Moving from YouTube to PeerTube
battlepenguin.com
battlepenguin.com
Multimillion dollar businesses are built based on just the discovery feature.
From the article:
> “If you do run a YouTube channel with any type of significant viewership, I highly recommend backing up your videos, in the event you may need to self-host your content in the future.”
Sure, backups are good but anyone with significant viewership should make sure they promote their other web assets to diversify.
Getting people subscribed to your YouTube channel is #1 priority. Getting them subscribed to your email list or to follow you on another platform should be your #2 priority.
There are plenty of alternatives to YouTube for pure video hosting (Vimeo, Wistia, self hosting). There are no alternatives to YouTube for discovery.
Arguably, entire political movements; the far right and conspiracy vlogosphere relies on constantly being advertised for free to new suckers through youtube recommendations.
Can we at least get youtube to put up a banner saying "no it's impossible to defy the laws of physics and build a unlimited energy machine with a few magnets a microwave and a multimeter?"
I always though these were prank/scam videos?
LOL, as a boat owner that hasn't been out on my boat in quite a few hears, I wholeheartedly agree. On a side note, the payment's due again...
All you need is some vague sense that all the "experts" are either dumber than you, or part of some big conspiracy.
Then because of that you don't even try to understand the work of those that came before you and hey presto! You're on your way to slowly rediscovering the laws of thermodynamics on your own - and until you do (if you ever do) you'll believe all sorts of wacky shit might be possible.
If you seriously believe that the Earth is flat or that lizard people control the world, then frankly a Youtube disclaimer won't really change anything.
But take this random video I found earlier on PeerTube: https://peer.tube/videos/watch/7b5faff9-1752-4eba-be37-beeb0...
It's in French but basically it's one of these videos against the banking system that simplify and caricature the situation to the point of meaninglessness. Coming up with a proper fact-check for something like that would be incredibly difficult, and I'm sure extremely controversial.
It would also take a lot of time and money to get economists and physicists to weigh in on these videos. That's how these conspiracy theories manage to remain relevant in the first place: overwhelm the opposition with thousands upon thousands of hours of content, and claim that they take things out of context or that they don't get it if they don't bother to sink months of their lives watching all that garbage.
Edit: And I've noticed the downvotes, yet what I have said is still accurate. It is true that Gab moved to mastodon, for example, and there is evidence of their mindset spreading to other properties in the Fediverse.
Some of the early adopters are definitely unsavory, yet that content is what new users are going to see. Peertube/etc are still too small to protect against it, I fear.
Early online worlds were (often, not always), academics and techies. Even that was often hard going to generate larger appeal. Facebook was Literally Harvard.
Random malcontents have an even higher social hill to climb.
An elite founding cohort tends to regress to the mean. An unsavory cohort ... tends to further radicalise or collapse entirely.
Fandom/hobby groups are more sustainable and often avoid pathological evolution, but rarely seem to develop mass appeal.
And all this before adding financial or business pressures.
I'm very cynical about any attempts to curb this. I suspect these services will go for stuff that they know, through A/B testing and whatnot, won't affect their bottom line.
Let's say they show particularly harmful and scientifically 'banana-shit' videos, but with a disclaimer in a sidebar that the content in question is 'disputed'.
I imagine viewers are much more drawn to the content and will filter out the sidebar because 1) they don't notice, 2) they don't care because it's just a sidebar, or at worst 3) the libs are trying to make us be okay with homos/feminist/etc.
A provider of said content could defend their 'wokeness', a consumer could just ignore the sidebar or use it to point out how 'the libs' control things.
Meanwhile the rest of us, if we get past the partisanship, are left wondering how such few actors got to decide on so many societally-relevant topics. Surely we've progressed beyond having to deal with feudal lords?
Is it though?
I don’t make videos, but if I did it wouldn’t be as “my job”, it would be because I had information to share.
My favorite YouTube videos and channels aren’t “personalities” being “influencers”.
I guess I just don’t measure success in “popularity”. I don’t think my number one goal would be to get to people, it would be to contribute something useful to a couple people that could use that info.
I would value a good and reliable search feature over the highest possible user base, but this is all just me. I am aware there are people that need the attention / viewership more than I do.
Maybe relying on Google to share -or- arbitrarily decide not to share money that they get in from their massive advertising machine with you... isn’t a good business model?
Someone not having your level of prudence and understanding in their MO doesn't mean they're idiots. Did you learn everything you know by reading the docs and best practices recommendations and acting accordingly, or did it take a couple of stinging mistakes to bring you to where you are? Your attitude is the stuff that nightmare bosses/parents/teachers/mentors are made of. Mellow out.
Perhaps it's a matter of tone not coming across well through text, but you seem to be bizarrely angry at people on YouTube in general, even more so if they don't back up their video files.
You would be incorrect. The overwhelming majority of video uploaders on YouTube have never made a single cent.
Dustin, from Smarter Every Day, has millions of subscribes and keeps his backup copies on old hard drives loosely placed into plastic containers. He also causally tosses them around.
He's hardly and idiot but...
Here's the video where Linus sets him up a 160tb server to replace his old "backup solution". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcWSrIiR1tY
There are many videos by creators chronicling the solutions they've had to contrive to preserve their records and the cost/time tradeoffs they've made to continue creating while saving their archives.
Most of the YouTube channels I follow have no external means to notify me about new videos. If I were to stop using YouTube, they were banned, or YouTube subscriptions stopped working the same, they would have no way to actually contact me about new content, and they’d lose me.
Effectively YouTube owns the relationship between the creators and I. This can be changed, CGPGrey has been building a mailing list for this reason, but it takes a lot of painstaking deliberate action to achieve. Migrating to a new platform alone is insufficient.
In the event that you have to change platform for whatever reason, you still have a line of communication.
Generally I would advise new content creators to be present on every possible platform.
By November 2010, they had iTunes Ping, Twitter, an iPhone app, Facebook, Myspace, the bassist's twitter feed all being pushed in huge tiles.
