Hi, my post is focusing specifically on YouTube since I observed the following categories have less intrusive solutions or privacy focused solutions, even if they are paid:
- Operating Systems (Linux, for example)
- Instant Messaging (Element, for example)
- Community Messaging (Revolt, for example)
- E-Mail (Proton, for example)
- Office (libreoffice, for example)
- Password Managers (Bitwarden, for example)
However, how do we distribute videos and watch them without data collection? I am NOT asking how do I use a privacy-focused front-end for YouTube, by the way, I am aware they exist.
I am wondering how we obtain a FOSS solution to something super critical such as YouTube. It is critical since it contains a lot of educational content (I’d wager more than any other platform), and arguably the most informative platform, despite having to filter through a lot of trash. During COVID, we even saw lecturers from universities upload their content on YouTube and telling students to watch those lectures. (I have first-hand experience with this at a respectable university).
I refuse to accept that there is nothing we can do about it.
for 3d printed gun people (not personally one of them, just browsed their subreddit once), they use some vaguely blockchain crypto related p2p video host called LBRY, not sure if that model is scalable though, as it seems to be based around free p2p hosting like torrents, although there was some mention of hosting fees, presumably in crypto? not sure
LBRY is interesting, but the platform is stale af idk whats up with the project.
Peertube seems to be the best option that already exists
Element isn’t replacing shit. I hate Matrix
…Agreed & real weird to see a specific client mentioned instead of a protocol.
People use YouTube because YouTube pays them. You want to get paid without a middleman; you have to use cryptocurrency. The Fediverse hates crypto, so the Fediverse will never have a YouTube replacement.
People use YouTube because that’s where you get biggest outreach. YouTube pay a little, but YouTubers mostly rely on secondary incomes like sponsors and Patreon. Both of these are viable on any other platform.
Podcasts have mainly been using this model for a long time.
if that were true, there’d be a Youtube competitor by now
What exactly would prevent people from paying in actual currencies? Crypto is in no way a requirement for a YT replacement whatsoever.
then the bank could stop processing your payments because they don’t like your content
What exactly would prevent people from paying in actual currencies? Crypto is in no way a requirement for a YT replacement whatsoever.
You want to get paid without a middleman
This is the part you missed. Imagine Lemmy but for videos instead of links. Users pay creators via some subscription or likes mechanism. Lemmy instance admins do not want to deal with:
- Custodying the funds and having to keep them safe
- Having to make connections to every major national banking system or payment processor
- Dealing with chargebacks, payment disputes, counterparty risks, KYC/AML/other onerous regulations etc. People are used to cards being “instant” but full settlement on the backend takes days to weeks depending on how you define “settlement”.
Doing these things is an absolute nightmare and takes a lot of human time. Human time costs lots of money. All this just to move money from viewers to content creators.
Bitcoin via lightning, for example, can do all of this for them without any of that mess. Payments can go P2P directly from viewers to creators. Payments can be settled instantly for <1% in fees, usually pennies.
There are many payment services that require pretty much nothing from the server/instance once implemented, and doesn’t cost anything for the instance (the fees are taken from the payer), specifically to address the issues you mention. It’s already a solved issue.
With bitcoin everyone now has to go to an exchange to convert the pseudo-currency to actual usable currencies, which is a much more annoying middleman IMO, which will then also take a cut.
And what are the fees like on those services? Does their fee structure work for micropayments? And do they support every country out-of-the box or are there some they don’t support? How do they handle chargebacks and counter-party risk? What is their settlement time? Do they occasionally freeze accounts for seemingly nonsensical or political reasons? Since we’re on the privacy community, how is their privacy? Can you, for example, sign up as an instance admin and automatically have them forward payments to content creators, or would you need to custom-code that through an API and then register with a non-standard account because now you aren’t a regular user but an intermediary? Try being an “intermediary” on Paypal and your account will get shut down very quickly, because you aren’t allowed to do that. You’d have to custom negotiate a special deal with them and fill out a bunch more paperwork and probably pay higher fees and meet a bunch of other requirements like being incorporated and obtaining insurance and auditors and the list goes on and on.
