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.
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.
Yeah, good point. The others are mainly hosting text and some images
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.
The main thing here is that twitter and Reddit dont pay their popular users (massively followed accounts i mean), but YouTube does. As long as PeerTube won’t have a business model, and they never will because that’s not what it was created for, i dont think there will be any migration
This.
YouTube and Twitch are in this same boat. The video format is a hugely lucrative one. Many people consume it passively, either in the background or while doing other things. The ad exposure is huge, and there’s a ton of value in having people invested in your platform, so financial incentives are high.
There just aren’t enough people who are willing or able to put that much effort into making rich content for free, especia6when there’s a payed alternative
Don’t most youtubers get their money from in video sponsorships these days?
Yeah, because sponsors are confident enough to trust a youtube-based audience. Good luck for PeerTubers to get sponsorships
These days it isn’t just a YouTube based audience. It’s YouTube and tiktok and Instagram etc etc. Sure exclusive peertubers won’t get sponsorships, but they don’t need to be exclusive, at first at least. peertube currently wouldn’t even factor in, but if it were to take off even moderately it could start to be part of the conversation.
Every youtuber I follow has some contiginency for when the YouTube algorithm turns against them. Patreon, nebula, floatplane, podcasts the list goes on and on.
The problem really is on the hosting side imo and I don’t think activitypub solves it the way it does for text based content.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
I will volunteer resources all day long to post a mostly text platform such as mastodon/lemmy/etc.
But- doing video streaming, consumes a lot of resources.
Using, my plex as an example, it supports a few handfuls of people. But- scaling that to hundreds/thousands… Its not going to be fun.
Videos take up a ton of room. Streaming them, consumes resources for transcoding.
Well, PeerTube works like torrents - which are proven to scale well.
I’ll take you word for its implementation-
Main problem stems from monetization.
That, is the real issue. Persuading content creators to come elsewhere will always be a challenge, especially as… well. income/money is the reason most of them make videos.
This is compounded by the fact, the majority of us purposely block ads, and nobody is going to switch from youtube, to a platform filled with ads.
In terms of compensation, that gets even tricker. If- the content creators are being compensated, then the people hosted the petabytes worth of videos, is going to want to be compensated as well.
Honestly, as dumb as it sounds, the best way to implement this, might be in a form of storage-based crypto, where the coins are earned from the pieces of videos you are hosted.
Let’s be honest- 99% of us don’t pay a cent for watching youtube content, and over 90% of us block all of the ads.
Lbry already tried that.
Another big thing I can see being a problem (other than cost and lack of monetization) would be the lack of Content ID. For as much shit as people give it, it does solve a big problem of lengthy and expensive lawsuits, especially for smaller channels who don’t necessarily have a company behind them.
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.
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
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.
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The other thing to keep in mind is that youtube (and twitch, and shudders quora), with all its problems, does share revenue with creators on the platform, instead of treating them as free labor.
I would love to see it, but I dont think we are there yet. No impetus to switch combined with much more expensive tech. I would also antipate dmca to turn the whole thing into a mess. But one day we’ll get there hopefully.
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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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Honestly, people generally have more compute power than they need. If this proverbial platform came with an efficient transcoder, then the files just need to be hosted.
The torrenting scene is alive and well with users fronting the cost and taking legal risks. Many torrents have enough speed to actually stream the content while it’s downloading. Hard to say now… But if somebody set up a solid peer-to-peer solution, I think it has a chance.
Youtube is the only truly great social media platform left. It pains me to say it, but the bar is quite low! It pays creators better than its rivals and its premium subscription is generally considered good value. Remember - it’s both users and creators that need to migrate.
Really, there cannot be an alternative until there’s one that can afford to pay content creators the same or more than YouTube can. No content, no platform.
It also needs to be able to distribute the cost for hosting insane amounts of video data, which is notoriously expensive. A single instance could bankrupt a person if it got hit with a large influx of users. Some lemmy instances has to brace for a rough ride as Reddit refugees jumped ship, and YouTube has a lot more users than Reddit. Even a tiny migration could be hell to deal with.
There will also need to be a purge of extremist content from any platform that wants to invite a migration. If all you have is weirdos evangelising dodgy cryptocoins and conspiracy theorists complaining about being booted off YouTube, nobody will want to go.
Peertube just isn’t the platform for this to happen. At least not yet.
I only disagree with one thing on that: youtube is not a social media platform. It is horrible for discussions, topic discovery and organization, the comment sections and chat are worse than 4chan. It is a video diffusion platform, but not truly social media.
Which is sad, because it used to be a much more social platform. I used to run a small channel in 2007 and I’d get people messaging me, or adding me to friends (yes, that was a thing on YouTube).
Nothing can really be worse than 4chan. Youtube users are primed to say genuinely stupid things and enjoy reinforcing ignorance, while 4chan users have always had the primary goal of causing as much harm and destruction as possible including but not limited to suicides, poisonings, and proliferation of genocidal ideologies.
Ok, when I said worse, it was from this point of view: in some subchans, I’ve seen some smart conversations and advice there among the 95% neverending jungle of slurs (they probably see that as a feature, not a bug). In yt: never, the medium simply doesn’t work to make people talk.
