you change apps or relays (you are typically connected to multiple relays), all your content moves with you seamlessly. And the payment/zap infrastructure is all decentralized, relays don't ever custody or manage the payments. If you tip a content creator, it goes directly from you to them. The lightning network has basically limitless transaction capacity. If you have cash app, it supports lightning, so you can already send zaps (you will need different apps to receive zaps though because cash app doesn't support the LNURL standard). Strike natively supports it. And because it's lightning, it works in every country automatically.

Long-term, if I am a content creator, which "fedi"-type system is going to be attractive to me? One where users can send me tips and mircopayments or one where they can't? This is why I think nostr is going to win out long-term over AP/Mastodon. Mastodon could add this kind of functionality but I don't get the impression they're open to it. People may not want to commit to yet another $5/month subscription to a YouTuber's patreon or nebula or whatever, but they are happy to tip 1-10c after watching a video. So there's a psychological beauty to micropayments as well. As some random person I have made like 7c on tips this month, but I've also given out plenty to other people.

Source about nostr fees: https://lemmy.ml/post/17824358

P2P, and shamelessly rehosting popular content.

Won't make those content creators happy... but it's the best way to get users to show up, which will attract original content creators.

The biggest issue I've always heard people say when it comes to replacing a video hosting service like YouTube is needing storage space and bandwidth.

I feel like ipfs, the interplanetary file system, could be leveraged to do this but it would require a concerted effort to make a fast, stable, reliable, and federated YouTube replacement, and I imagine that we would need people to financially support it.

You get me $10B annually or so, and then we can start to talk. Your single-fiber line and homelab will handle, what, 25 simultaneous users? Just have to scale that to a billion daily users or so, no bigger.

Also yt is "super critical"? Super critical is power for ICU wards and stuff, nobody is going to have a heart failure because they can't get their daily dose of #shorts. Also gestures at Wikipedia, who is glaring at you.

I think you're giving yt way, way too much credit, but simultaneously thinking that any one of us has the financial capability to not only have but risk that kind of cash. Companies have tried and failed. Users aren't doing it, chief.

you offer content creators a better revenue share to make content for the new service while offering the same level of stability. there's a reason why nobody has done it.

As a PeerTube instance owner, I would say that not everyone needs to join a single instance (that would be the biggest mistake). Instead, if you can self-host one and invite people you like and know, they can provide quality content. Also, having multiple smaller instances makes it easier to moderate and have quality control. Federation and direct subscription to channels also improve instance discovery.

Element isn't replacing shit. I hate Matrix

Also it’s worth mentioning the “how to distribute content among peers” problem has mostly been solved and has for over a decade, just that nobody has built out the UX for it for a YouTube clone. Torrents exist, #freenet and #hyphanet exist, #ipfs exists, these are all excellent platforms for storing and distributing content without relying on expensive, centralized hosting. Instead, users share the burden of hosting. There’s a whole category of software that solves this problem in different ways (P2P). Unfortunately, every new generation of developers seems to want to re-invent the wheel instead of using time-tested tech that already exists but just needs a UX refresh or maybe some protocol improvements.

If you have a tube site and it says “to skip ads, install IPFS”, everybody would be using IPFS.

RSS like podcasts. A compressed 1080p video is totally doable over most Internet.

I have thought about creating a video series that is distributed via torrent, that could be a decent idea...

If you're a creator, upload to Peertube and Youtube, and promote Peertube on your Youtube channel. It's a compromise, but it's the only realistic way to pull viewers over if you're not already a popular creator. Also provide some incentives to use Peertube instead of Youtube, like early uploads.

If you're a viewer, use Peertube; and when you need to use Youtube, use a 3rd party client like pipe-viewer. Don't support ad culture, donate to creators you like instead.

Proton as a private alternative to Gmail

lol, lmao

Look at the strangler pattern in microswrvice architecture. Applying this to your scenario, set up a front end to YouTube, cache the results locally (probably host in a place that allows it). Also host videos from other platforms like peertube. Once you have a lot of users, slowly prioritize "free" videos over YT content.

It's not likely to happen, but it's the pattern that FB uses to present news. First they showed a link to the story and you'd click through, then they required more of the story, then when all were hooked, they demanded the whole story to be displayed, effectively stealing all the users and the ability to advertise.

for 3d printed gun people (not personally one of them, just browsed their subreddit once), they use some vaguely blockchain crypto related p2p video host called LBRY, not sure if that model is scalable though, as it seems to be based around free p2p hosting like torrents, although there was some mention of hosting fees, presumably in crypto? not sure

I don't have solution for videos, but I am moving back to podcasts and rss as much as possible. I want to be ready when they finally forbbid watching without ads.

But I must admit content creators are not helping, content for most of them become just job to be done with. I am aware it is not their fault and that yt is pushing them, but content is geting worse.

It is hard to compete with platform that is loosing so much money. They will also buy anyone who tries. Maybe if we start being satisfied with one resolution and quality, but that will never happen.

Lobby your government to nationalize it. Anything that important can't be left to private industry.

People use YouTube because YouTube pays them. You want to get paid without a middleman; you have to use cryptocurrency. The Fediverse hates crypto, so the Fediverse will never have a YouTube replacement.

https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/

Check out FreeTube to privately watch YouTube videos, and PeerTube for a complete replacement.