Video tutorials now on PeerTube
solvespace.com
solvespace.com
YouTube is an amazing collection of knowledge, but it's unfortunate that it's in the hands of an entity whose primary goal and motivation is avarice. A degradation of the experience over time seems inevitable.
How to organize human endeavors in a way that captures the innovation and superbly focused effort of early-stage companies without devolving into the raw exploitation, rent-seeking, and monopolistic behavior of late-stage companies seems an open problem.
It can play videos on (most) podcasting apps people already have on their phones. Here's an example: https://evan.streambus.com/rss/main.xml (try putting that into your podcasting app)
We make a publishing tool for it with a linear/superhuman-like interface that's free to use. Since it's just RSS, it's fundamentally open: if you want to use a different tool, or roll your own, you can do so without losing your audience. And since it's a podcast, you can piggy-back off of an already thriving ecosystem of apps, tools, distribution channels, and monetization strategies.
If you watch videos on RSS, and the app you're using puts ads on the videos, you can just use a different app. And if the video creator wants to put ads on their videos; the money is at least going to them, and not giving a 45% cut to one of the wealthiest companies in the world.
It's a bit early, but if you'd like to try it, send me an email: evan @ streambus dot com, or fill out the thing here: https://streambus.com/
What I discovered about PeerTube recently, as a Mastodon user, is that PeerTube feeds can be subscribed to / followed as any other Mastodon user. Possibly even aggregated instances (I'm still sorting out how this operates).
This ... is actually more elegant and useful than RSS in numerous regards, at least for my workflows. (Though a flipside view might be that Mastodon / the Fediverse is more addictive and a greater timesuck).
But the ability to be notified of new content from within what's a primary social channel is pretty compelling. My RSS reader(s) by contrast seem to be higher-friction / higher-frustration (there are many, many, many poorly-structured or poorly-utilised feeds, I should of course weed those out, that ... seems like more work than it's worth).
The problem that direct access is seen as remunerative (that is: hitting a website directly), whilst various syndication channels are seen as appropriating value from the sites is also problematic. It's endemic to both advertising and surveillance-capitalism based monetisation, and is yet another case of how such practices when widely adopted actively destroy useful tools and platforms.
I mostly agree with you on this. In fact, this concept somewhat came from a fediverse/activity_pub thing I was working on awhile ago: https://github.com/pubcast/pubcast
The concept of having an "inbox" and "outbox" and then just interlacing with everyone else really hits that part of my brain.
Our goal right now is to create a publishing platform that smooths over some of these hiccups (for example, generating backwards-compatible RSS links for each app), as well as creating incentives for apps to coalesce around HLS/m3u8 natively.
Unsurprisingly, YouTube only follows the big money so they know that they cannot and will never change. Creators become victims to the recommendation algorithm and compete against viewership governed by 'The Algorithm'.
For those who are after monetisation on YouTube, It can best described as shooting a video on a tight-rope, blind folded and surrounded by thousands of snakes and crocodiles on a daily basis.
One slip up, wrong move or silly sound and your account could be demonetised, permanently banned or both. That's doesn't seem like 'freedom' as YouTube describes it. [0]
If you don’t want ads to appear on your videos, you can host the videos on your own website and pay for the data or use another video service. Neither are likely to give the streaming performance or audience you’d get with YouTube.
[1] https://framagit.org/framasoft/peertube
Is there Invidious-native content?
(Mind: the proxy feature is quite usfeul. It's also ... limited and limiting.)
Invidious is useful for more than just filtering out ads, it actually makes Youtube content useable on older hardware - like the Thinkpad T42p I'm using right now - where the "official" interface and player are close to useless. When configured correctly - i.e. when videos are proxied through the server - it keeps your video viewing habits out of Google's hands. It makes it possible to follow channels without Google knowing about it. It can not help against censorship, when Google removes content it can no longer be accessed through Invidious. I've used Peertube to mirror Youtube channels which have had videos removed which does help against censorship - run a cron job to monitor a channel for changes and mirror new videos to Peertube. All of this can be done anonymously - I do not even have a Google or Youtube account.
