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.
The problem is, you would need a lot of users that are willing to pay for the service to be able to pay enough large creators for more users to jump on board. Considering how many people would rather endure YouTube‘s obnoxious ads than paying their subscription, that wouldn’t be viable. You need both a free tier and the possibility to make money off those free accounts. Because if it’s just free with no ads and voluntary donations, why would the average person pay? And if it’s just paid, why would most people come to the platform if they can get the content free somewhere else? As soon as you introduce the need for monetisation, which a YouTube competitor would need, you’re going to struggle. It’s the same reason paid browsers stopped being a thing as soon as a free version existed. It might have been better but it wasn’t free.
I’m not saying that you’re wrong, but I think that people are more likely to put up money if they believe in the model instead of because they are being nagged into it. For example, I have a nebula subscription that I happily pay while I refuse to pay for a yt subscription despite the fact that I watch youtube a lot more. This is more out of spite towards youtube than it not being worth the money (it probably is to be honest). I also donate money to wikipedia while I haven’t ever considered shelling out for encyclopedia britannica for example.
Video hosting is of course very expensive so I understand that it’s harder to fund wikipedia-style than wikipedia. People are probably happy paying creators they like but less so spending a ton of money on infrastructure.
That is true for a lot of people but probably not for enough people. I agree, that a platform people believe in is more likely to receive donations but that’s not gonna be enough. Platforms like Nebula and Floatplane only work because there are tons of big YouTubers advertising for the platform on YouTube because they benefit from that. And tons of people primarily subscribe for the extra content provided by the creators they already like, not necessary because they believe in the platform.