At the time this was extraordinary, since many artists did not have a handle on social at all and definitely were not pushing people "away" from direct connection like this.
I believe the idea was to allow many platforms to get between you and your fans/followers, but to allow the fans to choose which platform that would be.
As the OP suggests, this can be a lot of work.
[1] Coran Capshaw, the band's manager created an early dial-up ISP company in Charlottesville that went on to become MusicToday. was responsible for major tech advances in live entertainment
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20090219153059/http://www.davema...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20101105102023/http://www.davema...
Judged.
However, on a more serious note, I new people who were -very- attached to bands/musicians based on interactions they had on MySpace and LiveJournal.
One problem with any online exposure in the modern web is that the bar from 'unknown' to 'trolls flooding your inbox' is pretty low. I do wonder however whether small time performers wind up trapped by this: When they are first growing they probably can't pick the ideal "Social Media" person, which may limit certain exposure and opportunities.
You don’t know the half of it. I ran a DMB blog and large online community. It was where I did a lot of my first web programming. :|
Whatever you think of their music, DMB and their fans pioneered a bunch of areas.
One of the most forward decisions by the band was to allow online distribution of their live recordings.
Being mainstream at that point meant it pushed torrenting of the live shows into the workflows of many people who wouldn’t have otherwise have been exposed to the tech.
It also drew the hackers of sorts to their scene who would illicitly capture and record IEM streams, mix them with mic recordings then combine them with stealth monopod videos to release bootleg copies of entire shows.
Only the Radiohead fans came close to the amount of enthusiasm in the DMB scene back then.
That said—if I could go back I’d pick Radiohead to follow.
It's really no different than anything else in life. People hire contractors to do larger home repairs, and the contractors contact and subcontract other specialty workers as needed (drywall, woodworking, plumbing, electrical) for things they can't cover themselves. As the homeowner, unless you make an effort to know who these people are, you won't know who they are and may not know what their company is. The benefit is that you don't need to know any of it and can just let the contractor coordinate it all for you.
Youtube is just like that contractor, except instead of a local guy that cares about your business it's a giant multinational which is hard to get to care if they screw something up for you because you're one of many millions of other customers.
The parallels of you can handle all this coordination youtube offers with more control are obvious. Either hire someone to do it all for you or handle it yourself if you want control, because no matter what platform you go to that handles it for you, chances are it will exhibit some or all of the problems that Youtube has, or even new ones.
I think it's hard to make a fully independent platform so I think topical ones are a better option - but YouTube is really in a position of power due to the network effect. As long as they don't shoot themselves in the foot with controversy and banning then they should be able to easily hold onto their position - everything challenging them has an uphill battle.
It would know what I read and watch. It would find new stuff for me, dedupe it, listen to my feedback,and learn from its mistakes. It would work with all kinds of media, not just youtube or HN.
And it would all be private. I don't mind paying for my content but I do mind being the product.
Some portions of a personalized, cross-service recommendation engine are a lot more viable if centralized (e.g. any scraping/indexing, and plausibly the personalization itself). Supposing such a service had no intention of you ever personally being the product, what would they have to do in order for you to still be comfortable handing that data over to them?
As a non-program, you can always depend on the means that humans have used for content discovery since time immemorial: word of mouth.
A recommendation engine that works solely based on your own watch history would require a totally different approach using algorithms that are years/decades/forever away from existing.
It does make sense that the job is simpler with everyone's history and inputs, if you can keep PII out of it. Are there any good references on recommendation aggregation algorithms?
Here's a simple proposal that keeps everyone's stuff anonymous and allows a rec service to pay bills.
Distribute the pool of everyone's watch histories/prefs/etc using IPFS, which is a DHT with static names and some storage. User clients put the share data into IPFS and register into a public pool. The client remembers their own hash. Rec services (there can be multiple) pull everyone's sets periodically and aggregate/indexe them. Users can then retrieve a batch of new recs by sending a small fee to the service of their choice along with their hash and the server will place some new recs into their bucket. If the recs are not suitable, they can try another service.
Even without this, I could just check videos you shared on Twitter, follow the same process, and have a decent chance of identifying you.
Anonymization is very very hard. Maybe federated learning is more promising here, keeping all your data privately stored on your own devices.
I think you're the one underestimating modern recommender systems, especially the ones built by advanced teams in big tech companies.
They absolutely use content features. Among other advantages, this counters the cold start problem (how will you learn about a new video if it doesn't get recommended to anyone).
YouTube has hours of video uploaded every minute. A non-centralized, context-less recommendation system would mean that you are offered those crap videos together with ones that are the standard for ‘good’ now. Just get into the long tail on any search results and see if you want those.
A non-monopolized video discovery would be splendid, only who knows how to achieve that. Perhaps it would be more realistic to do the recommendations based on the numbers of ‘retweets’ in federated networks—in a more ‘social’ style instead of views (dunno if PeerTube already offers that). Also, an open system will be incessantly gamed.
Personally, I would gladly donate my (anonymous etc) data for this noble goal.
How do you figure out which data has been faked to drive views to particular content?
Data quality and relevance matter far more.
I use both YouTube and Netflix pretty extensively. These companies are both held up as ML success stories. But, at least in my personal experience, they suck! My front-page feeds consist of (1) content that the platform knows I have already seen because IT IS IN MY WATCH HISTORY, (2) content that is trivially related, like by having the the same channel/director/actors, and (3) random junk I have no interest in watching and always regret clicking on.
It's not that the content isn't out there -- I'm able to find stuff I like through "big spreadsheet of all the Netflix movies" websites, online recommendations from humans, and YouTube channel crossovers/cameos. But I've never had that magical "the algorithm knows you better than you know yourself" experience that every ML engineer I've ever spoken to seems to be convinced their systems achieve.
Are all ML engineers mindless drones with exactly average movie preferences, or am I some kind of incomprehensible weirdo?
if you regret clicking on it, that means you did click on it and the recommendation did it's job; remember that the job of the recommendation engine is not (directly) to suggest content you'll like, it's to suggest content that will get you to click. Ideally those goals would be aligned, but not necessarily. YouTube is simply incentivised (via ad revenue) to get you to click on as many videos as possible.
