I literally have like 1TB of video stored on YouTube and privatized. Google is making $0 from my videos, but they still have to store them and have them available if I want to watch it (it's all of my Twitch VODs). Meanwhile websites like Streamable perma-delete my 5MB video after it gets 0 views in 2 milliseconds.
I frankly don't see a way for federated video to happen unless uploads are severely limited or it's paywalled. Even with YouTube's wild compression, you're looking at several gigs for a single 4k video.
Honestly the fact that YouTube exists is a miracle. Video is still just monstrously large.
Mastadon, Searx, Fediverse, and so on aren't killing or replacing the sites they're modeled after, not even close. They're just providing a privacy focused alternative for those who don't want to whored out by corporations or abused by powermods or shitty business decisions
Super shilly comment incoming, but YouTube Premium is maybe the only subscription I pay for (other than Game Pass) that I think is worthwhile. I was also blown away by how much I like YouTube Music. Don’t get me wrong, I’m fully anticipating the platform to race to the bottom and go to complete and utter shit, but for the time being, I think it’s solid.
Video is literally the data elephant in the room. I think we'll need AI to assist in developing something that demanding in terms of bandwidth. Remember, Youtube just works. No one is going to move to a platform where a video takes 30-60 seconds to load a video and a half an hour to upload a video when a practically instant option exists.
And I may be in the minority here, but so far, Google has been the least nefarious tech giant to my eyes. They haven't given me adequate reason to disavow them. I'm not saying they're good, I'm just saying they're not Musk Twitter, Zuck Meta, or the like. They don't obfuscate the fact that they sell your data like Meta, and they even understand the value of open source software, rare for a publically traded capitalist corporation. This will probably change, greed rot is universal, and they do treat their creators like dogshit on YouTube. But I'd be shocked if it was reasonably replacable by distributed enthusiasts given current infrastructure and bandwidth pricing. Estimates have Youtube's video data to be around 300 Petabytes, or 300,000 terabytes.
The problem with YouTube is that people make real money off of their content, in an honest way. Unless you can match or exceed that level of income, you don't have much of a chance of competing. People's livelihoods would be at stake
Reddit was big, but not profitable for users. At most, it was a social boost and marketing. That's easily replaceable. Real, significant profiting, not so much.
I REALLY want there to be a better YT replacement on the fediverse or in some form of decentralized way.
As people are pointing out, videos are very large files, and therefore very expensive to host. The fediverse can mitigate this a little bit, as everyone can host their own videos on their own server, but that's not enough, and extremely inconvenient.
I do wonder if the blockchain/torrents can be used here... I'm not a dev or anything so IDK how any of it really works, but I think something to that tune is gonna be the only way, since traditional servers don't seem to be viable.
Peertube already exist. If you have to upload a video to show someone on the internet it's already more convenient than youtube as you don't have to login and access with google accounts.
Am I the only one who thinks once something becomes a monolith of a platform, then it should be regulated (or dare I say), nationalized/ turned into a non profit?