• nifty@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit. And so here we are.

    Or that’s what we’re led to believe. Someone could say the same for an OS, but we have many open source alternatives. We need an open source alternative to YouTube, and perhaps with some innovation that may be possible. You don’t need storage, for example, if content is just streamed in a p2p manner, even with a time delay so people can watch something whenever

    Edit: some context https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P2PTV

    For the idiots downvoting explain why, or I’ll just believe you’re YouTube shills

    • brygphilomena@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Your equating the software development with the running costs.

      People have made OS and people have made YouTube alternatives. But that’s nothing compared to the quantity of servers, networking infrastructure, storage, power usage, and labor to maintain and update it.

      P2p isn’t a valid alternative because that’s just shifting costs onto your users. Just because a central entity isn’t taking on the burden of cost doesn’t mean the cost isn’t there.

      Pictures and text are rather low usage, both in storage and networking but video isn’t. Especially when millions are watching videos at the same time.

      • the_doktor
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        5 months ago

        Maybe if we would stop expecting these sites to provide wasteful ultra-huge megaHD videos, it wouldn’t be a problem. Hell, even with YouTube, maybe if they just served DVD-quality videos they wouldn’t need to push tons of ads on us in the first place. Our expectation for this crazy new pointless ultra-sharp quality videos is ridiculous and is part of the problem with content delivery these days.

      • nifty@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        What you’re saying is valid in a model where the server hosts content and provides it on demand, and that’s not what I was describing.

        Here’s the model I had in my head, but I am not sure if anyone has attempted this yet:

        1…user uploads a video which borrows resources from p2p network

        2…the shared burden is shifted around as nodes become active or inactive

        3…content is always available in asynchronous, on demand fashion

        I don’t work in distributed and networked systems, so I don’t expect the above model to strictly be based in reality, but it’s not that fanciful based on the wiki article I shared

        I guess it’s a fair point that users maybe don’t want to be responsible for the burden. In which case, I guess why complain about ads then 🤷‍♀️

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          You’re right that this is possible. But the speed and quality are going to decline considerably under this model, particularly across distant regions.

        • BlueMagma@sh.itjust.works
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          5 months ago

          You are kinda describing “maidsafe”

          But maidsafe isn’t fully free, you technically pay access by sharing/lending hardware to the network

          • nifty@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Cool, so I don’t understand why it has to be fully free. I think people should be comfortable taking control of their technologies otherwise they should be okay with getting what they get from the service providers

            • BlueMagma@sh.itjust.works
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              5 months ago

              I totally agree with you, I’m happy to pay when the service is good. I was only mentioning it wasn’t fully free because I know some care about that.

        • AwesomeLowlander@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          5 months ago

          In which case, I guess why complain about ads then

          Because the average internet user (and many FOSS users, sadly) have gotten into the mindset that they deserve everything for free, the way they want it.

          (For those taking offense to the bit about freeloading FOSS users, I refer you to the FOSS dev burnout trend we were discussing a month ago)

    • NoMoreCocaine@lemmynsfw.com
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      5 months ago

      Not downvoting, but I just think you’re way too optimistic. It’s like believing we, humans, could stop fighting wars. Sure, theoretically. But the difference between theory and the practical is that in theory there’s no difference.

      • nifty@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Hmm not being optimistic, just going based on past experience. Look at where you’re posting right now, did anyone think the fediverse could be a possibility when we have twitter, fb or reddit? There’s nothing out of the norm about what I am saying anyways, people do stuff like this for sport or based on ideology. That’s why anyone should support a foss project they use or admire, or pay artists, writers, niche magazines etc

        • upandatom@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          It’s just YouTube shills. Content creators who want to make money on the platform, and content viewers who don’t want to have to check multiple places for the things they watch.

          No one should feel bad for Google though, as they chose YouTube to be open to anyone uploading anything.

          • Prandom_returns@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            Content creators who want to make money on the platform

            You mean “get paid for labour”? How fucking dare they ask money for their time and providing people with information / entertainment / whatever.

                • PeggyLouBaldwin@lemmy.world
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                  5 months ago

                  if you can’t find someone willing to pay you to make content, maybe your content isn’t worth getting paid for.