So while it may not be overly successful on you (i.e. you only click occasionally), if it works on a significant portion of people it could still be a successful strategy overall.
I also still don't understand why yt recommendations are as poor as they are. I've tried taking the time to try removing certain things from the "recommendation history" (or whatever they call it), flag recommendations I'm not interested in etc and it does improve things a bit but still it recommends things I would never watch in a million years (eg right now I have 4 Joe Rogan recommendations on my homepage even though I've literally never watched any of his things and have zero interest in ever doing so, and click on every one and say not interested etc, for a while it was obsessed with trying to get me to watch MMA content even though I can't bear watching other people hurt each other).
And the whole issue of recommending videos where it knows I've watched the whole thing, I just don't even know where to start.
This is a different strategy to Google web search, where the monetisation occurs on the search results page (via ads there) rather than on click-throughs, so there isn't an incentive to try and get you to click several tangentially related links.
No affiliation, but it seems to be trying to do what you want
>I don't mind paying for my content but I do mind being the product.
This is another thing that bothers me. Being guilt-tripped for not watching an ad, or being a Patreon subscriber, or YouTube Red subscriber. Even if I don't watch ads or pay a fee I am, me, this individual is valuable just for who I am. My data, my habits are valuable to Google just as much as it is for me to pay a fee or to watch ads.
I do, but the memory is well-faded, and growing dimmer...
My flow for watching youtube has been to subscribe and sign up for email alerts (the bell). When I had some time to watch, I'd scan my youtube alerts email folder for items of interest. It was efficient and would quickly leave me with a queue of videos.
That workflow went away for me this month: https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/63269933?hl=en
I don't even know what the alert bell is for now. If I look at notifications its full of "recommendations". If I go to my subscriptions its random items from all my subscriptions regardless of "the bell".
Check Blender's Peertube [1] and compare to their Youtube Channel [2]. At the time of writing the latest video is a week old and has 27K views on YouTube while a measly 28 views on PeerTube.
Those figures alone show that it's not even worth to keep an instance up and running for this. I doubt it even counts as an insurance policy against Google shenanigans, you are likely to lose all viewership if your channel goes kaput anyway.
The only way this can possibly be successful for anyone is if they make huge investments in marketing and that carries a risk that even then it may never pay back. YouTube just provides immense value through discovery. You may not like it but there's no denying.
As we know, there is a growing history of unexpected changes or even phase-outs of services/features that were once considered fixtures provided by Google.
There is nothing I am aware of that says a user could/should not simultaneously 1. keeps backups of her work on physcial media in her possession (as well "in the cloud"), 2. host her work on YouTube or some similarly commercial service, and 3. self-host her work on PeerTube. The decision to diversify should not matter whether the videos have significant views or not.
If both services are free, do you have to "move" from service X to service Y, or can you can just "copy" (mirror).
This is how I learned about R. Budd Dwyer killing himself on live TV in 1987, as the video was the recording of him shooting himself in the head.
I think a lot of people underestimate the kind of challenges YouTube faces at their scale.
This is something the distributed video people don't seem to entirely understand. Look at how many copyright disputes happen on YouTube - not actual piracy, just disputes. Now imagine every dispute was resolved by sending DMCA takedown notices or subpoenas to individual users who happened to have the misfortune of watching a particular PeerTube video someone didn't like.
Centralized and non-distributed video platforms have one critical advantage over distributed: it's harder to sue users. That's because you'd have to first sue the host to get logs, which requires at least some legal adjudication of the merits of any underlying copyright claim. Distributed systems shift that legal liability directly to viewers. So you need some sort of mechanism to ensure people who provide you the video don't have an IP address to trace, which immediately puts you in all sorts of hard UX problems that the wave of encrypted P2P software from a decade and a half ago never really figured out.
In Germany at least as of a few years ago it was exceedingly common for people who seeded torrents of movies/tv shows etc to receive copyright infringement notices which were sent out on mass, which is why pretty much everyone used a VPN.
Not sure what exactly the legal situation was but I think they simply relied on third party services who would host/scan for copyright infringement, colllect a ton of IPs, then go to a court, and thus you pretty easily circumvent any individual issues because you just do it in bulk.
>Centralized and non-distributed video platforms have one critical advantage over distributed
A more compelling argument:
>>You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography. > > >Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. > >Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.
https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09...
When I did torrent, I would frequently get warnings from content owners by way of my ISP, so at least identification of offenders seems to have scaled. They didn't take me to court personally, but some other end users were compelled to settle, and even the threat of punitive measures should be enough to discourage many others. So overall I don't agree with your characterizations.
On the other hand steam is so game piracy is almost nonexistent.
It's mostly about convenience, since centralized app if designed with users in mind can be more convinient.
More and more people are pirating tv shows aswll, since pirates have the only solution that has all the content in one place.
My point is less about what content delivery systems are most prevalent at the present moment, more so about which are more survivable. Protocols and physical media outlive centralized content delivery because they are more fault tolerant. One doesn't need the commercial and technical apparatus of Amazon Inc to pick up a physical book and read it. The market trades convenience for future performance default.
TCP/IP will outlive your national-post service.
Someone uploading a file, or downloading a file on a peer to peer website that also involves uploading a file is violating a number of these rights. Downloading a file(not on a peer to peer site) is not a violation of any of these exclusive rights. This is analogous to an unauthorized public screening of a movie. The the person who displayed the movie without permission is infringing on the rights holder's copyright, the people who are watching are not.
For instance, let's say the bittorrent protocol was altered such that instead of pieces, you're assigned random bits to upload that are never enough to be assembled into any part of the original file in human watchable form. Have you actually violated copyright if you upload some of these bits?
Eg what if you uploaded a single bit (a 1 or a 0). Clearly not in violation. How many bits do you need to upload to be in violation?
