With YouTube leveraging its dominance to make the service shittier and shittier, we’re forced to consider our future. Yeah we have Peertube, but Peertube is shitty. I consider myself techy and I can’t find a peertube instance that’s not just one single users’ “boring” videos.
So in order to move away from YouTube, we’re facing two major issues. No three!
- Service: Even in its state of enshittification, the YouTube app is still a million times better than Vimeo, DailyMotion, etc. Introduce ReVanced into the equation and YouTube has a lock-in.
- Hosting: Hosting video is expensive as hell and that’s a major hurdle to toppling Big Tech.
- Audience: People stay where the people are, because that’s how they generate money. Peertube sucks because I can’t just put in a URL and find random content. Without audience you don’t have discoverability, without discoverability, you don’t have monetization, without monetization, you only get “boring” videos.
Okay, so the third point is a bigger one and I actually think we need to adopt the Blendle-esque model, until we overthrow capitalism and live our post monetary wealth utopia.
What’s this Blendle-esque model you speak of? Blendle was a great app idea that was blocked by corporate greed. The idea was that if you wanted to read an article from a newspaper, rather than pay a subscription, you could just pay 10 pence for the pleasure of reading the article. Win-win? Wrong! Most newspapers wanted a subscription or nothing.
Okay, so how does that work with videos? The idea is that users would put money into a pot. So let’s say I have £10 in my pot, at the end of the month, the app would divide that £10 across all the videos I watched in the month and send it to all the videographers. If my pot was £1 the share would be smaller and if it was £100 it would be larger.
Okay, so the service issue. When are they going to finally make Peertube user friendly and discoverable? Wouldn’t they be forced to if content creators were attracted? Because it can’t just continue to suck right? Anakin? Seriously, search for a video on the Peertube main site and someone in their infinite wisdom thought it would be great to give you a wall of text! Mate!
So now that we got all that out of the way, think of it like salad, this is the real meal now. Let’s talk about hosting. Hosting video is expensive and its the barrier to toppling Big Tech. Though middle-size tech should’ve been trying to do it. If Vimeo added Peertube support, it would be a hegemon, but I digress… Pick the pitchforks back up and re-light the torches! Hosting videos is a huge resource expense. It’s why we don’t see a crazy number of videos posted to Lemmy, Mastodon and even PixelFed. But what if we could solve that? Not the Fediverse video bit (yes, Peertube, you are a joke to me, kidding!), that’s just a byproduct, but what if we could all chip in and distribute the cost? Well, I recently, literally just before I started waffling in your eye. But I present the Interplanetary File System! IPFS for short. Think of it like torrenting, but more user friendly and more seamless. Anyway, I’m thinking this could be the missing piece and it could be the building block that allows video to return to the embrace of the open web? What do you think? Why aren’t we leveraging this?
More info on IPFS here: https://ipfs.tech/developers/
For the record, I’m not affiliated with any project, protocol, entity or anything. Peertube didn’t kill my puppy and I don’t even think my mum even subscribes to my YouTube, so I’m totally looking from the outside in.
Here’s a 2 minute video with animations that hopefully explains it better than text.
For a simple text version (not the transcript of the video):
You know about youtube. It’s a website that hosts videos, allows you discover videos, search them, comment on them, upload them, and lots more. Maybe you also know about similar sites like vimeo and dailymotion. Those are separate sites. The comments you write on youtube, the videos you upload, the accounts, and so on, aren’t visible on vimeo and dailymotion, and vice versa. They don’t speak the same language.
Just like lemmy is a federated reddit, peertube is like an federated/interconnected network of youtubes, vimeos, and dailymotions. They can all talk to each other. If youtube, vimeo, dailymotion, and other websites used peertube, you could upload a video to vimeo and watch it from youtube, comment on it from dailymotion using our dailymotion account, and (here’s the kicker) like it from your mastodon account!
The language peertube speaks is activitypub. The language mastodon, lemmy, kbin, mbin, misskey, and so on speak is activitypub. They aren’t all fluent and don’t speak with the same accent or dialect, but most things can be understood. For example lemmy cannot see the comments on a peertube video.
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