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.
For YouTube is extremely difficult, people are very used to it, and they are not moving to other platforms when there are decisions clearly against the users as they depend entirely on the creator’s decision (and they will not earn as much money on other platforms… They are still “workers”), it is not as easy as leaving Twitter and Reddit for Mastodon and Lemmy since in this case their creators are the community of users themselves.
There is also the problem of needing a huge storage to save the videos, unfeasible for an open source/FOSS community project unless the rates of adoption are enormous enough and everyone contribute/donate, or at least until we start using more efficient codecs and video compression.
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.
A lot of people in this thread talking about how it’s not feasible because content creators wouldn’t get paid and I agree if you expect that same quality of content.
But I think peertube opens the door for a lot of the more organic content of just people sharing interesting/entertaining/educational videos with others without any expectation of being paid. I’ve already watched some really good videos on peertube that feel a lot more like the old days of YouTube.
Yes, totally agree. For me by itself a great reason to do it. Or even just for archival purposes, seeing how suddenly things can just disappear.
Nebula has been quite successful as far as I can tell. A whole bunch of educational YouTubers have moved over or were part of establishing it and honestly it works well. Videos can download to your device, the quality is the same, the app is a tiny bit janky but nowhere near as bad as all the ads etc on the YouTube app, and the cost is actually reasonable and goes in a reasonable share to the creators. I strongly prefer direct access to creators like this and also like on Patreon. Direct support means there is no advertiser in between to demonetise a video or have it taken down because it is controversial. You can’t even have a WW2 documentary on YouTube but you can have actual Nazis, but on Nebula you get analysis and history without Nike or Surfshark being reticent to sponsor a video.
Mentioning Nebula reminded me that I wanted to set up an account on there - just did and very impressed with the amount of creators, some have never even mentioned that they’ve got a channel there?
Yeah, they have a bunch of smaller creators there too. Honestly their internal business structure seems much more mutually beneficial than something like YouTube could ever be. All of the creators that I watch who are on Nebula I watch exclusively there now and that has taken a good 40% of my YouTube time away. My current favourite is Stefan Milo who talks about paleoanthropology, basically how we can know about human prehistory and evolution. There was a great video about tracing the genetics of South American populations to figure out when humans arrived on the continent and where from, such interesting stuff.
Gotta be a way for folks to get paid. Most of the folks I watch on YouTube do it for a living.
Youtubers and streamers are different as they create content for getting paid by those services. Peer to peer video content cant replace youtube as it is without government level universal income basically. Most dont make enough from patreon or w/e to survive
Technically with a big enough audience a creator could support themselves with sponsorships. But YouTube still wins because it’s sponsorships+AdSense
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
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Hosting and bandwidth for videos has a big cost.
Plus it’s computationally expensive. YouTube has entire data centers filled with servers using custom silicon to encode ingested videos into nearly every resolution/framerate and codec they serve, so that different clients get the most efficient option for their quality settings and supported codecs, no matter what the original uploader happened to upload. Granted, that workflow mainly makes sense because of bandwidth costs, but the high quality of the user experience depends on that backend.
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As I understand it, it ingests an uploaded video and automatically encodes it in a bunch of different quality settings in h.264, then, if the video is popular enough to justify the computational cost of encoding into AV1 and VP9, they’ll do that when the video reaches something like 1000 views. And yes, once encoded they just keep the copies so that it doesn’t have to be done again.
Here’s a 2-year-old blog post where YouTube describes some of the technical challenges.
As that blog post explains, when you’re running a service that ingests 500 hours of user submitted video every minute, you’ll need to handle that task differently than how, for example, Netflix does (with way more video minutes being served, but a comparatively tiny amount of original video content to encode, where bandwidth efficiency becomes far more important than encoding computational efficiency).
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Yeah, I think it’s doable to distribute that compute burden if each channel owner has a desktop CPU laying around to encode a bunch of video formats, but lots of people are doing stuff directly on their phones, and I don’t think a phone CPU/GPU would be able to process a significant amount of video without heat/power issues.
Well Google is gutting ad blockers. So maybe there will be an extremely minor exodus yet.
Problem is youtube is a platform that pays its content creators. It won’t ever happen. If discord ever decides they want to be profitable then that’ll be next.
YouTube has a bunch of issues:
1/ climate change:
- A big centralised server needs lots of power, of cooling, a big pipe for upload/download,
- algorithms, metrics, content id, big size imagery (4k), all this is really needing a bunch of energy in itself to run,
- advertising in general is an ecological nightmare.
2/ monetisation:
- content id is a gamble for creators. A video can be demonetised for the dumbest reasons under the pretext of copyright infringement,
- no one knows how the algorithm works, it means one video can be suggested to a lot of people and the next one won’t. So income is randomised,
- the purpose of monetisation for content creators exist to legitimate the advertising and the monetisation of user’s personal data’s. Not the other way around. YouTube is not a platform made to retribute creators.
Going on Peertube could mostly fix every ecological problems for the lost of the uncertainty of the monetisation system.
Plus there is a psychological weigh on creators that goes with the monetisation and algorithm of YouTube.
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.
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.
It sounds like YouTube is heading towards conflict with it’s long-term content providers as well. Their new algorithm heavily favors “shorts”. This really screws over the traditional medium to long format creators who arguably made YouTube successful. Sounds like they want to move quickly into the TikTok space but it’s sad for a lot of creators who are losing significant income d/t this change.
do birds fly? do ducks duck?