But even if you only seed while downloading it is likely even the relatively small amount uploaded would meet the legal requirement, the law does not require that you distributed a full copy of a particular work. Ultimately whether a specific amount would be enough would come down to the judge or jury.
Imagine you're an average Internet user, you follow, say, a YouTuber that reviews movies. They say that their latest review isn't on YouTube, but on their website. You go there, watch the review, laugh, and move on with your life. But then you get a nastygram in the mail a week later. Turns out that particular YouTuber didn't have great copyright hygiene, and used an unlicensed music clip. Them moving it to PeerTube means that instead of their video getting taken down, the copyright holder has to sue the swarm - and they do. You get caught in that dragnet, and now you have a nice fat $10,000+ settlement you have to pay for watching a video, because PeerTube puts you in the chain of copyright liability.
I'm thinking about it from a cost / enforcement point of view.
PGP survived outright, explicit ban by the most powerful government with some of the most powerful cryptanalysis agencies in the world at the time not because "a company hid people's IPs". Your argument is: some users will be attacked for using applications for which lawyers have cheap attack costs/enforcement. It does not follow that, some agents being unable to survive their strategy results in an alternative strategy dominating.
Let's be real: legal systems that have the power to demand IP records subpoenas also have the power to demand logging, so you're argument that white-market companies can somehow provide anonymity, or shielding from culpability, to users doesn't hold water. One might interpret the outcome of the PGP battle happened because of some advanced concept like free-speech rights but the unavoidable reality is, attackers have limited resources and if the benefit is less than the attack costs, the attack won't survive.
Sure, there have been lots of successful lawsuits against BitTorrent users, but the level of sophistication involved with using BitTorrent in the traditional way is high enough that it's pretty clear it's being used intentionally. But if you showed a jury what the purported infringement consisted of with a PeerTube video (clicking play on a video in a webpage, something that almost all of us do every day)... do you think they would convict?
If that ever did make it to court, and someone did end up losing a suit after playing a video, I would hope it'd make the news and that we'd get new legislation that reflects the reality of the internet today.
There is a legal defense called "innocent infringement", but it's very limited. You have to be in a situation where it wouldn't be possible or reasonable to know about the copyright status of a work, not just be ignorant of the law. As an example of how fragile this is, merely putting the words "All Rights Reserved" on a work will generally prohibit defendants from using this defense. It also only disclaims statutory damages down to about $200, if the judge is okay with that. If the plaintiff can convince a court that you caused more than that in actual damages, then this defense won't do much, if at all.
For what it's worth:
France tried suing people using bittorrent to download illegally with the Hadopi law from 2009 to 2020 (it was ruled unconstitutional in May, because of a lack of judiciary oversight).
It cost between 5 to 10M€ every year, and resulted in only 87k€ in fines total. So not a huge success.
The privacy scare that Snowden brought to our attention is kind of abstract--"someday a different regime may use this data against me". But some lunatic who tracks you down because of an ideological dispute is a very real and physical threat.
What if all video was encrypted with DRM by default, and viewers/peers only shared DRM-encrypted data? This would still enable the biggest benefit of PeerTube: viewer/peer bandwidth sharing. But now we've (arguably) reduced the scope of 'publishing' -- for the purpose of legal liability -- to only those PeerTube instances that provide the DRM key. That is, just sharing the encrypted video data no longer carries the legal significance of 'publishing' it, because the data is useless without the key. Wield the media companies' own DRM as a legal shield to limit user liability.
Now to be clear, I'm not an attorney, so I'm not making any kind of legal claim, or saying that this is an argument that a court would find convincing. But I think there's a chance this could work out because I'm pretty sure this strategy where the DRM key is more protected than the video data is utilized in the video distribution industry today, and considered to be an ok solution.
If DRM is used, the encryption key itself becomes the unit of publishing. How keys are distributed between instances is not limited at all, maybe by default the key is shared with all the other instances in its federation. Also, now instances have an instant way to "unpublish" a video in case of DMCA: just stop sharing the key. And since no users share the key with each other, even if they are unaware of their instance taking down a video that they watched and are still sharing it, downloading peers still won't be able to view it.
This idea isn't perfect of course. All viewers would still need to connect to a central/federated instance to get the key, but compared to sharing the actual video data this is much more reasonable to scale. Also, getting access to DRM itself is still pretty centralized today, so it might take significant effort to implement.
What do you think?
The no-sharing-keys property isn't useful either. Presumably someone is going to want to archive PeerTube content (P2P swarms tend to archive poorly), which means modifying PeerTube or a browser to scrape keys. If an archivist can do this, so can a copyright enforcement bot.
What you would really want is something more akin to Tor, where both ends of each peer connection don't know who each other are. The way this works is by using multiple layers of encryption, so each link in the chain just knows where to send which packets of nonsense. You can do this today, actually, but BitTorrent-over-Tor is heavily discouraged as speeds are slow even at low hop counts. There's also the problem of accidentally leaking your own IP address over Tor. This is why, for example, most VPNs ship browser extensions that disable P2P features such as WebRTC.
An individual user watching a PeerTube video would not be able to do the same thing. The DMCA only protects against infringement liability that other people cause. If you watch an infringing upload, well, that's your liability.
Edit: besides traffic being (hopefully) encrypted; let’s say someone files a takedown for video page X—if I am viewing a video from page X, and stream comes from peer A, how does a third party arrives at a conclusion that the stream coming from peer A corresponds to page X (presumably required in order to sue the physical person behind A)?
This works because most P2P systems have a way to enforce that swarm participants contribute upload bandwidth, which also puts them at risk of a copyright lawsuit. PeerTube specifically uses WebTorrent, a WebRTC-tunneled version of BitTorrent, so it has tit-for-tat rules. Someone using a modified download-only client in the swarm will get a terribly slow experience unless the swarm is absolutely massive.
Well then, there’s still a major difference from BitTorrent: the fact that as soon as I stop watching and close the tab, the video is gone from my system and I’m no longer “distributing” it.