The now-largely-unusable (thanks to API key limitations) mps-youtube command-line utility still remains the most useful interface to YouTube I've ever used:
- Runs without any browser at all.
- From a console.
- Without video, if you so specify.
- Enables full search, can be limited to music, includes both content and account search. That is, you can search for content matching terms, or for a username / account matching a term. Also playlists IIRC.
- Can play based on a given account's videos / postings.
- Individual items can be saved to a queue. Those may be ephemeral (session-only), or saved to disk.
- Content can be downloaded if preferred.
- No YouTube account required, no play history on YouTube.
YouTube apparently did all they could to kill this, and largely succeeded. I'd used it fairly extensively for my own preferred use of the site: finding lectures (and occasionally book-readings or similar content), and queuing up playlists or downloading archives of those. Works on absolutely minimal hardware.
[1] ...cue audio from that ancient C64 game: Another visitor, stay a while, stay FOREVER... https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Impossible_Mission
Agreed.
But they didn’t do this until after providing you with the option to pay for ad-free.
If ads bother you that much really, just put up and pay for it. Your problem will be solved across all your machines, devices, phones, tablets and TVs in less than a minute.
A better solution is to move away from YouTube, if at all possible.
To find out about Premium I have to go to my channel-> Purchases and memberships->Read More
I could buy the search monopoly position, but not video.
If you are trying to reach a larger and larger audience beyond your own abilities to stream, it sounds like you yourself are advertising. So you are annoyed that the advertising firm you use to advertise is using your advertisement to advertise.
Discoverability is good for advertising. It seems odd that people complain about ads on a service they use for advertising.
You understand the costs involved to serve billions of hours of video a day yet still block the ads used to help sustain the site?
Why not pay for premium?
At this point I am fully convinced even cable tv has a better signal to noise ratio.
Then there's also the non-dollar cost of the access to the very sizeable YouTube audience that google curates.
Comparing the cost of the actual hosting is silly though. Nobody thinks the value of hosting the nyt cooking site comes from the engineering behind the website, it comes from the content stored. The exact same. Thing is true here, the value of your video being on youtube is it being in a storefront.
Is the video served from some datacenter in Germany, no matter where the user is? You can cut bandwidth costs and improve latency by caching videos closer to the users, at the cost of handling all of the caching complexity and business arrangements.
If video 6-of-15 in the tutorial series suddenly goes viral, are you on the hook for outlandish bandwidth charges, or does your site hit a quota and just die?
Overall, it's VERY understandable that businesses outsource the complexity of video hosting, based on the engineering complexity alone.
No. Those estimates are 1 order of magnitude wrong. You wouldnt even pay that much contracting the highest tiers in AWS/Azure/GC , let alone owning the infrastructure.
Or you mean using users’ bandwidth and storage to power the service? That might go over less well than you think.
One is that subscribing to YT Premium will get rid of all the ads. (You can’t get rid of sponsor shoutouts with Premium, though.) From the data that YouTube gives me, only a tiny fraction of my revenue comes from Premium users. I assume this means only a tiny fraction of users have Premium.
Second, if you are in YPP (monetized channel), you can choose which videos have ads and when the ads appear. One workaround I’ve seen people use is to get accepted into YPP and then use that to turn off ads. The Zig channel would qualify given its viewership.
Not advocating for one way over another, just wanted to add info.
Youtubers also get far more money from premium views than normal views.
Ironically, most of the complains people have with youtube are derived directly or indirectly from the fact that the platform is ad-supported. Youtube doesn't care that your video is offensive, but advertisers do. Every demonetization wave was preceded by a mass of people putting pressure on them (eg. NYT "journalists" literally searching for isis videos, taking screenshots and telling the companies with ads next to them that they will be listed in their article if they don't stop doing business with youtube)
It doesn't get rid of tracking, and it doesn't get rid of the eternal problem of Youtube's recommendation engine. However blocking ads, cookies, and several key scripts on Youtube does seem to get Youtube to at least stop constantly customizing things for me. Maybe it's gotten better now, but Youtube was also constantly trying to get me to watch exclusive videos, so it wasn't even actually getting rid of ads, just ads inside videos. It promised the ability to download videos, but they were locked in a weird format on Android and periodically deleted themselves or errored out, they were completely unreliable. Their app also used something like twice the battery of NewPipe, a program that (for viewers) seems to do literally everything their app does but better.
