Technology

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.

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 mot what it was created for, i dont think there will be any migration

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.

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.

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.

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.

See Tom Scott's video on copyright.

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.

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.

That's going to take megabucks. Huge bandwidth, storage and compute. Who's going to pay for it?

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.

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.

Better chance of YT -> Odysee

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.

Speaking of, got any good peertube channels? Tbh, I'm more familiar with nebula and floatplane - where YT creators made their own platform. Maybe that's where things are headed

I don't think so. The idea might be nice, but Peertube has neither the audience, nor the monetisation of platforms like YouTube. Moving to peertube just isn't a good business decision for that.

Video hosting is also expensive, especially since they would also have to deal with DMCA claims and all of that. YouTube wasn't really profitable, or even breaking even until rather recently, nearly a full decade after they started. It's not really economical to do video hosting quite like that.

Peertube might be good for casual use, but I also can't see any content creators using it. (Not unlike 2005 YouTube in that sense), and the lack of content creators also means a lack of audience (and through them, content) that might attract more users over. People are more likely to move over to something like Patreon or Twitch instead.

YouTube is one of the only groups that actually makes a profit..or at least gets close to making one - the metric seems to change with the economy.

Also it has a monetization model, which makes it infinitely more enticing than an instance that's more likely to cost money.

Finally the cost of storing and serving video is exponentially higher than images gifs and text, making it more prohibitedly expensive the more users you have.

Sure you could have a pretty ok system if they added a built in patreon like mechanism to peertube, with a revenue split. But it remains to be seen if creators and people are willing to negotiate and give up enough revenue in order to keep the server alive. And also it becomes a bit more businesslike - as you've seen with twitch, giving a worse split is bound to cause backlash and people to drop your instance, even if it's necessary to break even.

There's next to no chance you'll have an easy time if you wanted to migrate your account to another instance - especially if you wanted to keep all your videos. You'd probably have to re-upload them all as most migration setups on the fediverse don't move post data due to the prohibitive amount of data there is, more so for pictures and video

I think we'd be more likely to see pixelfed replace Instagram and pixiv than peertube replace YouTube.

I see existential problems for peertube, because of copyright infringement.

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.

I think at most you’d see people cross posting videos there as a secondary platform

If you think an ad-pocalypse is bad, then why would they jump to a platform with no ads at all? They'd likely be paying to be on that platform. Also the fact streaming video from a self hosting platform is much more demanding then text fedi instances like Lemmy or Mastodon. Also no way the fedi could keep up with even a fraction of YouTube's creator tools, or their audience which is their bottom line.

YouTube will probably never be replaced. We can at least go for private front ends like Invidious.

Youtubers and streamers are different as they create content for getting paid by those services. Peer to peer video content cant replace youtube as it is without government level universal income basically. Most dont make enough from patreon or w/e to survive

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

Peertube always felt hard to use, and no one has really caught on to it imo.

Youtube is great as long as you don't read the comments