The main value of youtube for many of us is the enormous video collection, which is impractical for anyone else to duplicate. Need to fix an old washing machine (I did, recently)? Type in the make and model and there's an instructional vid. It's unfortunate that Google has exclusive control over such a resource, but here we are.
this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
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I think it’s running it at a loss too. But there’s no reason these platforms couldn’t be publicly owned.
It was, but monetization has been so aggressively everywhere that I think they finally are in the black at least since 2018.
I had no idea. You’re right. It was a $15B business in 2019. https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-alphabet-earnings-revenue-first-time-reveal-q4-2019
Makes the ads seem even more obscene now that I know that.
That only mentions revenue, we still don't know their operating costs.
You’re right 🤦🏻♂️
Publicly owned by which government? Because I don't think YouTube's home of the US is really a good choice right now.
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I wonder what would happen if Google decided to "turn off" YouTube.
I would be free from relying on a single google server for anything.
some random mfs with 400TB of hoarded YouTube videos will emerge out of hiding
And sadly now I have to watch a video. Wouldn't step by step instructions be quicker and more effective? Yes. They were. Now it's some video wasting my time.
Not sure that is a great example.
Wouldn’t step by step instructions be quicker and more effective?
For this type of work, typically no, it's quicker and more effective to have someone show you exactly how to do it.
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I hate that this has become so commonplace. Yes for some - mostly physical - things it’s much better if you can see someone do it. But finding an obscure setting in an app shouldn’t be a video.
Stuck on a 20 step installation process? Here’s a 10 minute video showing all the steps you already know before the phase you’re stuck. Sure you can scrub through it, but it’s still faster to skim and scroll through a text with images.
Unfortunately, when you do find a text article explaining the thing it's often unnecessarily long and padded out with meaningless fluff, just so more advertising can be stuffed within the contents.
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The fact that you posted a link to this video from YouTube not peer tube says a lot.
The point is outreach to the other platform. Sending engagement to this video on YouTube will boost it due to YouTube's algorithm. More exposure on YouTube = more potential new PeerTube users. Publishing this on PeerTube is preaching to the choir. As an alternative platform, you always need to maintain a presence on the main platform so you can encourage people looking to leave.
Publishing this on PeerTube is also a problem. I mentioned this in another post, but to expand, I really, really, want to like PeerTube. But:
- Many running servers don't fully grasp the bandwidth requirements. The video I tried to watch in that post got "popular" (800 views) and it took 2 minutes to even get the progress bar to load. People will leave.
- The federated nature is even more disjointed than Lemmy. It feels like a bunch of different sites still, which makes it feel like less content.
IMO PeerTube could be great, but it has a lot of shortcomings that aren't solved by adding features and fixing bugs.
It would better to make peer tube super easy to use without needing to do more than cluck once on. A button and get going
The thing holding open source back is the gatekeeping. Developers could spend more time actually working with u.i experts to make things easy, but no. Rather make everyone think it's some magic that requires 50 steps.
Make it easy to do business and give them a great product. That's all that needs to be done. Do that foss community, and you'll win.
Working with you UX experts? You mean like hire them? With what money?
Otherwise, the UX experts need to step up and volunteer their services, just like programmers do when they create FOSS.
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I just can't get into using Peertube. I love the idea, but in my experience, it just doesn't work the way it should. Slow, low video quality, hard to get the federation working properly, and most importantly, a general lack of content creators I care to follow.
I stick with Odysee for this, and several other reasons.
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I think we should discuss about what is holding PeerTube back. For starters a monetization system
afaik most YT creators get their money from sponsor blocks rather than ads these days, so nothing really changes there… i think the combination of sponsors and some patreon-style system is plenty, so i’m not sure monetisation is the issue
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Server costs and disk limitations.
It's a nice thought but even this guy did not continue his Peertube instance. More of a thought experiment.
I think Peertube is more of a Vimeo alternative. YouTube is built around advertising.
Really? And here I thought they were all video platforms. Youtube advertising is just an added layer of enshittification.
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Joined PeerTube last month and have had great success with it in terms of as a platform and place to share art / content, though of course the views have been low.
I'm sure there is a megathread elsewhere but would love to see an acceleration of folks adopting the Fediverse. My talking point has been to sort of sell Fediverse alternatives (Lemmy, Pixelfed, Mastodon) as superior to other big tech alternatives out there (such as BlueSky and Flashes). We are either at the vanguard of a mass migration or just migrating while no one else is intending to, which I guess amounts to the same thing!
Linux is finally becoming mainstream. I love it.
