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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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?
firefox works great. You don’t need an app for everything.
Check out newpipe
Grayjay and I believe Tubular has a thing for it.
I think you can use web browsers with it
I like GrayJay. It has a PeerTube plugin.
Newpipe works
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.
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.
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.
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
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
I haven’t ever seen anything useful on twitter except funny tweets from musk
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).
This seems like one of the few problems where crypto might actually be useful. It would allow people to automatically and anonymously pay both the creator and the host of that video. Maybe make it a federated system and every host gets paid based on how many Bytes they send. The creator gets a share of that money and the whole system uses something like Monero or whatever. Not sure what the costs of that would be, but I assume its not too outrageous. If it was, YouTube wouldn’t be able to exist.
Youtube has a Google Search to back the 15 years of constant losses by Youtube.
That’s true, you’d definitely have to charge more than what YouTube makes with ads. But I don’t think Google would keep YouTube alive if it generated only like, 10% of the money it costs them to operate.
Edit: That’s why I said “it’s probably not too outrageous”, I know that YouTube probably operates at a loss, but I don’t think the cost is so great that noone would pay to fund a service like that. Though I’m obviously just guessing, I might be totally wrong
Google is a whole package. They can earn money with youtube by serving ads on Google search that are fueled by your Youtube data.
Isn’t that what LBRY is trying to do?
Basically, but I’m not sure how well it’ll work longterm due to the website not really contributing anything to the system afaik. Though I have to admit I haven’t looked that far into it, just posting my notreallyeducated guess. https://lbry.com/faq/host-content
People are working on this for general decentralized storage, some of them have existed and been functional for 5+ years, I’m not familiar with all the names but there’s jstor (jstore?), filecoin, etc. When you have a system where you need to manage a database (and everybody’s copy of the database is the same) but you need to do it in a decentralized, P2P way, blockchain is really the only solution. A system which records who is hosting what and allows people to buy & sell storage is exactly this: a database with some buy/sell frontend.
The key problem that needs to be solved is the monetization problem. Nostr has a potential solution though. Over the last two months alone, their users have “zapped” (tipped/donated) other users around 950K (nearly 1 mil!) USD worth via lightning and that number continues to grow. And it doesn’t just make it easy to pay content creators, but to also put a portion of your “zaps” towards the relay you use or development of the software if you want. If you have a nostr account, you can easily tie it to a lightning address to send/receive tips, nostr doesn’t take a fee. Relays can also portion out a bit of their zaps for the people who publish the most engaging content on their relay. The possibilities are quite extensive. And because it’s over lightning, zaps happen instantly and for pennies or less in fees. Though, you can use nostr without zaps at all.
For those unfamiliar with nostr, it’s a decentralized social media software much like ActivityPub/mastodon, the main use right now is as a twitter/instagram clone but there’s also a reddit-style section being built up as well. Video hosting itself could be done by relays or through a P2P system similar to IPFS. Moderation abilities from the perspective of the instance/relay are identical to activitypub/mastodon. But one bonus if that if your relay goes down, you don’t lose your identity, since your identity and relay are separate. And if you change apps or relays (you are typically connected to multiple relays), all your content moves with you seamlessly. And the payment/zap infrastructure is all decentralized, relays don’t ever custody or manage the payments. If you tip a content creator, it goes directly from you to them. The lightning network has basically limitless transaction capacity. If you have cash app, it supports lightning, so you can already send zaps (you will need different apps to receive zaps though because cash app doesn’t support the LNURL standard). Strike natively supports it. And because it’s lightning, it works in every country automatically.
Long-term, if I am a content creator, which “fedi”-type system is going to be attractive to me? One where users can send me tips and mircopayments or one where they can’t? This is why I think nostr is going to win out long-term over AP/Mastodon. Mastodon could add this kind of functionality but I don’t get the impression they’re open to it. People may not want to commit to yet another $5/month subscription to a YouTuber’s patreon or nebula or whatever, but they are happy to tip 1-10c after watching a video. So there’s a psychological beauty to micropayments as well. As some random person I have made like 7c on tips this month, but I’ve also given out plenty to other people.
Source about nostr fees: https://lemmy.ml/post/17824358
Unfortunately this financing requires a populace widely adopting cryptocurrency…making it a pipe dream for mainstream use.
Tips are generally a bad model as well, which creates an incentive for rapid and pandering work (like ad supported content).
Patreon had frankly built all of YouTube that is worth watching. I think a simple payment system using real banks can be integrated into smaller hosting services.
It’s all academic though, YouTube is unrivaled in ad revenue and helping you expand an audience.
25% of Americans own crypto, usage continues to grow year after year both domestically and internationally. Most people have a crypto-capable wallet on their phone (CashApp, Venmo, Paypal). It solves problems traditional financial systems can’t solve well. That’s a trend that has been happening for 15 years. You can be mad at it, but it doesn’t change that it’s true.
People want something (YouTube but not YouTube) but don’t want to learn new techniques and technology (crypto). Eventually you have to leave them behind.
I didn’t know about this Nostr, but I do believe you’re right with the content Creator coming for the money, it’s always the money.
I’m going to give it a go!
P2P, and shamelessly rehosting popular content.
