Eat shit, Youtube!
War, War never changes.
Grayjay by futo just released a desktop app.
What’s the Fediverse YouTube? ooof. that’s a tough nut.
YT Shorts maybe
No one understands the astronomical bandwidth, CPU/GPU intensive calcs, and data storage necessities required to do anything close to what YouTube currently does.
There is no way under this warm sun that a fediverse version of YouTube will ever be feasible, unless someone like literally yourself is willing to pay extraordinary high amounts of money for all the required infrastructure and daily maintenance to run it.
Monetization. Tumbleweed content-wise. Some content producers make content for money.
Media reach: Content is stored, where the consumers look for it.
What part of “bittorrent” do you not understand? I am really getting fucking sick and tired of people like you posting this bullshit FUD.
PeerTube uses WebTorrent protocol and it still doesn’t do well with the same quantity of bandwidth demands.
Post your own self-hosted PeerTube instance for us all to use then, let’s see who’s correct. Otherwise provide a solution or shut the fuck up.
A “fediverse” version of Youtube already got made and subsequently killed, PopcornTime.
The Bittorrent backbone already has plenty of media and can handle more bandwidth than we’d ever need to throw at it. Encrypted Onion Routing provides a degree of insurance against copyright cops, too. The only problems left to solve are automating the discovery of user-relevant content and avoiding the legal system long enough to write and popularize an open source app that puts it all together with a couch-friendly front-end.
PopcornTime was so amazing and important. Sad to see it dead.
At this point, I wonder how we can solve google’s youtube monopoly. Is it even doable? So overwhelming.
Simplest solution is to kill Google CEOs, anything else proposed as a solution will take longer than your entire lifetime.
I would want to see some data on costs, because I think you might be overselling the difficulty and cost a bit (I don’t actually know, just my good faith belief). Imagine if every content creator ran their own instance. Instead of needing to worry about every user coming to a single group of servers, the Creator only needs to worry about the cost of hosting their own content and the traffic they get.
With the number of YouTubers who have to get sponsorships and Patreon anyway, it doesn’t really seem that infeasible or unreasonable to expect content creators to run their own thing or pay to have someone else to do it. Doesn’t seem like the YouTube money is that lucrative, anymore, so not like it would be all that different, either.
Several tried. Nothing as elaborate as cross dissemination, federation or whatever. But at least 5 to 10 years ago it proved to be almost impossible. Platforms like Rooster teeth, which was 100% subscription based, I think never broke even and still relied on YT ads for the majority of the revenue. Some big and small channels tried to at least just catalog, archive and serve their own videos and the costs still became astronomical really fast. Whenever you see one of those very old channels, most of them don’t conserve copies, let alone original source footage of their entire material. Everyone just delete their videos once they’ve been on YouTube for a month or so now, and they have to download their own videos when they want to reuse old footage.
Storage is cheap today, yes, but video really eats storage at an alarming rate. Specially now that 4k is the standard. So you have to reuse storage over and over. Transcoding is also really fast and optimized with modern algorithms, but it takes specialized graphical cards and data centers charge a premium to use servers with such capacities. Self hosting will never be able to satisfy a moderate demand. Get anything above 100 users simultaneously transcoding videos and a non-specialized server will halt to a grind just on IO calls to hard drives alone.
Once you consider all those factors it is obvious why YouTube is such a miracle.
It’s such a miracle becuase the world gave it all of their content for free.
At least in part.
https://gbtimes.com/how-much-does-youtube/
Estimated annual server cost: approximately $1 billion
Estimated annual data center cost: approximately $5 billion
Estimated annual bandwidth cost: $3 billion
Good luck running that shit from your closet server.
According to that first link, it costs $6.1 billion to $11.7 billion annually to run YouTube. Even if you segment that into niche video communities, it’ll still cost hundreds of millions of dollars annually to host it, if you get a decent amount of traffic.
This is why YouTube is a monopoly. Because they have the ridiculous amount of money to throw at a “free” video hosting site. Any other video host would crumble under the weight of YouTube’s level of traffic. That’s also why some others, like Nebula, require a subscription model to function. Or any movie/TV show streaming service. They can’t afford to host that stuff for free.
This is also why Google is so obsessed with cracking down on anti-ad software. That’s how they make the money that pays for YouTube.
According to this, as of Jan 2024 there were 14 Billion videos on Yt. So effectively a dollar and change to host a video for all YT users.
Obviously it doesn’t work like that, but if the above commenter’s point was that I, a content creator, host my video and manage my own costs, and that video is linked via whatever federation, I can monetize and limit as needed as a creator, thus popular videos get paid to host, and unpopular videos are hosted for more or less table stakes because they’re only getting X hits per Month.
Some kind of WordPress-like container with a built-in safety switch for overages and - hey presto. Well, it’s a thought anyway.