That's kinda true, but what does that have to do with the comment you replied to?
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If any of the top 500 youtube channels joined peertube, things would surely change. Unfortunately a few of those have started their own video platforms e.g Mr Beast has his own.
I'm sure if a few of the top youtube channels of the biggest countries joined peertube that would also give an important push to peertube.
There was a lot of energy around strategy when I joined in January (can you guess why? Lol). The limiting factor seems to be chosen participation. Lots of people have opinions, not many people want to organize their thoughts into, eg. an effective advertising campaign, a github pull request, or basically anything other than meaningless musing.
Here were some threads in my message history I found insightful: https://lemmy.world/post/25512565 https://lemmy.world/post/25553607 https://lemmy.world/post/27824597
I'm not really skilled in anything relevant, so my strategy has been:
- On mainstream social platforms, point out any hint of enshittification and follow up with a recommendation toward a specific Fediverse alternative.
- Link directly to discussions or articles I found on Lemmy that I thought were worth sharing
- Building partnerships in my existing communities with the corresponding Lemmy communities to encourage user flow
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A lot of people, despite using a federated reddit alternative, will think of any reason to discourage the use of peertube I've noticed. It doesn't need to REPLACE youtube, that's basically impossible. You can use Peertube WITH YouTube. "Does it do anything different than youtube?" You can control what gets deleted and what stays up. "That's the only thing? It needs to do more." You can livrestream with it, and why would it need to do more than youtube? It gives you fucking CONTROL back in your hands! This is all about putting the people, back in control of the internet! The p2p aspect of peertube makes this the best competitor a community has to these giant companies with their world burning server farms. Why is this so hard for people to not be fascinated with having an option you can run with old PC hardware?
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These apps need ulterior uses.
Most know Matrix as an alternative to Discord.
has it replaced Discord? No, and it isn't likely to, buuuut Matrix is still a swiss-army-knife for other chat protocols via bridges, so it has its own use beyond Discord.
It's still useful, even alone.
What problem does Peertube solve beyond not being Youtube?
What problem does Peertube solve beyond not being Youtube?
Content creators can be in total control of their content and the platform, while still being able to reach the wider audience on the Fediverse.
There’s also features such as being able to replace an already uploaded video and for some, they would be happy not having to play the “algorithm game”.
A place to keep your videos in case of YouTube taking it off their site.
Same issue as Lemmy. Not enough people see centralized media as an issue and thus the status quo will continue.
Ehhh, I feel it's not just that.
Yeah, people don't think centralized media is an issue, and thus don't join Fediverse, causing it to be a little dead and discourages others from using it as an alternative.
However, YT is a job for the thousands that create content on there, and reasonably so, they need money to make said content and pay bills. Which means ads, cause be real, most people (including me) don't wanna join a Patreon to see their content. I just can't think of many creators who I love enough to drop consistent money on them, never mind several at once.
Lemmy doesn't need to be monetized to entice people, because Reddit wasn't built on that (karmawhoring gets you no money). Even pixelfed could make it as an alternative, because creators aren't paid by ads or Insta themselves, they get money from sponsorships and promoting their shops.
But YT? It's built to make money from putting in ads. So unless creators lived off of sponsors alone and the few who subscribe to Patreon, they're shit outta luck if they join Peertube.
EDIT: Completely forgot the server side of it, but was reminded of that fact by this comment on the Degoogle community about YT:
YouTube is expensive as all fuck to run. This is why alternatives will never take off unless they have a solid monetization model (e.g. floatplane). Sorry, but people on home internet with 100 down and 30 up aren't going to be able to host peertube nodes and stream 4k video to more than a couple people. Text and music work well decentralized, but people start to become a lot less able to contribute when hosting costs become hundreds per month and their home internet is saturated and barely usable instead of single digits with light traffic. This isn't even mentioning content creators' monetization.
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Like with fucking, friction is the difference between pleasure and pain. If I click a YT link and the video starts playing, no lag, no buffering, just plays, I will come back.
I tried to watch the French dude describing Texas, hosted on Peertube. It took 17 minutes, 3 attempts, 2 error messages, lag while playing.
Can't change the paradigm with thrift.
Interesting. I’ve watched some videos without issue, though not many since there aren’t that many to watch.
That's weird, I watch it every day and have never had an issue like that.
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Sometimes, I think that peertube would work better as simply being a different section of a personal/private website. You know how some sites hosted their own videos back before youtube became "the only place to post videos"? Gametrailers, Machinima, ThatGuyWithTheGlasses, etc.
Federation helps with discovery, but not much beyond that, I think.
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