Ask anybody in the adult industry how much trouble they have getting access to these services even though the business they are engaging in is perfectly legal. Not grey area legal, fully certified legal by the US Supreme Court and appellate courts up and down the system for decades.
Answer these questions and you start to see the appeal of not having a third-party custodian do all this. Bitcoin lightning can do all of this, instantly, for 10-1000x less fees and massively less complication. You can say you don’t like crypto, that’s fine, but it’s legitimately better at solving these kinds of problems which is why adoption has been growing for 15 straight years.
But it’s not objectively better, because you can’t fucking use it. It’s digital tokens that are literally unusable until exchanged for real currencies, which brings the need for exchanges in to the picture (see my edit above).
You don’t have to convert it to fiat if you don’t want to, plenty of people use Bitcoin as currency, that is the entire point. Users tipped each other nearly a million USD worth of it on nostr int he last two months ($950k). You can go to any major city and find place to buy/sell/spend it. Many places online accept it too, of course. The network effect is quite large. Bitcoin’s market cap is larger than sweden’s GDP. It moves trillions of dollars of value every year. Not people “hodling”, people using it to do funds transfer.
But if you want to, you can absolutely convert it, with a single click. Those middlemen typically take a lower cut since they’re doing conversion not sending/receiving/settlement which is a much risker and therefore expensive service. There is, for example, no counterparty risk if you convert somebody’s BTC to their native currency, but there is if you transfer that person’s money to another person or act as an intermediary. I use strike for this, strike’s conversion fee is less than 1%, in many apps or exchanges, conversion is literally free because the app wants to incentivize you to store money with them and because it’s just updating some row in a database.
Except for less than a handful of countries worldwide, bitcoin can’t pay your rent, your mortgage, your groceries, your gas, your tuition or anything in day-to-day life. It is effectively not usable as payment for basic things yet, you would die if that was all you had.
I can spend money (even digitally) without any fees at all, no functional delay (as in, I’m not bothered by the technical delay), no need to convert it and wait for the fiat to be paid out to me from an exchange. that is not doable with crypto.
Crypto may get there one day, but it is still very far from being there after 15 years.
Video hosting/streaming is the hardest use-case to replace due to infrastructure costs. PeerTube exists, which works like torrents and is probably the best solution that we’re gonna get for this. I don’t see it replacing YouTube though, since decentralization fundamentally limits reach (and potential income as a result) and a lack of data collection makes it harder to accurately profile viewers (both of which professional content creators care about). It’s probably fine for hobbyists and FOSS projects that want to distribute videos though.
I’m not sure if you can replace YouTube. It’s too popular and has been a mainstay of the Internet for 19 years. We won’t be able to convince people to just up and leave YouTube.
Best case scenario is to lead by example and start sharing videos from PeerTube.
same issue with twitter. too much momentum, not enough enshitification yet
Twitter’s different IMO. It relies on the network effect, whereas YouTubers get paid.
were not talkin about the small number of creators. its all about the audience . though i see what youre sayin… chicken and egg kind of thing… its ok, google is making it hard on them
I haven’t ever seen anything useful on twitter except funny tweets from musk
Not only that, I am certain Google will put as much money as needed into it not to allow any competing platform.
YT is not profitable, but gives them data, power and control.
If you’re a creator, upload to Peertube and Youtube, and promote Peertube on your Youtube channel. It’s a compromise, but it’s the only realistic way to pull viewers over if you’re not already a popular creator. Also provide some incentives to use Peertube instead of Youtube, like early uploads.
If you’re a viewer, use Peertube; and when you need to use Youtube, use a 3rd party client like pipe-viewer. Don’t support ad culture, donate to creators you like instead.