                  • Prandom_returns@lemm.ee
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                    5 months ago

                    But youtube pays you even if the content isn’t worth getting paid for, so I don’t think your reasoning works.

                    “Go somewhere where there’s no viewers and you don’t get paid”.

                    Nice advice, I’ll pass.

            • upandatom@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              Yawn. This was not my point, or even what I was trying to to say.

              But I wonder how much you’ll defend YouTube and Google in 2 years.

              • Prandom_returns@lemm.ee
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                5 months ago

                Of course it wasn’t…

                No defending here. Just making fun of all the entitled delusional crybabies here.

    • Agrivar@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      For the idiots downvoting explain why, or I’ll just believe you’re YouTube shills

      Fuck you.

    • BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk
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      5 months ago

      Storage and maintenance. OSes are miniscule in comparison to the data YouTube stores, we’re in the multiple exabyte range here. Someone’s got to pay for it somewhere. Floatplane might be a decent comparison as to what a FOSS YouTube might look like - they have a dedicated dev team and charge per channel to view, following more than a couple of creators would become cost prohibitive for me personally.

      You absolutely need storage in a P2P network, the data doesn’t just magic into existence, not only that but if there are insufficient peers in the network then you’re not watching the video, smaller creators and older content would likely suffer as a result.

    • PeggyLouBaldwin@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      peertube uses webtorrents. it’s viable. it works. owncast is fully self-hosted. it works. all the people downvoting are repeating a talking point, and have never implemented these projects.

      • nifty@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        They have a point about server costs and maintenance, which is why I suggested community garden type server farms.

        I also didn’t need to call people idiots, but we’re all humans sigh

    • Prandom_returns@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      We can barely keep Mastodon / Lemmy instnaces floating that host text, gifs and pictures.

      That doesn’t include paying the content creators.

      Just because you’re getting shit for free, doesn’t mean that other people will want to do it for you for free.

      Fuck you.

    • Emerald@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Someone could say the same for an OS, but we have many open source alternatives.

      An OS requires significantly less resources. The only online features you need for an OS is a website to market the OS and host ISO’s. Then you need a server to distribute packages to users. Packages which are significantly smaller then HD or 4K videos

    • credit crazy@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Considering I remember some project in the past tried something like that in the past and found that because you can’t control when people log off you can’t guarantee files will transfer in one piece not to mention how expensive it was having everyone’s computer constantly using Internet and computing stuff. For that reason I think the main problem here is that we are trying to centralize video sharing onto one platform. I instead propose we encourage people to make their own platforms. Like if you want to watch idk PewDiePie you go to PewDiePie.com and encourage people to explore the Internet instead of just sitting on one site. I suppose as a step in the right direction I propose that we get people to make online data bases using laptops/desktops that have nothing but xzamp and the videos you wish to upload to the web. Then we all collectively promote a sort of aggregation site that promotes everyones videos that way the aggregation site only has to store a bunch of hyperlinks and handle all the traffic while you the content creator just have to handle the traffic your content generates now the only challenge is making this idea profitable because if content creators can’t profit few if any will make content and if the aggregation platform can’t break eaven then we are back to square one of no one knowing where to look for content.

      • nifty@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        For that reason I think the main problem here is that we are trying to centralize video sharing onto one platform. I instead propose we encourage people to make their own platforms. Like if you want to watch idk PewDiePie you go to PewDiePie.com and encourage people to explore the Internet instead of just sitting on one site.

        Basically old web but with aggregators, I don’t hate it. I think there needs to be a way to alleviate burden from content creators in a way. Tbh, maybe we need community server farms which are jointly supported, like community gardens in a way

        • Furbag@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Old web was awesome. Audiences were smaller, but content was far more personalized and less corporate. I could see link aggregators and relay networks coming back and people self-hosting more of their own content in the future, but it would have to take a massive shift in consumer behavior to wean themselves off of the teat of Web 2.0 spoon-feeding them their content and making content creating/sharing as frictionless as possible.

    • ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      a) I downvoted you b) I am a YouTube shill c) Fuck you

      that means I get money from them, right? I’m still waiting for my check. YouTube is the best.