When I’m watching a video for the first time, I have no way of knowing it’s infringing. Once I’m finished—subpoena all you want; all I’ve got to do is remember to not watch that particular video ever again.
I could be in trouble if I’m seeding the video on purpose, presumably if I’m its creator.
Which on balance could actually be more reasonable than status quo: I reckon %CORP% would be compelled to do their homework before going after some poor individual. If it turns out to be a frivolous lawsuit and the work is fully original, that’d actually backfire—something they clearly don’t have to fear with their shotgun automated DMCA takedowns and overly zealous detection algorithms.
The stakes are higher for producers, but a legitimate creator confident in their work may well prefer that to the uncertainty and constant fear that %PLATFORM% mistakes your original work for something random and pulls the rug from under you.
I think there’s a parallel to be drawn between YouTube and Amazon. Apparently, the latter is leaking legitimate sellers and becomes a haven to fly-by-night shady sellers due to its ease of setup but unpredictable enforcement[0]. Not unimaginable YouTube will trend the same way—remain the platform for algorithm-favored provocative, controversial, hateful videos that tread the line of legality, and lose authentic artists.
I'd like to hear your counter argument on that.
> do something with it than my neighbor sniffing my IP address when I visit a singular Peertube Instance.
You're minimizing the risk of Peertube from _anyone in the world_ seeing my IP address to "a neighbor" in order to make your argument. Anyway, using Peertube, there is no TOS, no recourse, no privacy.
Use a VPN with Peertube if that is your concern. Problem solved.
> Anyway, using Peertube, there is no TOS, no recourse, no privacy.
Just the mere fact that most of your traffic goes thru Google for search, videos, Google Analytics everywhere on 99% of websites out of the Google realm, makes my privacy a lot less meaningful when I know a single company has access to all of that info and that precise company can leak that data to every government out there asking for it without letting me know.
By the way, has any individual sued Google for anything and won when it came to anything related to breach of privacy? Just the fact that it's extremely hard to prove that Google and nobody else leaked your information makes the possibility of legal action very remote to say the least.
No. Don't twist things. That's not my actual concern and doesn't solve the problem that: Peertube exposes your IP to anyone who wants it.
Don't you think people should know that? You responded with "whataboutgoogle?"
Sure, setting up/maintaining/buying a VPN may be a solution for some Peertube users, as has been said a million times in this thread.
PeerTube literally displays the warning when you start watching a video. How would people NOT know?
When using PeerTube you are exposing your IP address and the contents you are fetching or sharing with the whole world INCLUDING google.
I understand google is going to know what video I watch, and accept that... but I don’t like the idea of everyone knowing what I watch.
Original question: Wouldn’t you already have the IP of someone visiting your website?
The video is embedded on your own site, so you have all the info you need just from a regular page visit.
Peer-to-peer apps reveal your IP to any other peer in the network (anyone seeding, anyone else downloading, and anyone who wants to monitor by pretending to be a downloader).
https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/opc-actions-and-decisions/research...
--------- For example, the IP address of one individual Wikipedia contributor revealed that the person has:
1. Edited hundreds of pages on Wikipedia about television shows, both North American and international. The interest in TV shows was extensive and specific, but the details are not included here for privacy reasons;
2. Edited dozens of pages on Wikipedia related to history topics;
3. Participated in a discussion board about a television channel; and
4. Visited a site devoted to sexual preferences following an online search for a specific type of person.
Not that big of a problem if it's dynamic.
most people dont get this level of attention but you dont want it unless you like the thrill of cyberwar
https://videodirect.amazon.com/home/help?topicId=G201978440
I found one YouTube creator who moved his videos to Vimeo on Demand and then to Prime Video Direct. I think you can choose to require viewers pay for your video, or have them included for free for Prime members, where the pay is $.06 / hour of viewing (it used to be $.15 / hour).
Anyway, it's an interesting alternative for content creators, as long as their videos are high quality. The pay is certainly much better than YouTube, so I have a lot of sympathy for this route. Plus it's like YouTube Premium in that there are no ads.
I'm not sure if Amazon will actively promote these videos, so I suspect YouTube remains king for discovery.
Here are the videos:
Incidentally, Cloudflare Stream charges the same rates for serving video ($1 per 1000 minutes).
Any idea what kind of money a YouTuber would make off 100k views? Does something like Cloudflare's offering make a suitable backup where they could eat the cost of serving video temporarily if YouTube kicks them off?
I think it's a really hard problem because serving video is so expensive. YouTube must be a huge money pit.
Wow, serving video is expensive. I had no idea it was $.06 / hour. I presume Amazon and YouTube have their own CDN or something.
On the paying side I'd hate to end up on the hook for a video that goes viral and gets a million views.
Keep in mind that Cloudflare is making a profit on that and Amazon, Google probably have lower costs than Cloudflare. Still, it has to be a huge money pit to host that stuff.
You not only have the network effects of social media ("everybody is on Youtube") but you also have to host and stream petabytes of data and still manage to turn a profit.
Now if on top of all of that you want to do it with decentralized technologies it become even harder to reach the same level of quality. Anybody who's attempted to download some niche torrent from a few years ago knows that the success rate tends to be very low. Meanwhile you can still watch the holiday video of some Polish family in Italy in 2011 on Youtube, even if it only has like 20 views.
I want a decentralized, peer-to-peer internet but when you face the technical and financial realities you realize that it really doesn't add up, IMO. You need huge economies of scale to make it work.
Or alternatively you need to convince people that things like web search, video streaming and email hosting are actually worth paying for. Good luck.
And after that some of your clients will have terrible buffering because your video file is too large. Other clients will have a 4k TV and your file will be too small. Unless your bandwidth is very cheap you will also spend more money sending your 1080 video to phones with a 720p screen.
So yes you can. But there is a reason that every serious video service has multiple codecs, every client has a different ideal video file and by getting close to that you will provide a better experience.
If you do not do DRM you can probably get away with only using HLS or DASH and three or so bitrates/qualities. 480p, 720p and source perhaps?