The final kind of insult to injury was that I found out that if I was signed into Youtube on both my desktop and on my phone, it would block me if I tried to play videos on both at the same time, which... nothing else has that problem. I don't have that problem when I'm blocking ads, I can watch videos on as many devices as I want. Logging into Youtube shouldn't give me a worse experience than logging out of it.
I eventually gave up because I was paying Google $10 a month, and then signing out of my account and using UBlock Origin to watch videos. So none of that was going to the creators I wanted to support, and I just didn't see the point anymore. For a while it was getting bundled with Google Play Music, which was at least something, but even that ended and now they have Youtube Music or whatever. So I dropped Youtube Premium and just started giving people money on Patreon instead. It's more direct, it's more valuable to them, it's a better experience for me, and I get very slightly better privacy.
It's not necessarily that people are unwilling to pay, it's that the service is bad. Even if Youtube Premium was free I wouldn't use it. If Ublock Origin and NewPipe were $15 a month, they would still be a better deal than Youtube Premium was at the time I was subscribed.
Now, that of course doesn't apply if a copyright holder is claiming your ad revenue. But my researched back then is that yes, it does mean you still get paid for "advertiser-unfriendly" content.
So privately owned companies can be directly controlled by their owners in proportion to the amount of ownership. Publicly owned companies cannot usually be directly controlled by their owners, but can be indirectly controlled in proportion to the political power of the owner.
In a private company, you have no chance of appeal. In a government, you at least have elections. The worst most corrosive parts of our government come from its contact with the wealthy and the corporate sector and those aspiring to become them.
In theory I wanna agree with you, but in practice, "representative bodies" often represent their corporate masters far more than they do the will of the people.
They will offer way more money than you can offer for the service.
It’s hard work to make content, many channels are run full time. I know people hate ads, and if that’s the case, just pay for Premium.
My client, my computers, my rules.
They're being secretive about exactly how that split works.
There's also the point that pretty much every time a paywalled article is posted here, someone will inevitably post some work around to the paywall.
I will sometimes user NewPipe even to view their videos though. The Android app needs work.
How much of that is hosting, and how much is content?
And we gave it all to them, for the price of the convince of using their service.
Recently, some people were trying to tell me that ads are entirely controlled by the video uploader, when I brought up some videos that clearly had way more ads than any content creator would reasonably allow.
Some Youtubers talk shop on their channels. I have learnt from them that this is not the case. Even if a Youtuber is very meticulous about placing and restricting the ads (e.g. two mid-rolls), sometimes the software "forgets" and goes full ad blast on the viewer (one pre-roll and six mid-rolls). The cynic's interpretation would be that this happens on purpose.
Once I do have the watch-time (4000 hours per year) to monetize, I will feel sleazy about it but I don't think it would make any difference to viewers, I'll just be taking the pennies I deserve.
Oh, wait, you mean you can't monetize without exerting some actual effort? How is that Youtube's fault?
(disclaimer- I work for the Goog)
There were some other creators that I saw some less egregious but still questionable cadences with, which I thought would go against their general ethos (like ads every five minutes on an hour long video by a person who is generally against a culture of over-capitalization).
Maybe A/B tests?
JFTR, Eric Buijs[0] (author of mentioned SolveSpace video tutorials) moved to PeerTube[1] few years ago:
> I do hope that people, that love their privacy and want to control their content, will follow me and start uploading great content to PeerTube for this is the only way to get out of the YouTube stranglehold. To get you started I’ve made a list of some useful links. See you on PeerTube.