I dunno, it seems do-able, even if the Great Unwashed are going to stick with YT and getting ads up the wazoo to see “I Stuffed My Face In A Fusion Reactor - Watch What Happens Next” and the like.
Sure, but you’re assuming all content is on one server. With something like PeerTube, content is federated.
That said, I don’t think federation is the solution here because a popular video is going to completely swamp that instance, but something P2P would probably work if you can stream from multiple seeders. Even if you copy like we do w/ Lemmy, you’d still end up with a handful of instances that are way more popular than the rest and those would get hammered if there’s a particularly popular video.
If you can spread that $6B (ignoring bandwidth here) over 10M people, you end up with a very reasonable $600/year, and costs would go down as more people join the network. I also assume a lot of that is duplication to handle demand spikes, which is baked in to the P2P system, so a P2P system would probably be way cheaper to scale up.
but something P2P would probably work if you can stream from multiple seeders
Which is, in fact, exactly how PeerTube works: it’s got BitTorrent built right into it.
Frankly, it’s ridiculous how people keep harping on this “problem” as if it isn’t long since solved.
I thought it was largely federated? I don’t know how the internals work, so I don’t know what group of peers it’ll pull from.
Regardless, the problem PeerTube has little to do with its technical foundation IMO, but the network effect. If we get people to start using it, either we’ll fix it or we’ll develop something better, but getting creators to move is the first step.
If you read the links, this includes their server clusters and employees across the entire world all doing complex load balancing and maintenance.
Sure, and none of that is necessary with a proper P2P system. If I’m torrenting something, it’ll naturally pull from seeders near me over seeders on the other side of the planet, so load balancing happens by every client being greedy.
The complex load balancing is only necessary because it’s a centralized service.
This protocol already exists and so does the system, PeerTube.
Why no significant quantity of people use it is apparent after you try it for a while; the entire server system cannot handle the commensurate volume of content and interactions that YouTube is popular for.
I love that the replies to you are half saying that it’s an impossible problem, and half linking to existing solutions.
Yeah you’re right, it’s kinda great.
Peertube, but it’s really not nearly the replacement lemmy or mastodon are.
Yet. It’s still very new, and as enshittification increases, so will federated development.
Reddit is mostly text, with a few images for memes, very low in storage, processing power, or bandwidth, its easy to have a fediverse replacement.
Youtube is a video platform. Video take a lot of storage, encoding/decoding, bandwidth…
And video platforms are small amount of content creators, with 99 percent of the users being non-content-creating viewers. Once the content creators are on a monopoly platform (like youtube), there’s no incentive for them to leave. And fediverse wouldn’t have the same money to make.
In contrast, anyone can find interesting links to post to a Reddit-alternative, anyone can make memes.
TLDR: Reddit is community-focused. Youtube is creator-focused. Difference in hardware requirements. Theres no practical alternative for Youtube, especially not a fediverse one.
The whole idea that it violates the terms of service of a company to not let them show things on my screen without my consent is insane. It’s like if every time you went to the grocery store, the employees held you down and force fed you a free sample, then banned you from the store when you started running away from them.
I’m imagining a future where you’re not allowed to mute broadcast commercials
Fifteen Million Merits - Black Mirror - 2011
Please drink verification can.
I mean they already show ads when you pause. It’s just a tiny jump further to play video ads when you pause.
You already often can’t mute ads directly, you can only mute them on whatever platform you’re watching them on.
It’s worse than that. They use so much bw that most users have limited higher -speed to access, but they’re not giving anyone vouchers to pay for extra bandwidth.
It’s not that bizarre. They don’t have to serve you the content without showing you the ads that make the platform profitable. The freedom goes both ways. I use an ad blocker too, but I don’t think that YouTube is really doing anything wrong here. (Other than possibly ruining their own platform, but that’s their problem that they’re making for themselves.)
I hate the way they‘re doing it and how they push their silly premium subscription in my face whenever I open the app to look something up quick. Adblock all the way. But you‘re right. They have to make money somehow. They‘re a corporation after all. It‘s naive to think they will ever give up.
If they weren’t a monopoly, I’d agree, they can do whatever they want.
But since they are a monopoly, its a de facto the equivalent of a town square, and they are policing people’s speech, and broadcasting annoying public announcements that nobody wants to hear.
A privately owned platform cannot serve the public good. There will always be conflicts of interest. A proper public square should be funded by a competent government (but those are rare) or decentralized.
When suggested adblock, my mother also do not convinced it’s right to use them. Basically, my mother is grateful for the service provided, and will “pay” by watching ads. I guess this one is not so clear-cut.
The whole idea that it violates the terms of service of a company to not let them show things on my screen without my consent is insane.
Something something contract of adhesion something something. It is functionally a term of service to watch the whole body of content as a condition of watching any of it.
