Yes, we have archive.org. We need more than that, though.
I’m sure there’s some distributed solution like IPFS but I haven’t seen any serious attempt to make this accessible to every day people.
There are many thousands of paid hosting services, feel free to pick one. It turns out hosting TB of data for free is a pretty tricky business model to nail down.
And even if the legal attacks could be mitigated most people would still use youtube because they're there for the money (or for people who are there for the money). They are not there for a video host. Youtube enables distribution of money and there's no way that any government would let any free system distribute money without even more intense legal, and indeed physically violent, attacks.
It is the same reason why people just can't get off IG. Network effect and in YT case a lot of disk space and bandwidth.
I admit I haven’t looked into peertube, and I didn’t think that rumble was any better than YouTube. I don’t recognize the others. Thank you; I’ll resurvey.
And it is 2025, the HN crowd here can usually just deploy their video to CDN. Many business are also just hosting their own videos.
BTW forgot to mention Odyssey underlying protocol is https://lbry.com
And seems like there are past article about it on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24594663
This is a very bad standard and not indicative of the capabilities of the average small-to-medium business.
Nonetheless, I agree it's more complicated than I made it seem—YouTube is not an insurmountable problem for a determined actor.
I can imagine if they've added rate-limiting, e.g. 30GB per IP per week - that would've reduced amount of crap, literal white noise and spam/scam videos uploaded to Youtube in several magnitudes. Another strategy is, if a video doesn't get 1000 views after a week - it's deleted.
YouTube's economy of scale goes way beyond having their own datacenters, they have edge caches installed inside most ISP networks which soak up YT traffic before it even reaches a Google DC. It would take a staggering amount of investment to compete with them on cost.
CSAM peddlers, intellectual property violators, unconsensual sexual material ("revenge porn"), malware authors looking for places to exfiltrate stolen data, propagandists and terrorists, the list of abusers is as long as it is dire.
And for some of these abuser classes, the risk for any storage service is high. Various jurisdictions require extremely fast and thorough responses for a service provider to not be held liable, sometimes with turnaround times of 24 hours or less (EU anti terrorism legislation), sometimes with extremely steep fines including prison time for responsible persons. Hell, TOR exit node providers have had their homes raided and themselves held in police arrest or, worse, facing criminal prosecution and prison time particularly for CSAM charges - and these are transit providers, not persistent storage.
And all of that's before looking on the infrastructure provider side. Some will just cut you off when you're facing a DDoS attack, some will bring in extortionate fees (looking at you, AWS/GCE/Azure) for traffic that may leave you in personal bankruptcy. And if you are willing to take that risk, you'll still run the challenge of paying for the hardware itself - storage isn't cheap, 20TB of storage will be around 200€ and you want some redundancy and backups, so the actual cost will rather be 60-100€/TB plus the ongoing cost of electricity and connectivity.
That's why you're not seeing much in terms of democratization.
Youtube can get away with its shit service and utter lack of sensible moderation simply by being under Google's roof and the effort required to start up a competitor.
Almost 25 years on the internet and I have not been able to download anything from IPFS. Does one need a PhD to do so?
Maybe there is an opportunity for that company to expand.