No one has solved a way to make hosting massive amounts of videos cheap, and this is unlikely to happen anytime soon due to the large amount of data storage and bandwidth required.
So no, even if YouTube somehow becomes even more tyrannical than it is it’s unlikely we’ll ever see it decentralized and federated the way Lemmy is in a usable way anytime soon.
That basically just creates a hen and egg problem.
Who is going to pay? Every user? Every content creator? Both?
Let’s say just users pay to use the platform, this is already a massive hurdle but we’ll just go with it. If you personally have to pay you might get angry about “content creators” just spamming shitty videos that take up a ton of storage space (but maybe not that much bandwidth as nobody watches them yet). So to keep costs down suddenly uploads get moderated.
Now you’re choking user growth (as you have to pay money) and you’re choking content creation as you hinder the freedom of video creators.
YouTube does neither, it’s free for the average user (though with ads) and you can upload whatever you want. Their servers can handle it, but they also prioritize content. If a nobody uploads a video it gets put into cold storage on some lonely server in the middle of nowhere. If a video or content creator is more popular then their content is moved to more powerful servers and plenty of CDNs. That only works if you control the entire infrastructure, instead of having federated instances of random server admins.
No one has solved a way to make hosting massive amounts of videos cheap, and this is unlikely to happen anytime soon due to the large amount of data storage and bandwidth required.
So no, even if YouTube somehow becomes even more tyrannical than it is it’s unlikely we’ll ever see it decentralized and federated the way Lemmy is in a usable way anytime soon.
Isn’t PeerTube solving that problem?
Has anybody done the math? How much would each YouTube user have to pay each month to pay for hosting those videos?
If we want an Internet that doesn’t suck, we need to get over the idea that everything has to be free (as in beer).
That basically just creates a hen and egg problem.
Who is going to pay? Every user? Every content creator? Both?
Let’s say just users pay to use the platform, this is already a massive hurdle but we’ll just go with it. If you personally have to pay you might get angry about “content creators” just spamming shitty videos that take up a ton of storage space (but maybe not that much bandwidth as nobody watches them yet). So to keep costs down suddenly uploads get moderated.
Now you’re choking user growth (as you have to pay money) and you’re choking content creation as you hinder the freedom of video creators.
YouTube does neither, it’s free for the average user (though with ads) and you can upload whatever you want. Their servers can handle it, but they also prioritize content. If a nobody uploads a video it gets put into cold storage on some lonely server in the middle of nowhere. If a video or content creator is more popular then their content is moved to more powerful servers and plenty of CDNs. That only works if you control the entire infrastructure, instead of having federated instances of random server admins.
Video hosting is a nightmare.