Hi, my post is focusing specifically on YouTube since I observed the following categories have less intrusive solutions or privacy focused solutions, even if they are paid:
- Operating Systems (Linux, for example)
- Instant Messaging (Element, for example)
- Community Messaging (Revolt, for example)
- E-Mail (Proton, for example)
- Office (libreoffice, for example)
- Password Managers (Bitwarden, for example)
However, how do we distribute videos and watch them without data collection? I am NOT asking how do I use a privacy-focused front-end for YouTube, by the way, I am aware they exist.
I am wondering how we obtain a FOSS solution to something super critical such as YouTube. It is critical since it contains a lot of educational content (I’d wager more than any other platform), and arguably the most informative platform, despite having to filter through a lot of trash. During COVID, we even saw lecturers from universities upload their content on YouTube and telling students to watch those lectures. (I have first-hand experience with this at a respectable university).
I refuse to accept that there is nothing we can do about it.
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.
[…] I don’t think YouTube is even profitable for them.
Correct. Even Google, one of the richest companies in the world, is struggling to afford the massive infrastructure required to run YouTube. That’s why they’ve been cracking down on ad-blocking software lately.
Also, this is likely why they’ve been pushing their new updated Chromium-based infrastructure for web browsers, which will prevent ad-blockers from working on websites. If you’re not using Firefox or Safari to browse the Internet by now, you should switch. They’re the only independent browsers not using the Chromium framework.
I’d even buy subscription if it was a family one without music bundled for a reasonable price. No such luck in my country.
None of these big tech companies are profitable because they pay their execs insane amounts of bonuses
Restaurants don’t take steaks off the menu because they aren’t are profitable as salads. One date wants a salad, the other wants steak, they make less profit on the steak plate, but the average of the two is profit enough.
It’s ridiculous to look at any one service of these behemoth monopolies as an island - They are one collective thought, EVERY SINGLE PIECE does not have to be to enshittified to generate the biggest possible profit.
While I do agree with you, I also see twitch, TikTok and Patreon presenting models that are quite competitive with YouTube.
From a privacy perspective, free junk content like TikTok, YouTube and twitch will always be hard coupled with targeted advertising.
But Patreon (and onlyfans for that matter) do offer a model that can work without ads.
In fact, if Patreon also introduced an ad-supported tier and allowed you to more broadly see other content aside from the direct person you sponsor, it could probably grow quite a lot.
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Tiktok is a company comparable in scale to Google. 130Bn in revenue last year.
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Patreon is nowhere near the scale of YouTube. But I also think it’s the only viable solution to privacy and supporting creators.
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Counter-point : every single one of the videos uploaded to youtube already lives on the creators hard drive, usually in a much larger format. All that’s needed is for them to create torrents for them.
I think the largest challenge though is maintaining the distribution and managing the associated upfront costs.
Existing large content producers could likely afford to handle this but new producers could struggle paying to seed their content.
Though I do think overall this is more achievable than people give it credit for:
- YT videos don’t need huge bandwidth for a sustained period; only for short bursts. Most views come in within a week.
- Content is probably localized to specific countries. Less need to replicate across the globe.
- Let the source prefer to seed the highest quality and other peers downsample and replicate as needed.
- Doesn’t need YT scale. Tons of YT “content” is spammers leeching essentially free hosting from YT. No one needs to seed their videos if they don’t want to.
- 1080p is still fine for YT videos. h265 is very efficient (though downsampling 265 isn’t great). Don’t need 4k for most videos.
I’d have agreed but hundreds of
fmoviesand similar sites exist on the high seas that provide free streaming of millions of HD content (movies, web series, etc.) somehow. They use some third-party video host that is magically able to concurrently serve millions of people.the infrastructure of the pirate streaming sites is impressive, but I bet that is still orders of magnitude easier than hosting youtube.
Those sites just scrape from many different file hosting sites. They don’t pay for that storage themselves.
… which makes it even more wonderful, since those file hosting sites are now somehow able to serve video streaming to millions of viewers across the world FOR FREE.
Maybe the solution to YouTube is something similar to BitTorrent. It would make more sense for the protocol to preload the first chunk and to use a codec that can start with a lower res image and then fill in the resolution in subsequent passes. And on the front end, something like Lemmy would work, where channels and posts can be federated.
Considering the number of people who have 1gps symmetric bandwidth today, such a system should be able to technically work.
But nobody’s designed it yet AFAIK.
Because Google builds out their network as an ISP and doesn’t pay for the internet like the rest of us.
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
Are there any good PT clients for Android?
Check out newpipe
firefox works great. You don’t need an app for everything.
I think you can use web browsers with it
Grayjay and I believe Tubular has a thing for it.
Newpipe works
I like GrayJay. It has a PeerTube plugin.
