So Elon gutted Twitter, and people jumped ship to Mastodon.
Now spez did… you know… and we’re on Lemmy and Kbin.
Can we have a YouTube to PeerTube exodus next? With the whole ad-pocalypse over there, seems like Google is itching for it.
It probably wouldn’t be able to be exactly like YouTube with regular “shows” but rather like YouTube was at the beginning where people just uploaded their random videos to share.
That’s unlikely. Both Reddit and Twitter speak or at least spoke to people who enjoy a certain image of being anti establishment (in one way or another and whether that’s warranted or not). Youtube just doesn’t. You can’t get more mainstream than Youtube.
Not going to happen. All the alternatives so far are attracting all the nutjobs and platform ends up with loth of garbage conspiracy videos, antisemitic, racist…etc users who would be otherwise straight banned from youtube.
YouTube is getting increasingly user-hostile with monetization with the huge increase in pre-roll and mid-roll ads, starting to lock resolutions above 1080p behind a paywall ( this was reported months ago but I’ve recently stumbled into my first two videos where 1080p60 and above was paywalled), and even getting aggressive on adblockers.
On the flip side, they provide an inherently unprofitable high-cost service that, unlike virtually all others, actually does compensate its content creators.
Nobody I talk to about this ever seems to have any idea as to where the money is supposed to come from other than not ads and not blocking adblockers and not reducing bandwidth costs. So in other words… Nowhere.
Honestly… Leave YouTube alone. Even with ads, everyone’s getting a pretty good deal out of Google on that one. You don’t want to be sharing or taking on their costs.
I see potential in a site that offers an alternative algorithm, or curated list of channels, but still links to youtube for the streaming itself. The content that Youtube shows me has gotten quite bad lately… and the search doesn’t even work properly.
It seems like PeerTube does allow peer to peer streaming of watched videos too, so that might help mitigate the bandwidth requirements. The storage and transcoding requirements will be far larger than things like Lemmy though, agreed.
I’d expect p2p streaming to soften the blow for the traffic bill generated by popular videos. You’d always need somebody else to consume the content at the same time which doesn’t happen in most cases.
If you’re taking a similar route to YouTube, you also need a ton of CPU/GPU power and/or specialized hardware. YouTube transcodes every video into 2 (3 for videos with >~2M views) different formats in 5 different resolutions. A community-run service could skip on some of that, but it’d come at the cost of lower quality, less support for older devices, or higher bandwidth usage.
It might have potential and the video quality is decent, but unless they sort out their banning policy it will only attract nutjobs and all kind of anti[something]ists, [something]phobes… etc.
Reading comment sections is making me puke.
All the crypto crap is not helping as well.
I am prefering paying some money for nebula, which might not have a big creator base but everything I need, sometimes some bonus content and no ads. But this one is not for everyone.
Just for conversations sake, what is Odysee really? I’ve only heard of it in the context of crypto stuff, but is it selfhostable? A federated video platform that let’s you “mine”, in the loosest terms, crypto from viewers sounds interesting but I don’t know how it actually works.
Edit: looks like it’s at least partially open source, maybe fully. It’s centrally-hosted and funded by ads, premium subscriptions, and some sort of crypto scheme that can boost a video’s discoverability.
I’ve actually heard of some of the creators though (unlike PeerTube), so that’s interesting
Memes and text comments can be easily self hosted, but video hosting requires an expensive server farm with petabytes of SSDs, bandwidth and lots of GPUs for transcoding. Ok if you make a subscription only service like nebula or floatplane, but it’s impossibile to host an ad-free service and rely on the few donations.
Linus Tech Tips recently did a video where they go over the cost and complexity of running something like YouTube.
Frankly I’m surprised 4k video wasn’t locked behind Premium from the start.
Part of me wonders if YouTube could have scaled up more gracefully if they pushed a subscription option earlier (and priced it better, I hate how it’s bundled with a music service I don’t want).
Ads fucking suck, but I think most people recognize they are a necessary evil in order to run any kind of free social video platform at a meaningful scale.
i agree with that video also, free 4k video for something that most times it’s just entertainment when you’re doing something else, it’s a bit pointless
i have a 4k monitor but most of the times i watch 720p from my invidious instance because i prefer saving my own bandwidth to the visual quality for this kind of content.
If it’s a movie, then it’s different, 4k it’s a must
If a platform didn’t do transcoding, and requested content creators do it themselves, I wonder if that’d help enough to make it more feasible? Then its just bandwidth and storage, and storage has only gotten cheaper over the years.
There already are some that are fully relying on external income and leave there video unmonitized by google. But yeah most smaller channels dont have that option.
I’ve looked at peertube a few times, and everytime I do, it seems to be filled with nothing but videos about the latest cryptoscamcoin. I have zero interest in that at all. Until they get content worth watching, it’s not going to happen.
