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.
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 modèle, and they’re never will because that’s mot 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 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. Main problem stems from monetization.
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.
most mid range creator already do sponsor works or patreon, fighting for the ad impression money isn’t really something you can “do” unless you are in the top 0.1%. (basically, eye balls have limited time, so people flock to certain creator so they more or less feel like in the tribe, it’s a social psychology thing, and why pewdepie was a thing. Or why Bieber was a thing. )
I think things like peertube would face the most difficult thing is copyright and content moderation. It would take a lot of effort to maintain good quality contents.
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.
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 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.
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 such a 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.
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.
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)
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.
It pretty much definitively is less efficient. Energy costs are a substantial portion of the expense of a data center so efficiency is something they pay very careful attention to.
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 see existential problems for peertube, because of copyright infringement.
The thing is creators should use libre or open content to put in their videos.
If you use copyrighted content it means you don’t care about og creators stating that they don’t want to use their work. What’s so wrong about respecting creator’s wishes about their work ?
Youtube is great as long as you don’t read the comments
The ads are out of control, so no, it’s not great unless you use an adblocker, which on mobile doesn’t work with the native client.
Alternatively, you could access it with Premium ‘from Argentina’ like I do. It costs me about £3 a month, which I’m fine with.
The problem is that Premium screws you too - you have issues using downloaded content if you’re not connected WTF.
I literally only have it so I can watch YouTube on Apple TV without wanting to put my foot through the TV. Without some kind of ad blocking, YouTube is completely fucking unusable.
I think this is super interesting, and a really good idea. But as others have stated in this thread, very costly.
However until technology catches up, maybe we could have an interstitial federated platform. One that’s super decentralized. Like 90% of the users running their own instance, decentralized. Anyone with a NAS can host they’re own vids. Then the other 10% that are willing to host high bandwidth, high capacity servers, can work as caching for the most popular videos.
I don’t think YouTube is possible peer to peer, Lemmy/Reddit and Mastodon/twitter are mostly text with some images, not too difficult to store and network. YouTube on the other hand has astronomically high costs to store and serve their videos, more hardware than people have to spare for free
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.
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.
Yeah, good point. The others are mainly hosting text and some images
I see the switch from YouTube will be the final move, because it is has the most hurdles to overcome. Smart people will eventually figure out an efficient way to get things rolling. Fingers crossed it’s soon!
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.
Or the lack of content id could lead to people using more libre and open arts to make content. Therefore making the very need of content id irrelevant.
Nebula has been quite successful as far as I can tell. A whole bunch of educational YouTubers have moved over or were part of establishing it and honestly it works well. Videos can download to your device, the quality is the same, the app is a tiny bit janky but nowhere near as bad as all the ads etc on the YouTube app, and the cost is actually reasonable and goes in a reasonable share to the creators. I strongly prefer direct access to creators like this and also like on Patreon. Direct support means there is no advertiser in between to demonetise a video or have it taken down because it is controversial. You can’t even have a WW2 documentary on YouTube but you can have actual Nazis, but on Nebula you get analysis and history without Nike or Surfshark being reticent to sponsor a video.
Mentioning Nebula reminded me that I wanted to set up an account on there - just did and very impressed with the amount of creators, some have never even mentioned that they’ve got a channel there?
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.