P.S. Follow Eric & me on Mastodon if you are interested in showcases of SolveSpace app, a free & open-source 2D/3D CAD software.[2,3]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=homehack.nl
[1] https://homehack.nl/youtube-or-peertube-what-will-it-be/
I don't get any ads at all. Ever. Other than those "sponsorships" that are just as annoying.
My friends will not even host the torrent that they just downloaded for a single hour and my family don't know what torrent is and more important than that, they don't care. Good luck with really large scale p2p solutions. You must be really happy paying 100 bucks on fees to transfer 10 dollars on the Bitcoin or ETH networks, but hey! no adds or "evil" companies!
Ad blocking it's just a feature.
Or... you could route around Youtube completely. Why do you use a service with which you are unfriendly?
In the meantime I sympathize with folks who in a way have ground rules changed on them, but then again were using a free service where they were the product...
The internet is a weird place where we demand everything be free as just a baseline rule, and then complain when the product that we didn't pay for changes, or in some other cases just tries to turn a profit / be sustainable.
I keep hearing this lament that everyone just wants stuff for free. I think it is a distraction from the current wild west where these surveillance companies are the ones getting high value data for petty baubles.
Because we give it to them.
The end user's choices matter here.
"did not turn off third party cookies" should not equate "authorized this company to log about every site I visit"
(of course, if you are on youtube itself, that is another matter -- but you are replying to, I think, a more general comment about the two sides and the value they obtain/extract from each other)
there's plenty of stuff i'd be willing to pay for if it didn't involve creating yet another account and giving them my credit card info.
First, for large classes of media, the energy required to consume the media is much larger than the mental cost of even an explicit microtransaction - e.g. the energy required to decide whether or not I want to pay 10c to watch a 10 minute educational video is dwarfed by the energy spent watching the video itself, and probably comparable to the cost of watching 10 seconds of ads beforehand.
Second, for many of the media for which the opposite is true (e.g. short TikTok videos), you can make an argument that the value of those media is very low anyway.
Third, for short media that is still valuable, the cost can be amortized through either buying chunks all at once (e.g. the algorithm pre-computes a feed of 30 minutes of video and tells you the cost, and you can decide whether to watch or not), or through other technical solutions like setting a "payment limit" for the day - there are lots of ways that you can get creative with this.
Fourth, as for "I have to believe it would have been solved" - there are many, many problems that could be solved through technically superior solutions that aren't, because of external forces (monopolies on a market, manufacturing difficulties, lack of a market, economic dis-incentives for either sellers or buyers, band-wagoning/legacy baggage that people are emotionally attached to, etc).
I think that the answer is much simpler - people don't want to pay for content. People want it to be free. And, currently, most people (at least based on my interpersonal experiences) either don't know how much of their data is being harvested in order to pay for their zero-dollar-cost services, don't care, or do care but not enough to push for a micropayment solution.
EDIT: As an entirely separate point from what I wrote above, I think that the mental transaction costs would actually be useful (even if people hate them), because they'd disincentivize tiny chunks of content (due to the overhead of the decision being much higher relative to the length of the content), and incentivize long-form, thoughtful content, which would have a number of beneficial effects.
I'm not sure we're even disagreeing. Of course, people want things to be free as the default condition. Which is what sets up the mental transaction cost when something isn't free. And we see this in all sorts of settings. It's quite well established that there's a bigger gulf between free and really cheap than there is between really cheap and just cheap.
To clarify: I'm arguing against the idea of people not liking the mental transaction costs being the primary reason why microtransactions haven't been adopted (which is the point that I thought that you were making). I agree that the monetary costs themselves are the primary reason.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030911092002/http://www.shirky...
It didn’t work, obviously, but mostly because people just don’t want to pay. Not even if a typical cost is single digit dollars per month, or less.
In the case of something like YouTube, they'd want vastly more (and as a monthly subscription) to remove the ads than they'd earn from an average user watching the ads.