It’s the chicken & egg problem; people won’t use peertube because there’s no good content on there and content creators wont go there because the people aren’t there
I use RSS feed to follow youtube channels, but if they happen to upload to odysee or peertube as well, I follow them there instead. Just to give a YouTube competitor a bit more traffic.
Yes but it’s the creators that brings the people. YouTube worked because at the beginning it was the only place where you could upload videos and nobody was thinking about making a dime.
It doesn’t really seem workable right now. A video platform that just lets anybody upload anything and everything onto a large main server is going to use completely absurd amounts of storage and bandwidth, so PeerTube can only really work if most people either self-host or join small communities to host their videos.
Unfortunately, PeerTube is absolutely terrible for discovering videos you’d enjoy on smaller instances. Until they can fix that, there’s really no hope of it taking off. I’d love to see it happen, but we’re just not there right now.
Yea, having a competitor to youtube seem near impossible. The only reason youtube survived was because Google bought them, who was able to provide them with the insane resources required for a video hosting platform. Similar to Twitch being bought by Amazon, which has AWS.
There’s https://sepiasearch.org/ for global video search. It’s a search engine, run by the developers, that indexes every approved instance. So if you’re only interested in watching videos (and don’t mind searching for them), then it’s even easier than other Fediverse services, because you have one central place you can go to for all your videos.
Speaking of, got any good peertube channels?
Tbh, I’m more familiar with nebula and floatplane - where YT creators made their own platform. Maybe that’s where things are headed
Nebula is not bad. I paid for it for a year, but had some issues with not enough content and the buggy UI on Firefox. If Youtube blocks adblockers, I’ll certainly go back to it.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@beehaw.org
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Gotta be a way for folks to get paid. Most of the folks I watch on YouTube do it for a living.
It probably wouldn’t be able to be exactly like YouTube with regular “shows” but rather like YouTube was at the beginning where people just uploaded their random videos to share.
That’s unlikely. Both Reddit and Twitter speak or at least spoke to people who enjoy a certain image of being anti establishment (in one way or another and whether that’s warranted or not). Youtube just doesn’t. You can’t get more mainstream than Youtube.
I think at most you’d see people cross posting videos there as a secondary platform
That is precisely why I run my own instance, it’s essentially a backup from YouTube of my own dumb videos: https://peertube.bloonface.com
But honestly that’s pretty much all it is. It’s not really worth much more than that to me.
Not going to happen. All the alternatives so far are attracting all the nutjobs and platform ends up with loth of garbage conspiracy videos, antisemitic, racist…etc users who would be otherwise straight banned from youtube.
That’s going to take megabucks. Huge bandwidth, storage and compute. Who’s going to pay for it?
Not it
Everybody gangsta until they realise that their usage of services incurs costs
Replacing YouTube is a bad idea
I would rather go for reasonable competition. Ideally more than one. I really enjoy nebula for example.
At the very least competition is needed.
YouTube is getting increasingly user-hostile with monetization with the huge increase in pre-roll and mid-roll ads, starting to lock resolutions above 1080p behind a paywall ( this was reported months ago but I’ve recently stumbled into my first two videos where 1080p60 and above was paywalled), and even getting aggressive on adblockers.
On the flip side, they provide an inherently unprofitable high-cost service that, unlike virtually all others, actually does compensate its content creators.
Nobody I talk to about this ever seems to have any idea as to where the money is supposed to come from other than not ads and not blocking adblockers and not reducing bandwidth costs. So in other words… Nowhere.
Honestly… Leave YouTube alone. Even with ads, everyone’s getting a pretty good deal out of Google on that one. You don’t want to be sharing or taking on their costs.
If I recall correctly, they are also testing 10 unskippable ads before sone videos now, right? Fun times ahead!
Would creators actually move there? Say what you will about YouTube but at least they usually compensate the creators.
I’m afraid the barrier to entry for this is much higher, as video streaming is quite expensive. You need a lot of storage and also a lot of traffic.
I see potential in a site that offers an alternative algorithm, or curated list of channels, but still links to youtube for the streaming itself. The content that Youtube shows me has gotten quite bad lately… and the search doesn’t even work properly.
It seems like PeerTube does allow peer to peer streaming of watched videos too, so that might help mitigate the bandwidth requirements. The storage and transcoding requirements will be far larger than things like Lemmy though, agreed.
I’d expect p2p streaming to soften the blow for the traffic bill generated by popular videos. You’d always need somebody else to consume the content at the same time which doesn’t happen in most cases.