Won’t make those content creators happy… but it’s the best way to get users to show up, which will attract original content creators.
As a PeerTube instance owner, I would say that not everyone needs to join a single instance (that would be the biggest mistake). Instead, if you can self-host one and invite people you like and know, they can provide quality content. Also, having multiple smaller instances makes it easier to moderate and have quality control. Federation and direct subscription to channels also improve instance discovery.
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.
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.
People use YouTube because YouTube pays them. You want to get paid without a middleman; you have to use cryptocurrency. The Fediverse hates crypto, so the Fediverse will never have a YouTube replacement.
What exactly would prevent people from paying in actual currencies? Crypto is in no way a requirement for a YT replacement whatsoever.
What exactly would prevent people from paying in actual currencies? Crypto is in no way a requirement for a YT replacement whatsoever.
You want to get paid without a middleman
This is the part you missed. Imagine Lemmy but for videos instead of links. Users pay creators via some subscription or likes mechanism. Lemmy instance admins do not want to deal with:
- Custodying the funds and having to keep them safe
- Having to make connections to every major national banking system or payment processor
- Dealing with chargebacks, payment disputes, counterparty risks, KYC/AML/other onerous regulations etc. People are used to cards being “instant” but full settlement on the backend takes days to weeks depending on how you define “settlement”.
Doing these things is an absolute nightmare and takes a lot of human time. Human time costs lots of money. All this just to move money from viewers to content creators.
Bitcoin via lightning, for example, can do all of this for them without any of that mess. Payments can go P2P directly from viewers to creators. Payments can be settled instantly for <1% in fees, usually pennies.
There are many payment services that require pretty much nothing from the server/instance once implemented, and doesn’t cost anything for the instance (the fees are taken from the payer), specifically to address the issues you mention. It’s already a solved issue.
With bitcoin everyone now has to go to an exchange to convert the pseudo-currency to actual usable currencies, which is a much more annoying middleman IMO, which will then also take a cut.
And what are the fees like on those services? Does their fee structure work for micropayments? And do they support every country out-of-the box or are there some they don’t support? How do they handle chargebacks and counter-party risk? What is their settlement time? Do they occasionally freeze accounts for seemingly nonsensical or political reasons? Since we’re on the privacy community, how is their privacy? Can you, for example, sign up as an instance admin and automatically have them forward payments to content creators, or would you need to custom-code that through an API and then register with a non-standard account because now you aren’t a regular user but an intermediary? Try being an “intermediary” on Paypal and your account will get shut down very quickly, because you aren’t allowed to do that. You’d have to custom negotiate a special deal with them and fill out a bunch more paperwork and probably pay higher fees and meet a bunch of other requirements like being incorporated and obtaining insurance and auditors and the list goes on and on.
Ask anybody in the adult industry how much trouble they have getting access to these services even though the business they are engaging in is perfectly legal. Not grey area legal, fully certified legal by the US Supreme Court and appellate courts up and down the system for decades.
Answer these questions and you start to see the appeal of not having a third-party custodian do all this. Bitcoin lightning can do all of this, instantly, for 10-1000x less fees and massively less complication. You can say you don’t like crypto, that’s fine, but it’s legitimately better at solving these kinds of problems which is why adoption has been growing for 15 straight years.
But it’s not objectively better, because you can’t fucking use it. It’s digital tokens that are literally unusable until exchanged for real currencies, which brings the need for exchanges in to the picture (see my edit above).
You don’t have to convert it to fiat if you don’t want to, plenty of people use Bitcoin as currency, that is the entire point. Users tipped each other nearly a million USD worth of it on nostr int he last two months ($950k). You can go to any major city and find place to buy/sell/spend it. Many places online accept it too, of course. The network effect is quite large. Bitcoin’s market cap is larger than sweden’s GDP. It moves trillions of dollars of value every year. Not people “hodling”, people using it to do funds transfer.
But if you want to, you can absolutely convert it, with a single click. Those middlemen typically take a lower cut since they’re doing conversion not sending/receiving/settlement which is a much risker and therefore expensive service. There is, for example, no counterparty risk if you convert somebody’s BTC to their native currency, but there is if you transfer that person’s money to another person or act as an intermediary. I use strike for this, strike’s conversion fee is less than 1%, in many apps or exchanges, conversion is literally free because the app wants to incentivize you to store money with them and because it’s just updating some row in a database.
Except for less than a handful of countries worldwide, bitcoin can’t pay your rent, your mortgage, your groceries, your gas, your tuition or anything in day-to-day life. It is effectively not usable as payment for basic things yet, you would die if that was all you had.
I can spend money (even digitally) without any fees at all, no functional delay (as in, I’m not bothered by the technical delay), no need to convert it and wait for the fiat to be paid out to me from an exchange. that is not doable with crypto.
Crypto may get there one day, but it is still very far from being there after 15 years.
then the bank could stop processing your payments because they don’t like your content
People use YouTube because that’s where you get biggest outreach. YouTube pay a little, but YouTubers mostly rely on secondary incomes like sponsors and Patreon. Both of these are viable on any other platform.
Podcasts have mainly been using this model for a long time.
if that were true, there’d be a Youtube competitor by now