Proton as a private alternative to Gmail
deleted by creator
Oh I understand it, and I also understand that laws can be wrong and corrupt, and shouldn’t always be followed. If you think how law-abiding a corporation is is more important than protecting privacy of activists, maybe that shows your true colors.
deleted by creator
Good point! Trusting law-abiding corporations to protect your privacy is fundamentally a bad idea, and as such, promoting Proton as a private alternative to Google (compared to say, self hosting on a bulletproof VPS like buyvm) is harming users and promoting corporate propaganda.
deleted by creator
But self-hosting your own 100% bulletproof MailCow server on 1984 VPS, which you pay for in Monero won’t make you any more private, because emails you send still end up on Gmail inboxes.
How does sending mail to gmail affect my privacy? If I’m sending encrypted mail to gmail, only that one mail is compromised once decrypted on gmail’s servers. Any mail sent to any other server is fine. Do you only send mail to gmail users or something?
It’s simply unneccesary for normal user with not so high threat model. And if you’re a political activist, then why even using email instead of normal privacy communication solutions like SimpleX, Session or Matrix?
smtp is no better or worse than xmpp, irc or whatever else if you have end to end encryption. Proton decided to lie in their privacy policy that they don’t log IPs, which ended up fucking this activist because they started logging after a sneaky targeted court order, and then edited their privacy policy after the fact like the slimeballs they are.
deleted by creator
The biggest issue I’ve always heard people say when it comes to replacing a video hosting service like YouTube is needing storage space and bandwidth.
I feel like ipfs, the interplanetary file system, could be leveraged to do this but it would require a concerted effort to make a fast, stable, reliable, and federated YouTube replacement, and I imagine that we would need people to financially support it.
IPFS is not free storage. Someone has to “pin” your video, where it then takes up space on their hard drive.
I never said that it was free storage. I said that it could be a solution to the video storage issue
I mean, if a million people each offered 100 GB of storage, you could store an awful lot of video.
Also it’s worth mentioning the “how to distribute content among peers” problem has mostly been solved and has for over a decade, just that nobody has built out the UX for it for a YouTube clone. Torrents exist, #freenet and #hyphanet exist, #ipfs exists, these are all excellent platforms for storing and distributing content without relying on expensive, centralized hosting. Instead, users share the burden of hosting. There’s a whole category of software that solves this problem in different ways (P2P). Unfortunately, every new generation of developers seems to want to re-invent the wheel instead of using time-tested tech that already exists but just needs a UX refresh or maybe some protocol improvements.
If you have a tube site and it says “to skip ads, install IPFS”, everybody would be using IPFS.
The key problem that needs to be solved is the monetization problem. Nostr has a potential solution though. Over the last two months alone, their users have “zapped” (tipped/donated) other users around 950K (nearly 1 mil!) USD worth via lightning and that number continues to grow. And it doesn’t just make it easy to pay content creators, but to also put a portion of your “zaps” towards the relay you use or development of the software if you want. If you have a nostr account, you can easily tie it to a lightning address to send/receive tips, nostr doesn’t take a fee. Relays can also portion out a bit of their zaps for the people who publish the most engaging content on their relay. The possibilities are quite extensive. And because it’s over lightning, zaps happen instantly and for pennies or less in fees. Though, you can use nostr without zaps at all.
For those unfamiliar with nostr, it’s a decentralized social media software much like ActivityPub/mastodon, the main use right now is as a twitter/instagram clone but there’s also a reddit-style section being built up as well. Video hosting itself could be done by relays or through a P2P system similar to IPFS. Moderation abilities from the perspective of the instance/relay are identical to activitypub/mastodon. But one bonus if that if your relay goes down, you don’t lose your identity, since your identity and relay are separate. And if you change apps or relays (you are typically connected to multiple relays), all your content moves with you seamlessly. And the payment/zap infrastructure is all decentralized, relays don’t ever custody or manage the payments. If you tip a content creator, it goes directly from you to them. The lightning network has basically limitless transaction capacity. If you have cash app, it supports lightning, so you can already send zaps (you will need different apps to receive zaps though because cash app doesn’t support the LNURL standard). Strike natively supports it. And because it’s lightning, it works in every country automatically.