It’s like if every time you went to the grocery store, the employees held you down and force fed you a free sample, then banned you from the store when you started running away from them.
This effectively used to be how people would sell Time Share rentals. You would “win” a “free vacation” to a destination that hosted the time share. Then, in order to check in you needed to sit through a sales pitch that only ended when you agreed to purchase the unit you’d allegedly been awarded as a prize.
If you tried to leave the sales pitch prematurely, you were ejected from the venue.
Yeah, and there’s a reason contracts of adhesion are [supposed to be] illegal.
Incoming Meat Canyon video
Exactly, it’s absolutely absurd.
Think we ought to just start harassing marketers and anyone involved with advertising.
Yes. The only positive thing the Dilbert creator ever did for the world was teach me (and others) that Marketing is bad. (He’s a fucking creep and a Trump weirdo.)
So sad YouTube died, it was such a useful service.
If you digged all the crap out sure
Use Firefox
I am already doing that, but YouTube doesn’t like uBlock Origin. The browser is not the problem.
It’s been fine for me.
What it doesn’t like is my VPN, even when it’s not using it for the browser connection (split tunneling). For some reason many sites crap out when I have that on and become unreliable.
On ublock origin, go to settings > filters and disable the one that says “Quick fixes”. It will work again.
I just checked github and this is already resolved, just refresh filters
Fine work as always from ublock
I had the same issue until I realized I had Ghostery and privacybadger also enabled. Disabling them on YT but keeping ublock origin worked
No issues for me using Firefox and unlock
To be clear, uBlock Origin isn’t the problem, either.
YouTube is.
I blocked the popup…
Did that work? I thought that would replace the video and didn’t bother trying.
It hasn’t caused me any issues
i use ublock origin
reddit still good for something: Filter Lists–>uBlock filters–>uncheck the “ublock filters - quickfixes” box and then reload the page.
this worked for me
Yea this is also what I had to do to get things moving again.
Huh, I was able to just close the pop-up and play the video as normal.
Only one of my three computers was having this problem, but this solution worked for me as well. Thanks for sharing it here!
I just gave it 15 minutes and they started working again.
Rip chrome. It just killed ublock for me yesterday
Yup, I use ublock origin and have never had issues on YT.
They do random testing. I’ve received one of these a couple of times with unlock as well. Google/yt has not fully committed.
I hope they don’t commit. But if they do, I guess that’ll be the end of YT for me…
Sometimes I have to use YouTube rawdog for work and it’s unusable, if I want to skip forward in the video to reach the solution to my problem I get an add every time I click the timeline.
If you need it for work, why don’t you have YouTube premium?
I don’t speak for the person you are asking, but for me the reason is that google is evil, and huge. They don’t need my money, and I wouldn’t pay them for any reason.
I expect that if the workplace officially needed to use YouTube, then that workplace would be paying for that subscription. But if its just that sometimes someone wants to include video from YouTube in a presentation or something - then probably not.
The way they worded it, it sounded like dealing with YouTube was their job, like maybe managing a company’s YT account. So yeah, I totally expect a company to pay for YT premium. I’m certainly not suggesting they do it, unless they’re a freelancer or something.
Yeah you and a lot of people. There’s a couple articles about it but essentially there’s some talk of pushback.
And personally for me there are alternatives that people could use. While not a lot of people are on it, peertube is a viable alternative. I’ve watched a couple of small creators on it and it ha good performance. Just a very small audience.
Makertube is one of my favorites.
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I didn’t screencap it but today on YT I was given a modal that said I was using an adblocker (ublock) and I have three more videos before they require premium. I changed VPN locations and stopped getting the message.
Yep, used the reddit solution.
I find the adblock yt prompt only shows now when I try to open two tabs of YouTube. Second tab has this message but the first plays fine. I think ublock probably deployed a half fix already
Fuck reddit, this solution did not work for me. All YouTube videos stop buffering after 59 seconds. Only fixes i have found is with either making a custom userscript or disabling ublock from working on YouTube by whitelisting the entire domain.
Or you could download freetube and be done with it
Awesome.
The day FireFox and UBlock Origin stop working with eachother completely. Might be the day I just uninstall all of my browsers and use my PC more personally than before.
I’ve landed on that page a couple of times. I’m just waiting to be blocked.
I almost never watch videos on youtube because I download them and watch them locally. The two things that I use to download them are Downie (Mac) and yt-download (cross platform). This helps me avoid ads unless they are baked into the video. I also like to grab a bunch of content all at once and then watch at my leisure.
I also like to grab a bunch of content all at once and then watch at my leisure.
If you’re tech-inclined you might like pinchflat or Tube Archivist, which can archive channels/playlists in the background with video metadata automatically, which you can then use with JellyFin.
Need to be comfortable with /c/selfhosted@lemmy.world type setups, however.
I’d vote for Pinchflat. Tube Archivist is good software but very heavy.