The alternative might have been a 'watch without ads' button, allowing a truly small transaction (a few cents) to watch a specific video without ads.
For all the BS projects google has spent money on, then just killed off, a micropayment system should be easy.
> all-you-can-eat subscription services
Then give an alternative AYCE option too. Just implement micropayment caps. e.g. When total monthly micropayments are => $10, cap it at that amount until some other thresh-hold. Allow pre-payments. easy.
Are you sure about that? I reckon a lot of people didn't know it existed.
We’re already starting to see this model with Substack and Medium, and I’m not sure if it’s a better model, or just a different one.
Low-friction payment methods are here. Apple and Google Pay for example work pretty well. But if I pay for access to something today, how do you know it's me when I return a year later and want access again?
A good password manager can make creating an account almost effortless. Maybe that's part of the solution.
Yet another reason why identity verification by default would make the net better. No spam, easy payments, elimination of middle-men for many use cases.
Notice that they said "yet another account" - I'm pretty sure that they're not objecting to the idea of creating a single account for the micropayments service, but instead creating a separate account for each individual service that they could instead use micropayments for.
> A good password manager can make creating an account almost effortless. Maybe that's part of the solution.
That was already excluded by their comment - "and giving them my credit card info" - wherein it's made clear that part of the problem is the proliferation of private data among a very large number of individual sites/services/systems. A password manager doesn't do anything at all to help secure your private information from these services that you would be signing up for.
SecurityNow did a podcast about it (episode 477).
I'm not sure whether or not Google & Apple pay are "micro-" enough, though. Do they charge per-transaction fees that are significant enough that 5 cent transactions are infeasible? What's the transaction time like? Can you set up 1-click payments?
There is the privacy aspect too. Maybe I don't want [big sketchy data] to be able to buy my CC purchases and see know which creators i support.
I know that creating an account isn't adding _much_ friction, but there is some and I could see myself appreciating this.
I've certainly imagined a central micropayment system that I could just see what is being used, how much, manage it all... but otherwise just use services seamlessly (the traditional cart experience seems a bit jarring in many cases) and still pay the creators for their work .
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402
Its payment required.
You mean like this? https://www.youtube.com/premium
You can already do this at Vimeo. I guess we should look at how well they are doing with that. (That's not leading; I don't know.)
To them the internet and everything on it is free (and what isn't free is just greed by the owner) and ads are these annoying thing that crop up everywhere.
The choice is ours...Pay or barter? Barter our time watching ads, or pay money that we earned elsewhere.
Disclaimer: Founder of YouTube alternative where site owners who are tired of exchanging their traffic, and user data for free video hosting can pay affordable pricing just like they do for their web host, database host, and other services.
Interestingly, Peertube seems to be backed by exactly such infrastructure.
The non-free service will always be a smaller player IMO. But if there were a big enough bundle, people might see the value. A not-too-many-USD-per-year Youtube+LinkedIn+Facebook+Twitter web suite would be feasible IMO. Just imagine if it were seen as a public good and countries could fund it with a comparatively small per capita investment.
Hosting cost: $0.
Some details: https://fabian.social/posts/2020-11-07-ipfs-blogging.html
Example: https://fabian.social/photography/2021-01-15-incidentes-vial...
If one has a super low traffic site and is already hosting themselves (whether on a home computer or VPS), what’s the benefit of IPFS? My understanding is that if a file isn’t popular, it’ll be served by your own IPFS node/pulled from your local web server, which seems redundant to me.
(I totally get the use case for popular files; it’s awesome for that!)
> Centralized personal sites/blogs become fragile and expensive while a decent(ralized) alternative (like what is in use here) is anti-fragile and inexpensive.
> The only costs are the domain registration and running my own computer (where the IPFS daemon takes less than 1% of my cpu usage and 200 MB of memory) and some bandwidth.
> The more popular something is, the more peers replicate it.
