this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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Privacy
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I don't think you quite understand just how stupendous the amount of data Google processes from YouTube alone is. There is basically no way for hobbyists to provide an equivalent service. Very few companies have those kinds of resources. If you want, you can of course try running a PeerTube instance, but you rather quickly run in to problems with scaling.
I find it almost miraculous YouTube exists to begin with. It is no accident Google has very few competitors on that front, and I don't think YouTube is even profitable for them. Without Google's deep pockets and interest in monopolizing the market, YouTube would have withered a long time ago.
Trust me, I want a solution too. But 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute. All of that is processed, re-encoded, and saved with multiple bitrates. You can't compete with that. YouTube might eventually keel over from Enshittification and its own impossibility, but replacing it with anything meaningful will be a challenge.
I'd have agreed but hundreds of
fmoviesand similar sites exist on the high seas that provide free streaming of millions of HD content (movies, web series, etc.) somehow. They use some third-party video host that is magically able to concurrently serve millions of people.the infrastructure of the pirate streaming sites is impressive, but I bet that is still orders of magnitude easier than hosting youtube.
Those sites just scrape from many different file hosting sites. They don't pay for that storage themselves.
.. which makes it even more wonderful, since those file hosting sites are now somehow able to serve video streaming to millions of viewers across the world FOR FREE.
Maybe the solution to YouTube is something similar to BitTorrent. It would make more sense for the protocol to preload the first chunk and to use a codec that can start with a lower res image and then fill in the resolution in subsequent passes. And on the front end, something like Lemmy would work, where channels and posts can be federated.
Considering the number of people who have 1gps symmetric bandwidth today, such a system should be able to technically work.
But nobody’s designed it yet AFAIK.