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.
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.
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.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.
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Tiktok is a company comparable in scale to Google. 130Bn in revenue last year.
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Patreon is nowhere near the scale of YouTube. But I also think it's the only viable solution to privacy and supporting creators.
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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.
Because Google builds out their network as an ISP and doesn’t pay for the internet like the rest of us.
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'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.
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.
The technology mostly exists. The most important question is always how do you get people to use it.
The only way I see people using decentralized solutions is by having one interface where you can watch decentralized content as well as YouTube. That way they don't loose any of the content or convenience.
No one ever bothers to open up two apps for videos, that is why a single app solution is the only way.
The unique selling point of decentralized video plattforms atm is 1) you can watch what is banned on YouTube 2) you are not beholden to the YouTube algorithm for conent.
So if we can sell that to users and not have them loose any convenience or UX, you can slowly start replacing YouTube.
Monetization is also an important point, but others have addressed this.
If they integrate some self-hosted analytics and monetization mechanics, like Matomo and Stripe, to it, then it'll be a feasible alternative to YouTube.
yes, you're right. I forgot that exists. I even have it installed lmao
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.
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
Show
I was just reading this issue on Github last night and I really don't see how PeerTube is any better than a traditional server for hosting videos. The peer part of it seems to have such a miniscule impact on the whole thing that it just feels like a gimmick. I've read that the biggest problem for PeerTube instance hosts is storage and not the bandwidth. The only thing that peers can save you is tiny bit of bandwidth from what I understand.
So from what I've gathered, relying on peers only for hosting the video is completely unviable. And that makes sense, especially for old, unpopular videos, there will be no peers to begin with. Even if every video on the site is being "seeded" by viewers, the reliability of connection and bandwidth would be very bad because you can't know if the peer is some guy on the dial up connection. Even in the perfect scenario where everyone had very reliable connection and good bandwidth, the fact that browsers don't support p2p protocol and rely on a hack/workaround to use it, will mean that there will be delays. So starting the video and rewinding would be painfully slow.
Is there something that I'm missing, or is PeerTube really not that much better than a "normal" video hosting server?
Peertube uses webtorrents, not regular torrents, and doesn't even hook into the larger torrent network, which is seeding most of media on the net.
You're correc, the peer part of peertube is mainly a gimmick at this point, and it's nowhere close to being what torrents already are, a decentralized hosting network.
I wish people would start uploading their videos to Pornhub so I wouldn't get embarrassed whenever someone sees the app on my phone.
/s...or am I?
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
lol, lmao
I assume you don't understand how law and authorities work, if this is funny for you. Proton is still one of the best private email providers. Period.
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.
I think that you should look at our world realistically. You can't just go "fuck the goverment" mode and remain active as a corporation. Proton shared as less info as possible, but they couldn't refuse to share it at all.
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.
Trusting law-abiding corporations to protect your privacy is fundamentally a bad idea, and as such, promoting Proton as a private alternative to Google
You can't trust anyone, that's true. 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.
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 Briar?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 shitty little rats they are.
If I'm sending encrypted mail to gmail, only that one mail is compromised once decrypted on gmail's servers.
What? How? Most private email providers only support encryption like Proton to Proton or Tuta to Tuta. Emails sended to anything else stay unencrypted. And there's no way you're going to use this stupid password protection everytime, because if you do, then why would you even use email?
Do you only send mail to gmail users or something?
Almost everyone uses Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo or whatever. Unfortunately, not everyone are privacy concious like you and me.
smtp is no better or worse than xmpp, irc or whatever else if you have end to end encryption.
No, it's not. Emails should not be used by political activists to communicate. Even the best email providers like Proton or Tuta can't give you 100% protection and this activist arrest is the perfect example.
Email is the obsolete protocol, that should only be used to register on random websites and get authorization codes. For everything else you should use secure messaging apps.
As nice as an idea as it is, it will never be feesible for one reason: buy in. You would have to get everyone on youtube to migrate to the same platform. Just about everyone who uses windows has gripes about it, but the masses don't migrate to Linux. Because it is change at all, and there are too many choices. I like anyone else here, would love for folks to even consider an alternative, it's a losing battle against human nature.
Network Effect is the biggest hurdle for sure. I think it it true for so many other services too. I think we can agree there is no real technical problem to solve, we only look at the technical problems because trying to "fix" the social and political issues is a lot harder. Digital Markets Act is supposed to address this but time will tell if it has any lasting impact (in the EU).
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.
I don't have solution for videos, but I am moving back to podcasts and rss as much as possible. I want to be ready when they finally forbbid watching without ads.
But I must admit content creators are not helping, content for most of them become just job to be done with. I am aware it is not their fault and that yt is pushing them, but content is geting worse.
It is hard to compete with platform that is loosing so much money. They will also buy anyone who tries. Maybe if we start being satisfied with one resolution and quality, but that will never happen.
I have thought about creating a video series that is distributed via torrent, that could be a decent idea...
RSS like podcasts. A compressed 1080p video is totally doable over most Internet.
https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/
I am NOT asking how do I use a privacy-focused front-end for YouTube, by the way, I am aware they exist.
My bad needed more coffee
The prior verbiage threw me off.
how do we distribute videos and watch them without data collection?
So opinion answer to the latter. Opinion answer. Don't ignore YouTube.
Steam didn't ignore Win32 and ask 10k devs to port to Linux. They partnered up with CodeWeavers, WINE and others to create Proton and it made the former task largely unnecessary.
Expand federated video services to cache all videos they stream in case the original gets dunked on. And then at the same time grow the platform.
A subsection of FOSS hates wealth, but people need to be able to lift themselves out of poverty, there has to be a profit motive and that profit has to largely go to the content creators.
Without motives and incentives you can build the most beautiful codebase ever and it won't take off.
Mass censorship is coming, so platforms that don't censor and host in countries where this is legally protected will have the advantage of growing new mega sites.
