I would love for something to replace YouTube, especially something in the Fediverse, but video unfortunately has much higher storage and bandwidth requirements, so it’s hard to imagine that not being totally cost prohibitive at high levels of traffic, even if it’s split across so many different servers. I’d love to be wrong on that, though.
The other problem with YouTube/twitch alts as opposed to reddit/twitter is that a lot of the creators people like the most actually rely on those platforms to serve ads in order to make a living. That content can’t exist on FOSS systems unless they somehow manage to attract advertisers, which seems next to impossible
While some streamers could get direct sponsors, that option is really only available to a select few of the most popular ones, and would still deprive them of the extra income they currently get from ads served by the platform. You’d have to convince advertisers to trust that each instance is going to serve their ads fairly and not additionally host content they don’t like. A system to distribute ads between instances would be complicated enough to write in the first place; these sites have a lot of QoL updates to push before they even think about doing something like that.
Yeah, video is just that much more expensive to store. I am sure a lot of current Lemmy instances are still lighter that some “cat meowing for 3 hours” video. And let’s not talk about all of those channels that upload dozens of gigabytes of data on a daily basis. I fear we may never have a suitable replacement to YouTube (that it’s not just another asshole mega corporation).
Yeah, thats why strata like peertube reducing costs with p2p sharing helps, or lbry (rip, I think) attempt to put in donations and tipping directly in was key for those to gain any traction.
Going further in cost reduction is what I am hopeful for. Better AV1 support and IPFS support are two develops I am following. A more radical approach may be using latent space generation from AI models like stable diffusion to generate frames locally instead of storing and transmitting perfect copies.
I would love for something to replace YouTube, especially something in the Fediverse, but video unfortunately has much higher storage and bandwidth requirements, so it’s hard to imagine that not being totally cost prohibitive at high levels of traffic, even if it’s split across so many different servers. I’d love to be wrong on that, though.
The other problem with YouTube/twitch alts as opposed to reddit/twitter is that a lot of the creators people like the most actually rely on those platforms to serve ads in order to make a living. That content can’t exist on FOSS systems unless they somehow manage to attract advertisers, which seems next to impossible
I feel like the trend is going towards serving ads in stream anyways, the twitch ad/ad blocking war is/(was?) ongoing last I checked.
I don’t see why that would be impossible in a federated setting.
While some streamers could get direct sponsors, that option is really only available to a select few of the most popular ones, and would still deprive them of the extra income they currently get from ads served by the platform. You’d have to convince advertisers to trust that each instance is going to serve their ads fairly and not additionally host content they don’t like. A system to distribute ads between instances would be complicated enough to write in the first place; these sites have a lot of QoL updates to push before they even think about doing something like that.
Yeah, that’s definitely a good point. Even the creators that do get sponsorships also get money from the ads.
Yeah, video is just that much more expensive to store. I am sure a lot of current Lemmy instances are still lighter that some “cat meowing for 3 hours” video. And let’s not talk about all of those channels that upload dozens of gigabytes of data on a daily basis. I fear we may never have a suitable replacement to YouTube (that it’s not just another asshole mega corporation).
Yeah, thats why strata like peertube reducing costs with p2p sharing helps, or lbry (rip, I think) attempt to put in donations and tipping directly in was key for those to gain any traction.
Going further in cost reduction is what I am hopeful for. Better AV1 support and IPFS support are two develops I am following. A more radical approach may be using latent space generation from AI models like stable diffusion to generate frames locally instead of storing and transmitting perfect copies.
Fair point. I hadn’t thought much about the bandwidth and storage stuff. Reddit and co. are comparitively cheaper.