> As such more bandwidth and redundant fetch locations become available that could get the content to you (the reader) at lower latencies. (It is challenging to do a hug of death / slashdotting on such sites/blogs)
I think it would be really cool if there some super easy way to do IPFS blogging. Some GUI or CLI that you point at a repo for the source, then a host with a username, password or SSH key, a dropdown with your domain name registrar and your username+password, and finally a big "deploy" button.
DNS-link is no fun setting up and maintaining. Sure, you can write your own scripts and connect everything to a CI/CD, but for budding developers that's a lot of work.
He had no intention to ever monetise the channel, but with YouTube's ToS update he had to agree that YouTube can monetise his channel even if he doesn't want it to.
Considering he's basically forced to serve ads he has no control over and he does not earn a cent from it, I'd say "lost sovereignty" holds true.
"Sovereignty" is a bizarre word here. It's a business deal. Nobody's ever "sovereign" in any exchange, it's either a good deal or not.
If he wants to pay for hosting himself, then go ahead, but no need to act like it's a question of "sovereignty". Nobody's a king here.
Perhaps the business deal was too good before, and now it's merely good? Previously it was "acceptable" for them to store and host your videos for zero cost and show them without ads, and now you think it's "unrealistic" for them to finally cover those costs with ads?
On what basis? They has an old model, build up the success of the platform, then changed the model. On what basis can we judge the new model successful versus the momentum of the old model?
Literally the line that says "YouTube ads" in their quarterly report?
2020 Q1 was $4 billion, 2021 Q1 was $6 billion. [1]
Seems like wild success to me. But, you know, keep checking for the next few quarters if you're convinced Google is killing their golden goose. They've got some pretty smart business analysts and product people over there though, I wouldn't bet against them.
[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/20210428_alphabet_10Q.pd...
Lets turn that around. YouTube is a huge content provider that has 100 percent of their content provided FOR FREE and they feel that they can "monetize" it any way they see fit. There needs to be some balance. If enough people leave like this, there will be a credible competitor to YouTube and they'll never get those people back. Better yet, self hosting and federated services will start to become a thing and that could be an existential threat to Google itself.
But sure, they are free to do what they like on their platform. Doesn't mean it's always the best thing to do.
Not true. Creators can get paid for their video views and some make a living at it. Some of the content Google doesn't pay anything for, but tons of it (and most of the popular stuff) Google pays for on a per-view basis. It's not free to Google.
> There needs to be some balance.
That already is the balance, Google paying creators for the popular content.
(It's still kind of wierd that YouTube doesn't support simply paying for their hosting.)
[1]https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/videos/watch/6b779810-671...
It's really hard to paint youtube as the villain here and keep a straight face.
Ultimately though, the guy doesn't want his content monetised so he's removing it - that's his prerogative just as much as it is Youtube's for advertising however they please.
YouTube happens to be very good at advertising your videos and driving you viewers (just like, say, NBC was good at bringing viewers to Seinfeld).
does the means justify the ends? should this be allowed to ensure that the YT bottom line isn't red? I don't know; all I know is that the personal experience of the content creator got to such a negative point that they decided to forego all the benefits of YouTube and host elsewhere -- and that's really the only point that matters.
One wonders if youtube had an option for you to pay them to host videos for you without ads, if that would be popular. Of course then someone with a 1 million+ view video and a large bill would then start complaining..
You can always host yourself but you loose the audience youtube brings.
In broad strokes : you're right.
For the sake of a bit more nuance, i'd like to add that 'the control' isn't just given up by the user. 'The control' is promised by providers, and then slowly dwindled until some threshold is met where users are lost to competitors.
YouTube became popular because it gave creators just enough independence, while handling the technical stuff for them.
Now that the technical part is becoming increasingly easy to deal with, it stands to reason that YouTube must become more flexible, or lose market share.
Will G/YT be flexible enough to keep everyone happy enough to exist within their walled garden? Personally, I don't think so -- and people like the parent article are proving that point by packing up and taking their data elsewhere.
Discoverability is becoming less and less of an issue due to the pervasiveness of many different types and styles of social media; IMO that's YT's big advantage and I feel with anti-creator stuff like this stuff, along with YTs recommender being one of the biggest industry in-jokes on the planet -- they really squandered that advantage.