That might double your storage req and the one time encode effort, but running costs are the same (if not less because people will consume less bandwidth).
In other words, and ironically, the physical deanchoring of compute devices has made it harder for virtually decentralized video sharing to take off.
I wonder if the situation would've been different had something like IPv6 been adopted much earlier. Then even end users might have integrated the idea that their devices would remain accessible remotely once connected to the internet. That would have made it harder for ISPs to sell these connections where basically nothing but HTTP(S) makes it through.
You do need a decent VM or dedicated server for PeerTube, but they're not that expensive if you shop around. I pay ~€60 a month.
I don't know much about PeerTube. I assume your server is along the lines of an anchor / primary peer that guarantees there's always 1 seed. Is that right? If so, is there a way to turn off the peer-to-peer capabilities and to use it like a more traditional video hosting platform?
> It makes more sense for someone just starting out to host their own content, than a creator who is entrenched in the YouTube world.
I've thought about that concept for (literally) at least 2 years and I've always wanted to build a how-to website that helps creators do what they can to mitigate the risks of being de-platformed, etc.. Have you thought at all about ways to use YouTube to externalize costs initially, but with a plan to eventually migrate premium users to a platform where you'd get a better business relationship? I think Linus Tech Tips has the right idea with FloatPlane where they cater to creators that are already popular and help them syphon those creators' premium users away from YouTube.
Do you think there's any way a completely new creator could start out with extremely low ongoing costs? ~€60 a month is too expensive for high school kids and I think that's about the only age where you'd (possibly) have a chance to start capturing the market in terms of mindshare. Even by then, it might be too late. A lot of really young kids have YouTube channels and are already captured by Google. By the time they're in high school they've already got a half decade of "investment" into YouTube.
Any thoughts on that?
Alex Gleeson is working on affordable paid hosting for Pleroma+Soapbox (and ActivityPub platform like PeerTube, except for twitter/fb style text posts). Maybe that can be applied to PeerTube as well? I'm sure someone must be working on lower cost hosted PeerTube somewhere..
For say the high school student, a little bit of coding knowledge can be used to automate video uploads and metadata. That student can use a public PeerTube server, or one of the paid ones, and if you have uploads scripted in place, it makes it easy to move/re-host that content.
For revenue, once you get large enough, there may be ways to build integrations between a PeerTube server and Patreon, Librepay or other such platforms.
Bold of these folks to assume their little self-hosted hard disk will outlive YouTube. When an individual is in charge of keeping some resource online, it's a matter of when it disappears not if. I don't care how controversial your content is, it's more likely to be accessible by me in 10 years if you put it on YouTube versus your torrent or personal website.
There are certainly some seedless torrents still indexed, but TPB has a lot of good torrents, and is my goto for Jeopardy (among other things).
Right now the speeds are pretty bad (20 KB/s average 100KB/s for "fast" torrents), but with more users, that can drastically change. If 400KB/s becomes the average, watching 720p on a peertube instance on I2P will be possible without lag. At 800KB/s 1080p becomes possible without lag. https://stream.twitch.tv/encoding/
Google may have the technically superior implementation but they're straight up amoral. To some people that may be a worse problem than how long their personal hard drive will last.
I'm not familiar with the YouTuber industry but this scenario sounds like a death knell. Are there popular video bloggers that aren't on YouTube?
[0] https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/video-channels/luke_channel/vid...
Rogan, but he's moving to Spotify with a big check.
Personally that seems so weird. The amateur chem videos where what got me to start subscribing to YouTube channels.
In all seriousness, nearly every major chemistry youtuber that I have seen has had several videos struck for seemingly pointless issues. There are many many videos showing poor technique and potentially extremely dangerous synthesis - those remain up. I don't understand the criteria behind it in this domain.
Would be great to see competition in video hosting though.
searching and being surprised is cool
2/10 would not recommend (yet).
There's a ton of potential in re-discovering curation given how terrible the web has gotten in general, so I think a type of decentralized, creator driven curation would be pretty cool.
And discovery as managed by Google is built on massive collection of data on every individual.
Unfortunately, I cannot share the generated feed here, as it's too similar to the inbox address.
i see ads on almost all videos i watch now, there are two ads before the video (the first one i can’t skip at all, the second i can sometimes skip after a few seconds), and then some videos have more ads at different points in the actual video that show up out of nowhere.
and then there’s the search ads that take up the entire mobile interface plus ads beneath the video
given i’ve mostly been using youtube for recipes lately and skip around the video a lot the experience is like being forced watching 30 seconds of ads for every 5 minutes of content.
it’s completely completely unbearable
It does break sometimes, though, as Youtube changes their website on purpose to thwart NewPipe and youtube-dl, that both parse the website (which, incidentally, is a great way to spur innovation for a generic website parser).
Another option is ublock origin on Firefox mobile.
[0] https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/releases
[0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe (a bit slower to update there, but I prefer it as I have the f-droid OTA on my phone for automatic updates).
> the content creators are losing out by your adblockers, not youtube
Why do I have to financially support content creators without question? Please explain this to me.
Only some. One of my favorite channels isn't sponsored at all, and is ad free.
The only thing people like to complain more then ads is for paywalls, but content creators need to be paid somehow to be able to make a living.
Due to this uncertainty I prefer to support creators I watch via Patreon.
How many Patreon subscriptions do you have? Are those the only videos you watch?
Afterall, it might be the case that non ad-based revenue is only viable once you've secured enough ad-based revenue. I hope that isn't the case though.
Youtube also has a subscription similar to Patreon, available only to larger creators and they take 30% off that, according to [2]. While this seems high compared to Patreon it's actually lower than Twitch that takes 50% off subscriptions.
Twitch also offer a bit system that is like a tip, and has a lower percentage.
Another datapoint is OnlyFans, used mostly for porn and takes 60%.
IMO the platforms are very distinct and their offers are fairly different. It's not a fair comparison.
[1] https://digiday.com/future-of-tv/youtube-premium-remains-sma....