I run a Plex server for my movie and television library. I just watch YT videos once and delete them, mostly in the background while I do other things. But I’ll look into both tools regardless because automation is always interesting to me. Thanks for the tips!
TubeArchivist is kind of an all-in-one software for you to watch YouTube videos in so its own web interface and is pretty heavy. But PinchFlat is very lightweight and is actually designed to be used with your Plex server being the medium you watch your videos on. So I’d recommend starting with the latter, as it’s kinda built for your exact use case.
This is an interesting way to watch YouTube, and I have some questions about your system around watching the videos.
- How do you plan out downloading and watching the videos? Do you download at the time of watching, or do you just download as many videos you like when you get the chance?
- What do you do with the videos after watching?
I download when I have free time to fill / kill. I watch one genre of videos and periodically check on a number of channels that have that content. I watch each video working down the list deleting them as I consume them. In the rare case that I want to save something, I toss it in an unmanaged directory of internet content.
My Plex library is where managed content lives. Stuff from the internet doesn’t deserve that level of care (in my system of data management).
Thank you for sharing your workflow.
If you use yt-dlp you can save your subscriptions in a text file and download all their latest vids on a schedule.
Easy enough ChatGPT can write you this script and you may also find examples online.
If not directly useful for you, i am also putting this down for others. Do not let a monopoly dictate what is “the normal way” to do things.
What a great idea! I love Bash scripting, so I’ll look into doing this myself for fun tomorrow.
Fun fact, it seems this ban is IP based. (they’re still testing in waves with a subset of overall users)
I switched to a new IP with my VPN, and while still signed in to the same YouTube account on the same video without ever clearing my cache or cookies, the block disappeared.
Genius work from the developers over at YouTube.
I think that’s probably because ublock fixed the filters while u were doing this.
It was early yesterday, before filters had been updated, 30 seconds after a full purge and re-selecting of all relevant filter lists, done within the span of 2 minutes, so I doubt it was those.
I use Firefox on Linux Mint, none of this happens and if it does you fix it by copy pasting a code on the settings of ublock
What code? I am on Fedora+Forefox and it does happen all tge time :-/
Search for it, is a code you paste on the my filters tab of Ublock add on in Firefox
mpv youtube-URL works just fine without even loading the crappy scripts to show a banner like that. Manage your subscriptions with a RSS feeder and you don’t need an account to follow creators.
Just replace the watch?v= with embed/
Delete this, YouTube will catch on and block this workaround.
Edit: disregard. Here is a custom GreaseMonkey/ViolentMonkey userscript to automatically do this for you:
// ==UserScript== // @name YouTube to Embed Redirect (Desktop & Mobile) // @namespace http://tampermonkey.net/ // @version 1.1 // @description Redirects YouTube video URLs (desktop and mobile) to their embed version. // @author BaroqueInMind // @match https://www.youtube.com/watch?v* // @match https://m.youtube.com/watch?v* // @grant none // ==/UserScript== (function() { 'use strict'; // Extract the video ID from the URL const videoId = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search).get('v'); if (videoId) { // Redirect to the embed URL window.location.href = `https://www.youtube.com/embed/$%7BvideoId%7D`; } })();Wouldn’t surprise me in the least if some of the employees are watching threads like this one.
BTW, go fuck yourself, YouTube devs!
im not so sure the devs have fault in any of this though
They likely use adblocks themselves.
Yes and No.
Get a cheap (Argentina, Egypt, Ghana, India, Ecuador) premium… There are dozens of instructions on how to get it through a VPN.
Wait yt premium has different rates in different countries? Anyway hosting a free to use service like youtube cost a ton in storage and bandwidth, contrary to nebula. I would rather support it as it doesn’t do DRM and other too much user hostile stuffs (I’m using free software clients for long time, no issue. I’ll continue after premium too as official client isn’t that good). But ofc first I would like to know actual budget and ad money cash flow to see if it needs help really or just a marketing tactic to pump up revenue in typical corporate fashion.
Anybody has such income-expense data source for youtube?
A lot of companies have regional pricing. Some regions jist have way lower buying power and as such cannot afford 60$ games as it can be quite a significant sum of their income as compared to us.
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Nah. I’m just gonna steal it all for free. Thanks, tho.
Pretty sure this doesn’t work anymore. They stopped it a few months back.
YouTube is canceling accounts in other countries in waves at the moment. My account in Vietnam (I live in Germany) will also be canceled in mid-January 2025. I would have to add a Vietnamese credit card, which would be a bit much work for me.
It works for me! I have a german account with YouTube family prem sub through Peru.
Oh, might have just been Australian Google accounts then!? Definately tried 4 or 5 different countries and no dice here. If anyone from Au knows of a working country, I’d be happy to hear it! 😁
aggressively refreshes ublock patch list