[1] https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/lazy-static/video-caption...
Yeah I know Google are rich but still, from a technical standpoint YT is pretty damn good. I've never had any issues watching videos or streaming, and instantly served in EU, Asia and the US.
For that and the massive selection of content I'd say it's worth it for me.
A video series about parametric 2d/3d CAD is not going to do Logan Paul numbers, so what merit is there to jam ads into it anyway?
It has absolutely been an issue. If you listen in on the earnings call, shareholders have been asking for YouTube revenue for years. Google has to show it can be a profitable business.
However, it does have one edge-case use that's come up a few times. If you have a few bucks, moderate technical knowledge, and just need a way to put 20 or 30 videos online in a form that's easy to link to and navigate for the non-technical, Peertube can be a handy tool. In the past you might say "Why not Youtube?", but Youtube has become increasingly obnoxious to use for simple "throwaway" cases. What's the alternative? Tossing the files up on a shady site like Mega? Running an FTP server or hosting a torrent? Youtube used to be a no-brainer for something like this, but there are so many techno-bureaucratic gotchas now that an alternative just might be worth it. There's zero discoverability, no ad revenue, and you have to deal with hosting and security, but at least Peertube is a ready-made package that mostly "just works."
Some sites/services I currently use:
neeva.com
Paid search that I'm liking atm. Feels like I can find stuff again and it's 4 months free.
For video hosting and content I like
Odysee.com
as an ad free decentralized Youtube, but the network effect hasn't quite taken hold yet.
Social I like
peakd.com
as a decentralized blogging and social platform.
It's OK to keep it the way it is now, but there's friction in order to support content creators: you need at least one other account on another website in order to support at least one creator. I also doubt most people will support more than a few creators through those means.
A "donate as you watch" plugin or something would be very useful. Transfer funds at some frequency to your peertube/activitypub account, and define rules (or keep some reasonable default) of how that is distributed.
Examples:
- 100% of your funds go to your favorite creator - 90% to favorite creator, 10% to the next top 2 depending on accumulated watch time in a month - Funds are distributed proportionally to watch time in a month
Given that this is opensource and plugins are possible, there's a lot of room for innovation.
Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii
Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
One underappreciated role of a large, well-financed and well-capitalised publisher is in providing legal defence to both itself and its creators.
YouTube cannot be fixed and they will never change, and it is no more about 'the creators' anymore, It's for the big influencers, advertisers and now for the already established cable news networks. It's for the best to start leaving the platform since it is completely skewed for them.
At least there are some sane alternative platforms that exist which make the switch possible to some.
Do we though? It seems to me that a few very wealthy people have choices. The rest of us are simply along for the ride.
Does youtube show fewer ads on embedded videos?
(Or maybe uBlock just works better against embedded videos.)
If so, then maybe host a page of embedded videos.
Further, for more than a handful of videos (embedded), I'd want some kind of carousel, so you don't crush the client's browser with dozens of videos pre-loading.
(Hot damn I hate youtube.)
It is pretty rare in 2021 to serve video just as "video files". HLS and DASH allow for adaptive quality streaming for bandwidth- or performance-constrained devices -- which can also help keep costs down, if you're shipping lower bitrate 480p renditions to some clients rather than full-boat 1080p -- and make resumption of partially played media easier. (Because you can append segments to an HLS or DASH manifest, you can also use this technology more easily for live-streamed content.)
This stuff is complicated. You can build out the pipelines to do this stuff yourself with either cloud services or a lot of duct tape -- I've done it before -- but it's A Lot Of Work to get right and economies of scale are a real thing. There exist services like Mux Video (YC W16, https://mux.com -- this is a shameless plug; I work on the devex team) package this and present straightforwardly consumable APIs for folks who just want to ship decent video at a reasonable price.
We need something like bit torrent for video, where the peers send chunks biased toward the beginning of the video. This would spread the bandwidth costs to the viewers. Sure, the main site might be constantly streaming 1 or 2 full streams, but that can be fairly low bandwidth.