Long-term, if I am a content creator, which “fedi”-type system is going to be attractive to me? One where users can send me tips and mircopayments or one where they can’t? This is why I think nostr is going to win out long-term over AP/Mastodon. Mastodon could add this kind of functionality but I don’t get the impression they’re open to it. People may not want to commit to yet another $5/month subscription to a YouTuber’s patreon or nebula or whatever, but they are happy to tip 1-10c after watching a video. So there’s a psychological beauty to micropayments as well. As some random person I have made like 7c on tips this month, but I’ve also given out plenty to other people.
Source about nostr fees: https://lemmy.ml/post/17824358
Unfortunately this financing requires a populace widely adopting cryptocurrency…making it a pipe dream for mainstream use.
Tips are generally a bad model as well, which creates an incentive for rapid and pandering work (like ad supported content).
Patreon had frankly built all of YouTube that is worth watching. I think a simple payment system using real banks can be integrated into smaller hosting services.
It’s all academic though, YouTube is unrivaled in ad revenue and helping you expand an audience.
25% of Americans own crypto, usage continues to grow year after year both domestically and internationally. Most people have a crypto-capable wallet on their phone (CashApp, Venmo, Paypal). It solves problems traditional financial systems can’t solve well. That’s a trend that has been happening for 15 years. You can be mad at it, but it doesn’t change that it’s true.
People want something (YouTube but not YouTube) but don’t want to learn new techniques and technology (crypto). Eventually you have to leave them behind.
I didn’t know about this Nostr, but I do believe you’re right with the content Creator coming for the money, it’s always the money.
I’m going to give it a go!
Look at the strangler pattern in microswrvice architecture. Applying this to your scenario, set up a front end to YouTube, cache the results locally (probably host in a place that allows it). Also host videos from other platforms like peertube. Once you have a lot of users, slowly prioritize “free” videos over YT content.
It’s not likely to happen, but it’s the pattern that FB uses to present news. First they showed a link to the story and you’d click through, then they required more of the story, then when all were hooked, they demanded the whole story to be displayed, effectively stealing all the users and the ability to advertise.
P2P, and shamelessly rehosting popular content.
Won’t make those content creators happy… but it’s the best way to get users to show up, which will attract original content creators.
I refuse to accept that there is nothing we can do about it.
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.
Because Google builds out their network as an ISP and doesn’t pay for the internet like the rest of us.
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.
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.
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.
Counter-point : every single one of the videos uploaded to youtube already lives on the creators hard drive, usually in a much larger format. All that’s needed is for them to create torrents for them.
I think the largest challenge though is maintaining the distribution and managing the associated upfront costs.
Existing large content producers could likely afford to handle this but new producers could struggle paying to seed their content.
Though I do think overall this is more achievable than people give it credit for:
- YT videos don’t need huge bandwidth for a sustained period; only for short bursts. Most views come in within a week.
- Content is probably localized to specific countries. Less need to replicate across the globe.
- Let the source prefer to seed the highest quality and other peers downsample and replicate as needed.
- Doesn’t need YT scale. Tons of YT “content” is spammers leeching essentially free hosting from YT. No one needs to seed their videos if they don’t want to.
- 1080p is still fine for YT videos. h265 is very efficient (though downsampling 265 isn’t great). Don’t need 4k for most videos.
[…] I don’t think YouTube is even profitable for them.
Correct. Even Google, one of the richest companies in the world, is struggling to afford the massive infrastructure required to run YouTube. That’s why they’ve been cracking down on ad-blocking software lately.