Yeah, good point. The others are mainly hosting text and some images
If you’re taking a similar route to YouTube, you also need a ton of CPU/GPU power and/or specialized hardware. YouTube transcodes every video into 2 (3 for videos with >~2M views) different formats in 5 different resolutions. A community-run service could skip on some of that, but it’d come at the cost of lower quality, less support for older devices, or higher bandwidth usage.
Peertube always felt hard to use, and no one has really caught on to it imo.
Better chance of YT -> Odysee
It might have potential and the video quality is decent, but unless they sort out their banning policy it will only attract nutjobs and all kind of anti[something]ists, [something]phobes… etc.
Reading comment sections is making me puke.
All the crypto crap is not helping as well.
I am prefering paying some money for nebula, which might not have a big creator base but everything I need, sometimes some bonus content and no ads. But this one is not for everyone.
Just for conversations sake, what is Odysee really? I’ve only heard of it in the context of crypto stuff, but is it selfhostable? A federated video platform that let’s you “mine”, in the loosest terms, crypto from viewers sounds interesting but I don’t know how it actually works.
I’m reading their FAQ here, but I’m still not sure how the money and hosting side works yet https://help.odysee.tv/category-basics/whatisodysee/
Edit: looks like it’s at least partially open source, maybe fully. It’s centrally-hosted and funded by ads, premium subscriptions, and some sort of crypto scheme that can boost a video’s discoverability. I’ve actually heard of some of the creators though (unlike PeerTube), so that’s interesting
Memes and text comments can be easily self hosted, but video hosting requires an expensive server farm with petabytes of SSDs, bandwidth and lots of GPUs for transcoding. Ok if you make a subscription only service like nebula or floatplane, but it’s impossibile to host an ad-free service and rely on the few donations.
Linus Tech Tips recently did a video where they go over the cost and complexity of running something like YouTube.
Frankly I’m surprised 4k video wasn’t locked behind Premium from the start.
Part of me wonders if YouTube could have scaled up more gracefully if they pushed a subscription option earlier (and priced it better, I hate how it’s bundled with a music service I don’t want).
Ads fucking suck, but I think most people recognize they are a necessary evil in order to run any kind of free social video platform at a meaningful scale.
i agree with that video also, free 4k video for something that most times it’s just entertainment when you’re doing something else, it’s a bit pointless
i have a 4k monitor but most of the times i watch 720p from my invidious instance because i prefer saving my own bandwidth to the visual quality for this kind of content.
If it’s a movie, then it’s different, 4k it’s a must
If a platform didn’t do transcoding, and requested content creators do it themselves, I wonder if that’d help enough to make it more feasible? Then its just bandwidth and storage, and storage has only gotten cheaper over the years.
Yeah, I wonder what the cost breakdown is for transcoding, storage, streaming, etc.
do birds fly? do ducks duck?
There already are some that are fully relying on external income and leave there video unmonitized by google. But yeah most smaller channels dont have that option.
I’ve looked at peertube a few times, and everytime I do, it seems to be filled with nothing but videos about the latest cryptoscamcoin. I have zero interest in that at all. Until they get content worth watching, it’s not going to happen.
It’s the chicken & egg problem; people won’t use peertube because there’s no good content on there and content creators wont go there because the people aren’t there
That’s true.
I use RSS feed to follow youtube channels, but if they happen to upload to odysee or peertube as well, I follow them there instead. Just to give a YouTube competitor a bit more traffic.
Yes but it’s the creators that brings the people. YouTube worked because at the beginning it was the only place where you could upload videos and nobody was thinking about making a dime.
But they are also going to struggle to monetise their content.
Does peer tube have monetisation features? Or would it all be sponsors, patreons and product placement?
It doesn’t really seem workable right now. A video platform that just lets anybody upload anything and everything onto a large main server is going to use completely absurd amounts of storage and bandwidth, so PeerTube can only really work if most people either self-host or join small communities to host their videos.
Unfortunately, PeerTube is absolutely terrible for discovering videos you’d enjoy on smaller instances. Until they can fix that, there’s really no hope of it taking off. I’d love to see it happen, but we’re just not there right now.
Yea, having a competitor to youtube seem near impossible. The only reason youtube survived was because Google bought them, who was able to provide them with the insane resources required for a video hosting platform. Similar to Twitch being bought by Amazon, which has AWS.
There’s https://sepiasearch.org/ for global video search. It’s a search engine, run by the developers, that indexes every approved instance. So if you’re only interested in watching videos (and don’t mind searching for them), then it’s even easier than other Fediverse services, because you have one central place you can go to for all your videos.
Speaking of, got any good peertube channels? Tbh, I’m more familiar with nebula and floatplane - where YT creators made their own platform. Maybe that’s where things are headed
Nebula is not bad. I paid for it for a year, but had some issues with not enough content and the buggy UI on Firefox. If Youtube blocks adblockers, I’ll certainly go back to it.