[2] https://www.polygon.com/2018/6/21/17484006/channel-subscript....
For instance, see Paypal https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/acceptableuse-full
> You may not use the PayPal service for activities that:
> ...relate to transactions involving...
> ...certain sexually oriented materials or services...
And yes, I use an ad blocker. You'd be crazy not to.
Personally, I do not disagree that YouTube is worth paying for. But I have reservations because I believe their parent company (Google) already profits tremendously in morally objectionable ways. Thus, I try to avoid giving them my business as much as possible.
Unfortunately, the reality is Google (and YouTube) are practically impossible to compete with in all things data.
To play devil's advocate: you say you use adblocker (I assume you use it on sites other than YouTube) -- but why? Because the modern web is practically unbearable without it? But is there not an implicit contract when you visit a website and consume their bandwidth, that you view the ads? Are you not, in effect, stealing? Sure, advertisers don't have the right to your attention, but don't the content creators have the right to your financial support?
What about all the one-off bicycle/car maintenance videos I watch? Or a cool animation someone linked me? Or that music video from my favorite band?
> What about all the one-off bicycle/car maintenance videos I watch? Or a cool animation someone linked me? Or that music video from my favorite band?
They don't get paid! Unless, you'd like them to. :) I think it makes more sense to use adblock and deliberately give your time or money to the creators whose content you truly value. If it was a one-off video that you derived personal value from, toss them a couple bucks (Paypal, a month of Patreon) or temporarily turn off your adblock and watch a video of theirs.
If they have no outlets for you to directly give them money, it's highly likely that they don't see YouTube as a means to make money.
EDIT: Also, if it's a video from your favorite band -- dude, buy some merch already!
This would be much more reasonable if there were a frictionless way to do it. Nobody is going to take 5 minutes out of their day after each little video to support the content creator. If there was a button I could use to support them built-in to Youtube? Sure!
> If they have no outlets for you to directly give them money, it's highly likely that they don't see YouTube as a means to make money.
Or perhaps they make money from YouTube via ad impressions.
> EDIT: Also, if it's a video from your favorite band -- dude, buy some merch already!
Somehow I knew it'd get picked apart if I used the word "favorite." Obviously I've got plenty of merch! And still I'd like to support them when I listen to their music - even if minusculely.
I didn't know this before today, but apparently there is such a feature called "Applause." Although, I personally have not seen it anywhere, so not sure if it's opt-in for Youtube creators, and perhaps it is not fully rolled out yet. This does seem like it could be a good way to directly express support for Youtubers: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9632365
> Somehow I knew it'd get picked apart if I used the word "favorite." Obviously I've got plenty of merch! And still I'd like to support them when I listen to their music - even if minusculely.
Admittedly, I knew you were just giving an example and I took a cheap shot. :) Couldn't resist.
In the beginning I mostly did it to get rid of iOS YouTube ads. Now I just keep it to support channels as well. Not everyone has a patreon and I don‘t want to pay every channel membership.
The family premium plan is really fairly priced I feel like.
If I have to click a button O(n) times for n people I like, I'm just not going to do it.
"OK, then we'll offer the option to pay a small fee to support the content creators and not have to deal with ads."
"Why would I do that when ad blockers are free?"
Did you see me saying that anywhere? Are you a mind reader?
I go even further and run a VPN with pihole as its DNS server.
Ads are easy to block these days. Why not block for free instead of spraying cash here and there?
To be clear, I don't think using adblock is immortal - just that I personally like it when services offer a subscription that remove ads.
There are lots of life hacks to not spend money. I used to think it was my responsibility to pay, but honestly, if I can get away with it, why would I?
You can also go to their website and buy t-shirts, coffee cups and other merch. If you're a creator and want funds from people who block ads, promote your merch.
> "OK, then we'll offer the option to pay a small fee to support the content creators and not have to deal with ads."
To offer a counterpoint, if you're trying to protect your privacy, signing into Google to watch Youtube videos is probably not the right way to do it. Google isn't offering any guarantees that Youtube Premium data isn't used exactly the same way that any other data would be. They're still building a profile on you, and your recommendations are still tailored based on that profile.
This is also one of the big issues I have with online newspaper accounts. Part of the reason I'm blocking ads and trackers is because I don't want newspapers to track me either. I don't want somebody to be monitoring what I read. Logging into an account is counterproductive to that goal, so at best I'm going to give them money for an account and then never use it.
I pay for a Youtube Premium account at the moment, precisely because I wanted to signal that I would pay for content. But none of that subscription money is actually going to creators I watch because I never log into it. I'm just throwing money at Google for basically no reason.
Adblocking is a better option than Youtube Premium not just from a UX perspective or monetary perspective, but also if you care about privacy, because it means you can handle all of your account stuff through local RSS feeds and NewPipe on mobile, which is a significant win in the fight to stop Google from putting me into a box.
In the old times, I could just pass at the newsstand while walking to the bakery at the start of my morning, drop a few coins, pick a paper or magazine and its done ... nobody would know what parts of the paper I read, for how log I focus on particular paragraphs, which pictures grab my attention, etc. neither will the newspaper owner know who I am, keep a history of what I am reading or follow me around my other shopping to add information to my profile.
Anonymous micropayments would be a excellent approach here. AFAIK Bitcoin never intended to solve this particular problem, maybe GNU Taler may work here (better yet: it's a payment system using Euros, Dollars, etc. not a wildly-floating new currency/asset).
Even better because you can prevent google from tracking every single video you watch and linking this information into your IRL details through the payment info.
Paying Youtube for privacy is nonsense. You need to send Google more information and log in your account to get rid of the ads and then google will track the videos you watch, link this information to your real life name, CC number, phone, billing address, etc. and then allow advertisers to use this information to push you more ads on other Google services.
Just use a good ad blocker, Firefox Multi-account Containers (forcing YT to only open in a dedicated container) and Cookie AutoDelete (despite the name it handles LocalStorage too). When you close the last Youtube tab, your tracks will be erased and the next one will get a clean one -- but, for sake of mental sanity, never click on any of that trashy first page videos :)
On Android, just use NewPipe.