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 appreciate your work. I’m thinking it should be easy to reach out to non tech content creators to get permission to migrate their stuff, and for end users like me to request that without a technical barrier. For example: I was watching a self defense channel throughout the week until the youpocalypse happened. What if there is a simple button for me to request his data to be integrated into your system? I’m pretty sure he is more focused on exposure and reach rather than ad revenue, so he might consent. You interpret this to be consent to ytdl it, store it, spread it.
Sure, a lot of people do even have entire youtube playlists and channels shared on torrents without their consent even, downloaded with youtube-dl. Getting existing content onto torrents should be pretty easy.
We do need to get these content creators to create and seed their own torrents also tho, rather than have everyone else do it on their behalf, then post their own torrent links so others can help seed.
The only clean way I see this happening is some kind of a tool that simplifies this, or a readme that can help with the process, possibly linked to lemmy’s post creation as a video/audio upload button, and on any other platform that supports magnet links.
If anyone knows of something like that already, it’d be really helpful.
I’m wondering what your thoughts on IPFS are.
I’ve never used it personally, so I don’t know.
Torrents link to static data, each with their own explicit seeders, so that always seemed more safe than these universal file-system solutions where you don’t know what might be changing, or what you’re hosting.
I only quickly looked into it. I’m also looking for a solution for my work. It seems very privacy focused and works a bit like tor, so like you say, you don’t really know what’s going through your system. But it also has a trust system that trusts friends of friends and so on, so perhaps that isn’t a problem.
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.
Not only that, I am certain Google will put as much money as needed into it not to allow any competing platform.
YT is not profitable, but gives them data, power and control.
same issue with twitter. too much momentum, not enough enshitification yet
I haven’t ever seen anything useful on twitter except funny tweets from musk
Twitter’s different IMO. It relies on the network effect, whereas YouTubers get paid.
were not talkin about the small number of creators. its all about the audience . though i see what youre sayin… chicken and egg kind of thing… its ok, google is making it hard on them
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.
What youre describing sounds alot like Grayjay
yes, you’re right. I forgot that exists. I even have it installed lmao
If they integrate some self-hosted analytics and monetization mechanics, like Matomo and Stripe, to it, then it’ll be a feasible alternative to YouTube.
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.
So i put more thought into this… assuming this was how a youtube competitor turned out. The negatives would begin to force certain human behaviors to mitigate risk. You would see guilds/channels form. This covers the weakness of the Wild West. Groups can bargain with more leverage from sponcers and demand more money in exchange for more consistency, these guilds/channels can also hire a lawyer on retainer if large enough to handle litigious tasks, and advise its members though copyright dangers. If it when it goes to court they can handle hiring of additional representation. The guild/channel would have say as to who they admit to the group, so they can expel risky members. But like joining an HOA creatives will have to adhere to the channels rules. But without a monolith controlling everything, you could find a guild/channel that has terms you agree with. This would bring a lot of the status quo youtube brings, but with everyone’s goals more aligned
For the algorithm,i would recommend using a hash tag system (i know they are not called hash tags but I’m in a stream of consciousness here) give creators the freedom to label hashtags to their content. Though to avoid gaming them, the value of views/upvotes is divided equally amongst all the tags, so if you put #hollow_knight as your only tag, you get more weight on a smaller net. Or if you act like an Amazon reseller and dump every single hash tag on you video to throw the widest net, you get a more shallow weight in each tag. I would count views AND like for this. Likes would be weighted more due to needing engagement. I probably would recommend not having down votes weighted either way, but obviously shown. And subscribing just guarantees the viewer gets notified at the top of the page.
I would also like to see if we can’t have embed 2 videos on the same page. So let’s say react videos. What if the reactor can que and control another video from the viewer. If you ever did a watchtogether it’s like that, but the reactors manipulation of the video is recorded like a Doom demo so it’s light weight, accurate, and most importantly of all… both creators get full credit for the views. No need to sue over copyright, a like button will be available for both videos. A juggernaut of a creator finding and reacting to another video will IMMEDIATELY have beneficial effects for the smaller creator. Colabs, head to head streams can share a chat. Weird art house effects can be used, ARGs made. On and on.
I would have the non live chat be built to resemble a forum more then the type used by YouTube now. Like with topic headers, and newer content floating recently discussed topics to the top. I have issues with YouTube chat being impossible to navigate or follow what anyone is talking about and who they are replying to, and i never know if anyone replys to me. So a more structured chat appeals to me…
I think you SEVERELY misunderstand the content on YouTube and the content that pays and people watch. The average YouTube watcher is quite brain-dead.