“and its premium subscription is generally considered good value”
That’s funny. You must live in a different world than I do.
Well at least the hosting is cleverly helped by having the videos be shared by every user watching it at the same time. So viral videos are a lot less likely to take the platform down. But even though thats most of the bandwith cost its not all.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Does peertube ban people for having sponsors? If you could get enough views to get a sponsor you could make money that way.
Peertube itself is just an open source self-hostable web application. Each Peertube instance has their own rules.
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.
How would a distributed system be more efficient? That is very counter intuitive. In addition the question would be who pays for PeerTube. Because unlike Mastodon or Lemmy and the likes, storing large amounts of video files is actually damn expensive.
I’m pretty sure the average successful YouTube content creators can invest in one computer to host his own content on peertube. For start that’s all what is needed.
Video storage is a false problem, creators already store their content locally (to not lose the work if there is any issue).
On the technical side, others have answer that question here but in short:
- decentralised with peer to peer means that the more a video is shared the more it will be available, even with small size pipes (when I’m watching your content, others can watch it through me),
- you don’t have to pay for hudge and hardware so less money wasted, but it needs a strong network of pipes, which can improve internet navigation as a all,
- instances are nodes of a network, if one fails the others stays up,
- better scalability cause p2p,
- peertube can run on rather old tech so I’d say it’s more efficient.
I will need more precise questions for better answers.
My assumption was based on the idea to have a proper YouTube replacement. Not some run down video storage for a hand full of large content creators that can afford it.
- The scalability you buy via P2P also means an increased storage. So if you want to offer a similar platform that is used in a similar way then you probably would need a multiple of the current storage capacity that YouTube offers. Likely close to an exabyte of storage (assuming that YouTube has just about 300 petabytes. Which likely is a lower number by now.)
- Especially for the amount of users consuming the content you would need a good distribution factor. Popular content would need to be distribution over thousands of peers for it to kinda work out. So a lot of people could share the necessary video data, making the storage a problem.
- Big servers in a datacenter will always be more efficient because they are designed to be compared to consumer hardware. It’s like replacing a central power plant with a small power plant per home. It won’t deliver the same efficiency and is a waste of resources. Ecologically speaking.
creators already store their content locally
A lot of creators delete at least the raw footage because they don’t have enough space and it would be too expensive. One creator hosting their own content wouldn’t even begin to scale in such a scenario. They would need powerful hardware and serious network connectivity. Something the large creators probably could afford, but most couldn’t.
peertube can run on rather old tech so I’d say it’s more efficient.
Especially old tech is less efficient than current generations.
tl;dr: I think you were talking about a small solution for large content creators where as I took it as a literal replacement for YouTube.
Smaller servers doesn’t mean less work is being done. It means the work is being distributed outside the server farm. Quite likely it is less efficient, not more.
Less efficient? How?
And I’m pretty sure I didn’t say less work was done.
The more you distribute work, the more energy you have to spend on distributing that work.
I’m pretty sure you got that backwards … Distributed systems like Lemmy and PeerTube rely on large amounts of redundancy and duplication. In general, centralized systems are going to be more efficient by default. YouTube is an “ecological nightmare” simply because it’s absolutely massive. If PeerTube grows to anywhere near the same scale, you can be sure it will far eclipse total energy usage (and also be harder to measure).
I don’t see how billions of users connected on the same pipe can be more efficient than being connected each to a different point of a network.
I think YouTube is mostly a network of datacenter of his own right now, but that doesn’t change anything since we can not see it.
On the energy usage, maybe, but this usage will be better spread across the earth than being concentrated on a few points.
The Internet is not a “series of tubes” … It’s a packet-switched messaging network. The fact that billions of computers are “connected” to a single address doesn’t really mean much other than they’ve exchanged some messages within the last several minutes (or some other arbitrary amount of time).
You’re not wrong: any sizeable web service must distribute to several servers and data centers for performance (e.g. response times and data throughput), and for resiliency (e.g. if a server fails then another one can take over). But the difference is these data centers have a financial incentive to maximize efficiency in both hardware costs and electricity usage (which includes cooling, etc.). Folks self-hosting Lemmy/Mastodon/etc. servers in their basement have much less incentive, and so less effort is put into eeking out every ounce of capability per dollar. Even hosting on AWS/Google/Azure/etc is never going to beat a bespoke data center dedicated to one particular application.
Although they don’t necessarily publish this information, at least a data center can accurately measure its energy usage (which tends to dwarf hardware costs…). Also newer hardware will always outperform old hardware per energy usage. For either aspect I can’t say the same for the server in my basement … It’s 10 year-old hardware running on the same circuit as the beer fridge next to it. I have no idea how much electricity it uses to handle like 2 users. It’s a glorified space heater.
It’s all about trade-offs. Fediverse applications value open standardization, availability, and long-term resiliency over efficiency, performance, and short-term profits.
The Fediverse is great, but in the short/mid-term, efficiency and ecological impact aren’t things i would expect it to excel at.
There are tubes nonetheless, under the Atlantic ocean for instance… But I agree.
