this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2024
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Ok: PeerTube is interesting. But: in terms of replacement? No. non-viable.
The problem you have is multifold - and one of them is constant content availability, and total bandwidth. The value of Youtube is on demand streaming - you click a video, it plays, basically anywhere in the world. The other value is... copyright: Because of the way youtube is set up, you don't have the same kind of copyright problems as you would without the back end negotiating and systems youtube as put in place. You can think copyright as it stands is oppresive and sucks -and I agree; but with the law the way it is - youtube is the best work around that is feasibly possible.
Mirroring all of youtube needs piles of terrabytes of new storage DAILY. and it's in the hundreds of thousands as a low end estimate. You need the computational power to do the transcoding. You need the distribution of servers to load balance and avoid over saturating and d-dossing any given server cluster.
The reality is the Torrent protocol has been around forever - and there is a reason it never really took off, despite live watching while streaming was feasible: It has too many pitfalls.
And then, there is the content creator side: If you want to make money - youutube is kind of the place to put your content up with youtube premium sharing, ad revenue sharing and so on once you can monetize your channel. And while there are all kinds of BS in regards to what can and can't be monetized - there really isn't a replacement, not for the average person just getting started - and not if you are trying to build your following.
People also forget that YouTube ran at a loss for well over a decade.
And any new start up would have to compete with YouTube and their massive audience, and all the other sites. There's a reason that Vimeo never made quite the same height, for example.
Floatplane is feeling that. At small scale, they're really a poor value proposition.
Copyright is the one thing I can't think of a way to work around in a decentralized fashion. There is very little to stop people from hosting non-free movies, TV shows, or other people's content. Community policing can only do so much.
The lack of proper copywriter policing prevents you from using their centralized monetization strategy. If you get paid to let them overlay ads, people will just record and repost your videos. If you use sponsorship, Sponsorblock will eat your lunch. You can try to do lockdown and Patreon; eventually, someone will copy and repost your stuff for free. Unauthorized copying ties closely with monetization. Without monetization, the lion's share of content providers aren't going to bother.
Most of the other problems are technical issues that can be solved, but there has to be a willingness to share a little more resources at the client level and enough money in it for people to develop the systems. The TB/day problem would evaporate if people had to pay a small amount for the GB of garbage they're uploading to YouTube to get rich quick. I'm honestly shocked they haven't added tiny fees for storage at their basic cost for the service. If your stuff takes off, they pay you for the ad view, if it doesn't take off, you'll be likely to remove the worthless burden from their system.