But how can we be sure that Google is not storing, using, or keeping this information? If disabling tracking has the same (apparent) effect of not letting it grab the information, I prefer the later. At least I can help them to not "accidentally" track me ;-)
This may sound too pessimistic, but I lost all confidence and respect for these companies.
All while being (imo) easier to use and (objectively) less resource intensive than the official Youtube client.
It is possible to build good video clients/services without sacrificing people's privacy. The reason Google's tracking is essential for stuff like video resume is because Google integrated those features into their tracking systems from day one, and now they don't know how to separate them.
Another example here -- if I turn off search & web tracking in my Google account, Google loses the ability to save locations in Google maps on my phone. They never considered that they could just save my locations locally and not send them to the cloud.
Google is being honest when they say they can't do stuff like auto-resume without tracking me, but they're being dishonest when they give the reason they can't do it. It's not because privacy and convenience are so impossible to reconcile, it's because (being charitable) Google engineers and managers don't have the first clue how to build a service that even tries to reconcile those ideas.
The less charitable possibility is that Google deliberately makes their services terrible when privacy options are enabled to reinforce the idea in people's minds that it's impossible to have both privacy and convenience. But while I don't assume the best of Google, I still lean towards blaming incompetence over maliciousness.
Regarding funding Google, I like the discoverability that they provide, and the infrastructure that delivers the content. I continue to delight in the value that I get from the YouTube recommendation algorithm. I have discovered content that I would have likely never found in the past - it expands my horizons.
Of course, YMMV, and you are certainly entitled to make your own choices here. I thought that I'd share my perspective for others who may find it valuable.
It is a bummer they've turned up the commercials - but then again, paying makes for a potentialy healthier ecosystem.
I use YouTube so much paying just to get rid of the "new video commercial" was a no-brainer.
On a different note, does anybody know if the stream is cut down to audio only when the screen is turned off? Or if there is anyway to get an audio-only stream? Streaming video when I'm off WiFi and I just want to listen to audio seems wasteful.
Yet another google service I use shuttered in favor of something worse for me.
About half my TV watching is via YouTube on my ShieldTV box for channels I watch regularly. I got sick of the ads and willing to pay to support what I watch and listen to.
I am hoping tha Bitchute and others become more popular, as I really don't like what's happening to the platform in general.
Download, transfer to device, plug in headphone jack, press play.
It's very convenient actually.
I have a massive music collection, and sometimes I'll pull up a specific album or artist... but mostly prefer the streaming options were others' time are used to curate the play lists.
I kind of wish that independent streaming services weren't effectively crushed. I miss DJ curated content with fewer commercials.
They also have a phone app that supports caching for offline listening and once you rate at least 75 songs higher than 6 out of 10 you can have your own stream composed of your favorites.
FYI and for anyone reading this, Bitchute is not P2P or decentralized at all. 100% of its requests are served from data center IPs in Kansas. It's a fraud.
Once the ad is over you have to re-enter the comments, scroll back down to where you were, enter the chain, scroll down to where you were reading...
It's a torturous flow, but I suspect the "engagement" metrics look great on their dashboard. I can imagine a product manager somewhere is getting a raise after doubling user interaction with a single feature
Yes. I've noticed that almost every video I've watched I have to sit through two ads (first 15 seconds, second I can stop after 5ish) first. And if the video is long enough I get the ads at the bottom of the video and sometimes one or two more video ads.
I get it, it's free, but at some point it won't be worth the frustration.
They have 0 incentive to do that, it would only reduce the revenue they get from ads.
I'll be finally setting up that Pi Hole server for my wireless network when I have a chance. It's obnoxious right now and I have no interest in giving Google money to make them go away.
If on android, you can download newpipe (first download and install f-droid, a "google play for free/open source", and then download newpipe from there)
I'm not sure if the original YT app allows this, but i'm able to minimize videos while it's playing or shut off my phone while listening to a video, which I recall you had to pay premium for
Not exactly, since you can join a node and upload there and it's also like Mastadon in that it's federated.
https://joinpeertube.org/instances#instances
Some of those are federated with eachother and you can upload to them and your videos are stored on the instance. You do not need to run your own instance but obviously it can be helpful.
I wonder if this is actually that useful for reducing server bandwidth for the long-tail type of content that self-hosters are apt to produce.
They have the server capacity/capability and have more than enough capital to try and incentivise creators across if they think the venture is worth it, which it probably isn't.
I'm not sure I'd like Amazon any better... they really need to improve the UI/UX of the video services they already offer.
https://docs.joinpeertube.org/#/contribute-architecture?id=r...
1. Better (or at least a different) way of discovering. I'm a pretty heavy YouTube watcher, but my recommendations are bland and full of reruns. It knows what I've been interested in the past but I find them tiresome. It does a terrible job of recommending new things that I might find interesting. It needs to take more chances.
2. As many have already said, there are plenty of ways to host a video but none of them have good discoverability. If there was a good video aggregator site, it would help to begin diversifying this aspect. Even better, it could be successful even without convincing content creators to use it directly, because much of the content could still just link to YouTube.
Does such a site exist? One that I've found is browsing lobste.rs' [video] tag, or HN for the youtube.com domain, but that's not really the same.
even if you setup the main language to english a bunch of other languages keep poping up on top on every search
the only reason youtube is so good now is because is tied with google, thus making the search/discovery process fully efficient and am sorry my friends, thats exactly what am looking for
Maybe I'm missing the point but I though the advantage of PeerTube was using P2P file sharing to cut down on the huge amount of bandwidth necessary for video streaming.
As it's opt-out, most people won't do it, so the host can still reap the benefit of the p2p system.
Aside from that, another goal of peertube is the ability to federate instances together so that a search on one site can return results from all federated ones. The hope is to build a decentralised, federated youtube competitor.
Maybe the author thinks the video service "Viemo" sells the pro account with that name..