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
First I’ve heard of alternatives to YouTube. Do they pay content creators the same or is it just people posting for free there?
They are just offering the free service of video hosting. There are no advertisements and no paid accounts, so all they could share are costs, not income. They are not an advertisement/monetarization service.
Each channel has a option to put your support information so people can pay you through patreon, etc. Peertube instances are offering their video hosting for free. You can put in video ads or patreon like services to enable payments. Peertube instances can ask for money as well to help with hosting costs. It's the same business model as all other federated software. The cost of video hosting is distributed by instances and also uses bittorrent to help with sharing the load.
Would creators actually move there? Say what you will about YouTube but at least they usually compensate the creators.
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
Youtubers generally make more from sponsorships than adsense, at least from what I've gathered. The reason to still run adsense even though it might annoy your audience is that if you don't you get penalised by the algorithm.
Where I could easily see peertube taking off is with public broadcasters and generally media companies doing video that's free to view, as far as youtubers is concerned I wouldn't be surprised if e.g. nebula started to federate... they can still have a "paying customer vs. free content" type of separation while probably saving on bandwidth costs.
A big thing would be the likes of vimeo seeing this as an opportunity. Unless you're already running such a platform you probably don't want to get into the business of contentid and copyright strikes and would restrict your platform to well-known and/or paying actors, or, well, yourself.
That's unlikely. Both Reddit and Twitter speak or at least spoke to people who enjoy a certain image of being anti establishment (in one way or another and whether that's warranted or not). Youtube just doesn't. You can't get more mainstream than Youtube.
Doubt it, it's expensive to host and creators won't have ways to ways to monetize it as easily as YouTube.
Also, I wouldn't really call the Twitter and Reddit cases "exodus". As much as I would like to see the fediverse succeed, the number of users on mastodon and Lemmy are just a blip on the radar.
I still see the same links on my Lemmy frontage days after they have been submitted, it's far less active than Reddit.
I hate this notion that a platform isn't successful unless it has a billion users. As long as there's a critical mass of people, it's fine. One thing I've realised browsing lemmy for the past week is just how much of my Reddit experience was defined by the same handful of Twitter screenshots and rehosted tiktoks being reposted over and over again like every week.
The lemmy front page default sort is broken IIRC. try sorting by new comments.
I still see the same links on my Lemmy frontage days after they have been submitted, it's far less active than Reddit.
That problem stopped the instant I switched to Kbin. There is a ton of activity happening that you are missing.
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!
Gotta be a way for folks to get paid. Most of the folks I watch on YouTube do it for a living.
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.
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 wouldn't for the reasons mentioned by others.
There's no monetization; I would have to find, attract, and deal with sponsors on my own.
There's not really much in the way of audience which makes the above harder since I would need numbers/
There's also the whole thing about bandwidth.
Then there's all the sysadmin stuff to do, security updates, etc.
Then there's still the legal and other admin roles, presumably, about DMCA, etc.
I do not have the time for any of that right now.
Replacing YouTube is a bad idea
I would rather go for reasonable competition. Ideally more than one. I really enjoy nebula for example.
Reddit has 500 million MAU, and this is a conservative estimate. Youtube on the other hand, is sitting comfortably at 4x this number, 2 billion MAU.
Considering that, and the nature of the platform, I'm pretty certain they are too big to fail.
The thing I find fascinating is I only have 1 reddit account, but I effectively have dozens of YT accounts. Just on this device I have newpipe, and libretube. Libretube has around a dozen auto generated random instances associated. Both my laptops have Freetube. I had 4 regular YouTube channels with various gmail accounts linked from when I actually posted content. Practically every device I have replaced had random YT accounts too. I know what I like to watch and importing and exporting features usually fail.
Maybe it is just newpipe being screwy but in my watch history, newpipe shows how many times I've watched any given upload. Most stuff I've watched says some bogus number of views like 6-10 when I just watched it once. Some report correctly, but most do not. It would not surprise me if this is actually YouTube. I can say, for most of the stuff I watch I'm a solid 2 dozen subscribers or more.
No one is too big too fail. There just needs to be a better service, which right now there definitely is not.
And hosting text, images and links on decentralized servers is one thing. High bitrate video, plus the network infrastructure to serve it, is kind of a whole different ballgame. I could see this system working for some kind of torrent/file sharing service that hosts video but not a YouTube competitor.
If Youtube blocks Adblockers, maybe.. but I think ppl will go to Odysse&Co first
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