The most profitable YouTube channels are:
- shitty Mr beast style clickbait videos
- kid cartoons
- music
- corporations
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouTube_channels
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-viewed_YouTube_channels
https://www.tubefilter.com/2024/02/02/top-100-most-viewed-youtube-channels-us-january-2024/
The likes of popular youtubers with good content like Tom Scott and GamersNexus do not even make the list at all.
Good channels like Stories to Old that aren’t big, but well produced probably won’t be able to make it at all with this setup unless they form a coalition with other small creators to pay for hosting costs and have someone with the expertise to manage it. That cost would severely cut into what they would be able to live off of.
The most likely scenario is the platform becomes a wasteland of clickbait and child-friendly clickbait because that is what gets the most watch time.
So what YouTube is now. But there will be a higher bar for entry. I said as much. I fully expect groups to form and would welcome them. And the hash tag system would allow greater means of finding content that people want to actually watch, and still allowing these content farms to operate.
But this is a discussion about possible YouTube replacement, and realistically i don’t see another company that could handle the infinite demands of free on demand video streaming that we would have been as our new masters. I took inspiration from the Fediverse in this regard. The FOSS collaboration may be able to stream line the hows and specifications expected to have creatives connect their content to the collective.
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.
There are two YouTubes. One is the “creator” YouTube, algorithms, numbers blah blah
The other is the actual content creator YouTube. These are the channels that people actually follow. If captain disillusion set up his own RSS feed for videos, and I had the method to subscribe to it, I’d no longer need YouTube
The argument that YouTube has the algorithm and recommendations etc is moot, that’s the same job that every network does, you could absolutely replace this
The video content would have to be self hosted probably. How it used to be. So we need all these tools to eat YouTube’s lunch
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?
Peertube uses webtorrents, not regular torrents, and doesn’t even hook into the larger torrent network, which is seeding most of media on the net.
You’re correc, the peer part of peertube is mainly a gimmick at this point, and it’s nowhere close to being what torrents already are, a decentralized hosting network.
Pray that Google enshittifies YouTube enough for any amount of creators to migrate to Peertube
The big problem is there are a lot of good creators who are only able to be good creators in large part because of the YouTube ad revenue they get. They would otherwise have to work normal jobs and not be able to devote the time or resources to their videos. I have little faith that enough viewers would actually pay enough money to offset the ad revenue that supports many creators. Without a way to realistically replace that financial stream there is a large chunk of YouTube that can’t migrate. Of course, that’s no loss with some of the content mills churning out crap to try and cash in on the revenue, but I’ve seen plenty of good stuff that I’m not sure would exist another way.
There are at least in-video sponsors, as well as things like Patreon.
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.
Network Effect is the biggest hurdle for sure. I think it it true for so many other services too. I think we can agree there is no real technical problem to solve, we only look at the technical problems because trying to “fix” the social and political issues is a lot harder. Digital Markets Act is supposed to address this but time will tell if it has any lasting impact (in the EU).
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.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?
If I start a video series about Space Station 14, would you subscribe and comment on pornhub?
More importantly, would you fap? I’d feel really accomplished for making fappable content.
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.
Dude no one can figure out ftp. Before there was yt there were embedded QuickTime videos and video podcasts
The underlying tech doesn’t matter. Only it has an easy to use interface. I just took FTP as an example of technology that already exists today.
That isn’t a solution, because YouTube provides discoverability as one of its primary draws. The primary draw for content creators is the promise of being paid via the ad network. So FTP doesn’t offer 1/10th of what people go to YouTube FOR. EVEN if your theoretical FTP server had literally every piece of content in the world; people would still go to YouTube.
Recommendation systems are well studied. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to add some form of recommendation layer separate from (or on top of) the content delivery. It doesn’t need to be up to par with YouTube’s, at least before there’s any major content.
Most YouTubers rely on sponsors or Patreon. Podcasters are doing the same - many of which are self hosting. So I don’t think an ad delivery system is that needed.
I don’t see how it would have to work much differently compared to how Pocketcast or Overcast already works.
The first problem is getting content to the platform.
There isn’t even a recommendation engine for video media that is open source and/or freely usable at this point in time that I am aware of. This needs to be a public database which is editable freely by everyone, in order to get every detail about media. Something like OpenStreetMaps; but for audio/video – and a suitable media recognition engine so that every variation of a media file doesn’t need its own entry. We also need laws so that services such as these are clearly protected by fair-use; because they currently aren’t, and get attacked at every chance by media conglomerates.
Recommendation systems don’t need to be that complicated. In its base form it’s just a list of videos you’ve watched (or content creators or topics). It can then be compared with the watching lists of other people to get an idea of what else you might be interested in. No need for any advanced video recognition.
Maybe this list is isolated within a single instance. Maybe it can be shared between instances. Different instances might use different recommendation systems.
Again, it might not work as well as YouTube’s, but I don’t think it needs to.