1) Orchestration of this is not trivial, and creates new points of centralization. Who runs your moral equivalent of a tracker/DHT? How do they keep the lights on for your relatively niche video? There are social differences between the infrastructural audiences of BitTorrent and a hypothetical general-purpose video tracker. If the idea is that everyone runs their own, you're getting into latency-sensitive problems of coordination (and given the push towards static sites, make me ask "do we expect people to have the capacity to do this?") that strike me as tricky given the requirements of video streaming.
2) This assumes that clients are both willing and able to do peer-to-peer transfers. I wouldn't bet on it.
3) This assumes that clients keep old chunks around for the purpose of peer-to-peer transfers (and don't evict things when under memory/storage pressure) and adequately update the tracker with what it has available at all times. I wouldn't bet on that being a reasonable assumption.
4) This assumes clients are reliable and have reliable upload. If you don't get a chunk from that peer client fast enough or that client disappears before you can handshake with another one and get that chunk, you have a video drop. Video drops are a game-over condition in 2021. Which probably seems unfair to say, but something like this has to present a better solution for clients, not for content providers, and this strikes me as really not viable for clients. Otherwise, people leave.
Video is really, really hard. It wasn't until I built a pipeline myself (not a fancy one, either) that I realized how nasty it was. Slinging huge amounts of data around with stiff latency requirements seems to lend itself to more vertical scaling than this approach suggests.
Some of the most expensive cloud bandwidth is AWS egress, which costs $0.09 per gigabyte for the most expensive band [2]. So we're looking at $70 per video. Plus of course the price of your time to get everything set up and working right.
Of course, you could undoubtedly get lower prices - either with an 'unlimited traffic' VPS if you're a small user, or by getting into a cheaper CDN pricing tier if you're a large user.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oROPkh6YosE [2] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/?nc2=type_a
And, as peer says, discoverability unless you already have an audience.
If you are using AWS, Google, Oracle, or Azure and are just using VMs, you are getting horribly ripped off. There is absolutely zero advantage to using these for just compute. None. They only make sense in a business setting if you are leveraging their managed services to save on labor costs, or if you need to elastically scale to really enormous sizes and have confidence that you won't run out of resources.
VPS providers like Digital Ocean, Vultr, or Linode charge for bandwidth overages but their costs are generally at least an order of magnitude less than the big cloud vendors.
If your primary concern is cost consciousness, and when your failure case is "get slow and fall over" and you're OK with that, this makes sense. For the OP, who doesn't seem to have a profit motive, I think this is good advice.
The caveat I would add is that a lot of folks try to extrapolate from personal stuff into the small-business (opposing "startup" -- that is, not swimming in VC money) realm, and it's easy to staple your hand to your face when looking at video in that way. Balancing cost controls against quality of service is kinda pretty hard for video because engagement is tied in pretty tightly to time-to-first-frame and to consistency of the video stream coming down, and even a well-provisioned set of boxes in an OVH datacenter somewhere are going to have more trouble with latency as well as bandwidth to geographically distributed clients. Yeah, you can fix this...by building your own CDN out of multiple points of presence at multiple data centers, but there are economies of scale to just paying your local friendly CDN overlords to ship your stuff from their POPs. Not all video usage is directly tied to revenue, though, which is why I characterize it as risk: the particulars of your venture may be such that the risk of higher costs due to sudden popularity is worth the quality of service during the 99.9% period for your users who aren't local to your point of presence. But there are no hard-and-fast rules here.
But, yes, in general for an individual hobby site, I'd choose an option that resulted in a hug of death rather than a big bill.
If I had to compare this to a historical event, it would be like the Puritans leaving England for America to escape the oppressive bureaucracy that controlled their lives.
There's radical freedom in decentralized social media. The question is whether or not it will take off as a viable alternative to Facebook/Twitter/YouTube -- or whether it will become the next Parler-esque shipwreck.