What’s the Fediverse YouTube? ooof. that’s a tough nut.
No one understands the astronomical bandwidth, CPU/GPU intensive calcs, and data storage necessities required to do anything close to what YouTube currently does.
There is no way under this warm sun that a fediverse version of YouTube will ever be feasible, unless someone like literally yourself is willing to pay extraordinary high amounts of money for all the required infrastructure and daily maintenance to run it.
I would want to see some data on costs, because I think you might be overselling the difficulty and cost a bit (I don’t actually know, just my good faith belief). Imagine if every content creator ran their own instance. Instead of needing to worry about every user coming to a single group of servers, the Creator only needs to worry about the cost of hosting their own content and the traffic they get.
With the number of YouTubers who have to get sponsorships and Patreon anyway, it doesn’t really seem that infeasible or unreasonable to expect content creators to run their own thing or pay to have someone else to do it. Doesn’t seem like the YouTube money is that lucrative, anymore, so not like it would be all that different, either.
https://gbtimes.com/how-much-does-youtube/
Estimated annual server cost: approximately $1 billion
Estimated annual data center cost: approximately $5 billion
Estimated annual bandwidth cost: $3 billion
Good luck running that shit from your closet server.
Several tried. Nothing as elaborate as cross dissemination, federation or whatever. But at least 5 to 10 years ago it proved to be almost impossible. Platforms like Rooster teeth, which was 100% subscription based, I think never broke even and still relied on YT ads for the majority of the revenue. Some big and small channels tried to at least just catalog, archive and serve their own videos and the costs still became astronomical really fast. Whenever you see one of those very old channels, most of them don’t conserve copies, let alone original source footage of their entire material. Everyone just delete their videos once they’ve been on YouTube for a month or so now, and they have to download their own videos when they want to reuse old footage.
Storage is cheap today, yes, but video really eats storage at an alarming rate. Specially now that 4k is the standard. So you have to reuse storage over and over. Transcoding is also really fast and optimized with modern algorithms, but it takes specialized graphical cards and data centers charge a premium to use servers with such capacities. Self hosting will never be able to satisfy a moderate demand. Get anything above 100 users simultaneously transcoding videos and a non-specialized server will halt to a grind just on IO calls to hard drives alone.
Once you consider all those factors it is obvious why YouTube is such a miracle.
A “fediverse” version of Youtube already got made and subsequently killed, PopcornTime.
The Bittorrent backbone already has plenty of media and can handle more bandwidth than we’d ever need to throw at it. Encrypted Onion Routing provides a degree of insurance against copyright cops, too. The only problems left to solve are automating the discovery of user-relevant content and avoiding the legal system long enough to write and popularize an open source app that puts it all together with a couch-friendly front-end.
At this point, I wonder how we can solve google’s youtube monopoly. Is it even doable? So overwhelming.
What part of “bittorrent” do you not understand? I am really getting fucking sick and tired of people like you posting this bullshit FUD.
I love that the replies to you are half saying that it’s an impossible problem, and half linking to existing solutions.
Peertube, but it’s really not nearly the replacement lemmy or mastodon are.
Reddit is mostly text, with a few images for memes, very low in storage, processing power, or bandwidth, its easy to have a fediverse replacement.
Youtube is a video platform. Video take a lot of storage, encoding/decoding, bandwidth…
And video platforms are small amount of content creators, with 99 percent of the users being non-content-creating viewers. Once the content creators are on a monopoly platform (like youtube), there’s no incentive for them to leave. And fediverse wouldn’t have the same money to make.
In contrast, anyone can find interesting links to post to a Reddit-alternative, anyone can make memes.
TLDR: Reddit is community-focused. Youtube is creator-focused. Difference in hardware requirements. Theres no practical alternative for Youtube, especially not a fediverse one.