The major economic impact of the digital is making new teminal. The second is the streaming. I can find the scientific research about that if you like.
With this in mind, you are telling me that a streaming software running with potential low tech hardware and using p2p (allowing for packet to NOT travel 3 times around the world before reaching destination) will not be better for the environment than a centralised video system running 4k formats and advertising everywhere?
Again, maybe I’m missing something here. And yes hardware running uses power, yes datacenter are more power efficient (I already talked about that in the thread).
If you’ve got some scientific papers handy, I’d love to see them!
The point I’m trying to make is that YouTube has an incentive to design their system to not let traffic travel further than it has to (users closer to a data center hosting the content they want will get it faster). They build data centers close to where their users live. Even then, delivery is likely less energy-intensive than video transcoding, meaning large, specialized data centers make a lot of sense for that task. They then distribute transcoded content to smaller, regional servers to improve user experience … again, specialized systems for a specialized task.
This means that YouTube has already distributed their system across many different servers in many different regions around the world, so in many ways, they already take advantage of the efficiency benefits of p2p, but they can carefully coordinate to reduce overall costs in a way that p2p can’t (yet).
But the Fediverse will lag in efficiency for exactly the reason you pointed out: it’s running on low tech, general-purpose hardware. Energy usage has the largest environmental impact by far. Hardware that is specialized (like Application-Specific Integrated Circuits) or newer will always outperform general or old hardware.
Here is the study : https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/4238589?sommaire=4238635 It’s in French, I didn’t find something in English (maybe in the IPCC studies ). 47% of digital impact comes from users terminals (mostly from smartphone manufacturing).
I agree with you, but YouTube is also a big part of the incentive of building more and more new hardware. Plus as I said before YouTube isn’t just for hosting videos but also metrics tools, content id, advertising, editing tools and such… All this needs also power to run.
Did you have any data regarding packet distribution on google services? Last time I checked (about 4/5 years ago) an email send from a gmail to a gmail traveled about 1,5 of the earth size. Which is a lot for 2 laptops side by side in the same room.
Lastly you’re trying to make this a debate only on the tech aspect but it is not. They are ethical points at stake and they are equally important I think.
Interesting article (my French is not good, but with the help of translation I get the idea). Thank you for sharing.
Ahh so, I think there is room for confusion. Fediverse is “p2p” only in the context of the (federated) servers. PeerTube/Lemmy/Mastodon/etc. are still “centralized” in that your instance (e.g. programming.dev) is shared with many other users (possibly worldwide). This potentially increases the cost of delivery, because a user still has to find a server, and may select one that is ideologically, rather than physically, close to them. Because YouTube’s servers are ideologically homogeneous, there is no reason to find a server other than the one physically closest to you, and thus the cheapest to stream from. So delivery costs to the end user’s terminal should be even higher for PeerTube as compared to YouTube!
A completely flat, p2p architecture potentially eliminates almost all of the cost of delivery, but it does introduce other costs, and doesn’t eliminate the need for video encoding. I don’t have any research available, but I feel confident it will not be simple to compare with centralized services like Fediverse or traditional web services. I will keep my eye out for research.
There are many reasons to switch to Fediverse. I’m simply arguing that “efficiency” is not one of them :)
potential low tech hardware
Low tech ≠ efficient
I have an old laptop that is low tech and uses only 15 watts of power. Compared to that my laptop has a general power usage of 35 watts or more on heavy CPU intensive tasks. On face value it seems that the old machine is more power efficient but that is not the case. The amount computing power provided for that 15 watts used is very low and like 15 times lower than the computational grunt provided by the new machine which makes the new machine 5-6 times more efficient.
Edit - it would great if you can link the scientific papers you mentioned. I am by no means an expert and love to be proven wrong and learn something in the process
Here is the study : https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/4238589?sommaire=4238635 It’s in French, I didn’t find something in English (maybe in the IPCC studies ). 47% of digital impact comes from users terminals (mostly from smartphone manufacturing).
Yes, but it doesn’t mean low tech hardware should always be replace by new ones.
I honestly doesn’t understand why everybody here seems to think efficiency=ecology. Mass manufacturing new hardware have a big ecological impact. As I said before things aren’t magically replaced by better ones. Old unused tech ends up burning in pile in Africa or Asia.
What’s the point of using things like YouTube that keeps promoting 4k (needs for better screen), instant access, streaming over download, advertising, things that have a judge ecological impact.
That is a very fair point. There are ecological costs to electronics manufacturing and waste that are not as well understood as lifecycle energy consumption. It is much more complex and appears much harder to solve than energy consumption … so maybe that’s why.
I understand your points about the ecological impacts of creating and buying new technological devices. But youtube is not the sole driver in making people new devices. People buying new stuff is the goal of the entire tech industry. I dont see how switching to peertube or other FOSS alternatives will lead to an reduction in ecological impact. Hardware companies will still be making new phones, laptops, etc and people will still be buying these new devices.
Dont get me wrong, i would love for FOSS alternatives to youtube becoming mainstream but the ecological impact argument does not seem to hold at least not in my eyes.
The paper was an interesting read though. Thank you. I will try to hold on to devices for longer from now on (hopefully as long as possible)