Also, this is likely why they’ve been pushing their new updated Chromium-based infrastructure for web browsers, which will prevent ad-blockers from working on websites. If you’re not using Firefox or Safari to browse the Internet by now, you should switch. They’re the only independent browsers not using the Chromium framework.
Restaurants don’t take steaks off the menu because they aren’t are profitable as salads. One date wants a salad, the other wants steak, they make less profit on the steak plate, but the average of the two is profit enough.
It’s ridiculous to look at any one service of these behemoth monopolies as an island - They are one collective thought, EVERY SINGLE PIECE does not have to be to enshittified to generate the biggest possible profit.
I’d even buy subscription if it was a family one without music bundled for a reasonable price. No such luck in my country.
None of these big tech companies are profitable because they pay their execs insane amounts of bonuses
While I do agree with you, I also see twitch, TikTok and Patreon presenting models that are quite competitive with YouTube.
From a privacy perspective, free junk content like TikTok, YouTube and twitch will always be hard coupled with targeted advertising.
But Patreon (and onlyfans for that matter) do offer a model that can work without ads.
In fact, if Patreon also introduced an ad-supported tier and allowed you to more broadly see other content aside from the direct person you sponsor, it could probably grow quite a lot.
-
Tiktok is a company comparable in scale to Google. 130Bn in revenue last year.
-
Patreon is nowhere near the scale of YouTube. But I also think it’s the only viable solution to privacy and supporting creators.
-
Check out FreeTube to privately watch YouTube videos, and PeerTube for a complete replacement.
That is a temporary solution. OP is looking for a whole other service to replace YouTube.
I thought peertube attempts to be a complete replacement
I’m not as optimistic as you.
Hosting video is really expensive. Making video is really expensive. YouTube was losing money for about 15 years despite having a monopoly on online video for most of that time and the best advertising tech in the world. I don’t think it’s possible to make a free competitor to YouTube.
On the paid side, there’s plenty of streaming services that are making money. But you have to be already established in order to get a contract. And since you will typically have to use social media in order to get past that initial barrier, it might as well include YouTube.
However, my guess is that YouTube makes the majority of it’s money from larger channels. If the larger channels all join paid streaming services(e.g. Nebula) then gradually that may be able to bring YouTube down.
Torrents solved this problem (big data distribution) over 20 years ago now, and is still a sizeable chunk of all internet media traffic.
All that’s needed is for people to actually create torrents for their content, and a user friendly way for people to post and view magnet links.
I’m trying to integrate them into lemmy in various ways: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4204
I appreciate your work. I’m thinking it should be easy to reach out to non tech content creators to get permission to migrate their stuff, and for end users like me to request that without a technical barrier. For example: I was watching a self defense channel throughout the week until the youpocalypse happened. What if there is a simple button for me to request his data to be integrated into your system? I’m pretty sure he is more focused on exposure and reach rather than ad revenue, so he might consent. You interpret this to be consent to ytdl it, store it, spread it.
Sure, a lot of people do even have entire youtube playlists and channels shared on torrents without their consent even, downloaded with youtube-dl. Getting existing content onto torrents should be pretty easy.
We do need to get these content creators to create and seed their own torrents also tho, rather than have everyone else do it on their behalf, then post their own torrent links so others can help seed.
The only clean way I see this happening is some kind of a tool that simplifies this, or a readme that can help with the process, possibly linked to lemmy’s post creation as a video/audio upload button, and on any other platform that supports magnet links.
If anyone knows of something like that already, it’d be really helpful.
I’m wondering what your thoughts on IPFS are.
I’ve never used it personally, so I don’t know.
Torrents link to static data, each with their own explicit seeders, so that always seemed more safe than these universal file-system solutions where you don’t know what might be changing, or what you’re hosting.
I only quickly looked into it. I’m also looking for a solution for my work. It seems very privacy focused and works a bit like tor, so like you say, you don’t really know what’s going through your system. But it also has a trust system that trusts friends of friends and so on, so perhaps that isn’t a problem.
