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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Fun fact, video files are extremely big and cost money to host. It's a neat idea but will never be scalable in the same way that YouTube is without some form of monetization
Funnily enough, I think federation is the only way anything is going to compete with YouTube. If the hosting costs are distributed across the network, it gets a bit more viable.
I could imagine a niche hobby focused instance funded by a patreon that hosts the videos of a few related creators. Perhaps the videos contain sponsorships which the hosting instance gets a cut of.
It would be even better if there was a BitTorrent style P2P sharing from others who have recently watched a video sharing it to other users. A bit tough from a browser, so perhaps in order to watch videos you need to sign up with (or simply just access via) a "viewer" instance that acts as a content cache and seed for other viewer instances.
You'd have a couple of network hops and p2p startup delays to contend with so perhaps the first 10-20s of a video are packaged as separate chunks that can be fetched directly from the source, or perhaps prefetched for subscribed channels on a given instance. I think you could fudge this as being more or less seamless with an HLS stream.
Viewer instances could fund themselves through the usual selection of options, and keep a cap on costs by limiting users. I could imagine a lot of people might self host viewer instances
Sorry that ended up as a bit of a brain dump
You're so right IMO!
I'm trying with a Lemmy art instance (we'll see how that goes eh), and I host that on a PC, why couldn't I have a bunch of art videos too? I think I can :-)
Of course, those "monetising" youtubers who "has to" "reach out" to millions of subscribers would need something else, but they won't be missed by me anyway...
You - or someone like you - should totally make this happen.
peertube already has the bittorrent thing, just not many people watch at the same time. it needs to be easier to seed videos you watch/like without leaving the browser window open
That was my thinking behind the viewer instances that do the seeding once the user has gone away from the browser. It also simplifies the client apps as they don't have to try and set up p2p connections in random environments (imagine someone watching something on their phone via public WiFi)
I'm sorry but you're completely out to lunch, YouTube is barely sustainable as it is and that's without the inefficiency of distributed storage. There's no way you can convince people to give up half their phone storage just to watch internet videos when ad-supported alternatives exist
why peer to peer wouldn't be scalable for this?
For not popular Videos you could have the same system as private trackers to encourage people to seed those videos.
peertube uses torrents
Yes, and torrents only work because they are relatively unpopular. You reach a certain scale and proportion of people who would rather just freeload than seed gets too big
i don't think you understand how the torrenting works or why i raised it as a solution to the storage/bandwidth problem.
I do understand how torrenting works, it only works because the total amount of upload bandwidth being made available is enough to satisfy the demand for download bandwidth. As you get to larger and larger groups of users, the proportion of people willing to seed after their download finishes drops.
Also keep in mind that most ISPs give their users extremely low upload bandwidth relative to their download pipe, and you have an poorly scalable solution. At least if you're talking anywhere within a few orders of magnitude of what YouTube handles.
peertube has everyone currently watching a video join the swarm. you just don't seem to understand why we keep raising peertube and torrenting in the same sentence
Everyone currently watching the video will not have enough total upload bandwidth to support the download demand, especially when you move to resolutions higher than 1080
do you have a graph I can look at?
Happy?
no. this doesn't seem to be actual data.
You asked for a graph and I gave you a graph. If you can't be bothered to research the disparity in residential upload vs download speeds for yourself, that's on you.
your bad attitude is very convincing.
While I think the concept of BitTorrent to handle distributed storage is a good line of thinking, I have a feeling keeping seeders alive.
I kind of wish for Pied Piper from Silicon Valley. Distributed sharding with p2p distribution. I can only speak for myself, but my phone has more storage than I would ever need, and T-Mobile 5G is unlimited, just cache the video content as and my phone can serve chunks as a temp seeder until I need that space for new content. With enough people contributing the space needed per person could be negligible. Extending to a federated backend protocol, selfhosters to large organization could contribute block storage as things scale. BBC just started exploring Mastodon. If there was a viable video platform for BBC, their resources would help establish large collective pools of data.
Just keep it a completely open source standard, very strong encryption/compression and wide duplicated sharding across devices. I absolutely hate blockchain hype, but an actual use case would be a blockchain index of where each chunk of information resides.
All of that totally hypothetical, that’s just my “throw shit at the wall” idea for a federated solution. Initial adoption would probably never succeed. Just like in the show, things are getting to incredibly complex solutions once federated networks come into play, explaining it to not computer oriented people would be neigh impossible.
Okay and? Like, you've listed the problem, which I think was already known to anyone passionate enough to care about PeerTube and to want it to grow, do you have any ideas or solutions or are you only here to demoralize and discourage?