Things like this are exactly why we need to leave big tech for other platforms
11d 1h ago by sh.itjust.works/u/bridgeenjoyer in privacy
So I'm not sure if y'all are following this series, its insane and it gets really dark. I highly recommend.
Anyway, the scary thing is how much control big tech and the oligarchy, corrupt police, (and Scientology) has over squashing justice and doing anything they can to keep the little guy down.
Just an example of why we desperately NEED to get people off these platforms
Isn't YouTube one of "those" platforms?
Yes but unfortunately there is no feasible alternative at this time. Currently every other platform out there is either comically bad experience to use, populated solely by extremists or completely barren of new content.
Your only current alternative to using YouTube is to stop watching the types of videos that YouTube hosts.
What are your thoughts on PeerTube? I've heard people complain about storage costs, which makes me think they should have let viewers seed torrents (i.e. make an application with torrents built in have some setting to seed for different times based on if you completed/liked/disliked a video add in a seed forever button). While I'm sure video profits are lower for now, creators can cross post to youtube, and I thought most profits come from patreon and ad reads rather than youtube ads. I think there's a way to link peertube and lemmy / mastadon accounts, but I haven't looked into it yet.
I consider Peertube to fall under the "comically bad experience" for a multitude of reasons. There's too many to really get into but to give you an idea of my experience with the platform, after the "pick a meaningless instance to house yourself" gauntlet that all fediverse outlets do, I was met with not one or two, but three instance refusals to allow me to create an account "because I was not a creator"(the admins literally emailed me to state that was the reason they declined my membership) so was left with the prospect of not having any means to manage or track subscriptions, get notifications of new content, etc. In spite of this, I tried to push through figuring I was missing an obvious manner of use that made it better than it initially seemed. I started searching for content I regularly subscribe to on YT, like "guitar playthough, rehab, urban exploration, drag racing, abandoned" and kept getting results 5 years old, completely unrelated to my search query or so poorly created that it was practically unwatchable.
I tried really hard to use it, it's just clearly for the nerd crowd that wants to use it in spite of how bad it is as a video serving social platform. I love Lemmy, tolerate mastodon and keep checking on things like Loops and Pixelfed but Peertube is an entirely different beast. It punishes those that try to use it in any way like YT.
I thought most profits come from patreon and ad reads rather than youtube ads.
I think you're absolutely right but if they move to another platform, they lose their subscriber base, views and interaction that advertisers demand so they don't bother with the alternate platforms and for that reason alone, there's nobody willing to waste time on platforms that none of their creators use.
I would have appreciated some of my creators at least copying their releases but nobody does. I don't know if it's hard to manage another platform that makes it not worth the time for the minuscule view count they get from it.
I would have appreciated some of my creators at least copying their releases but nobody does.
People do, you just don't notice it because they aren't in your sphere. And FYI it's easy to setup. You can setup a sync on peertube with a YouTube channel and just let it get the videos forever. No maintainance is necessary. Odysee does the same thing and there ate creators on there too.
Peertube is far from perfect, I grant you that, but I use it through GrayJay ever day and do not face issues.
The search function on peertube is hot garbage, I still pay the every month hoping it will improve but it doesn't seem to be changing
The seeding idea intrigues me... anyone know if there's already relevant discussions or feature requests on the PeerTube codebase?
Seeding was a thing with webtorrent, then they defaulted to their new HLS method and it is now practically unused. You can still download the entire file via torrent on some instances.
Their problem was they needed to be able to stream chunks of the video via webtorrent and also switch between different resolutions. Supposedly that isn't true, but I do believe it is ( I've seen other people talk about possible implementations). Dunno if the maintainers are actually receptive to a webtorrent HLS or DASH solution.
Ugh, resolution.
Unpopular opinion, but I feel like resolution is a vocal minority issue. Most people listen to videos in the background or only glance at it now and then. Even when watching the video, resolution just doesn't matter that much to the vast majority of people. But of course, a vocal minority will loudly complain if they don't have super resolution, and it makes everything harder for everyone else.
Like, I can tell you I'd not be willing to seed a high resolution video for any length of time because I value my hard drive space. Maybe they could split the torrent up into several torrent by resolution and I can change my setting to seed the reasonable ones? I do think it'll take a dedicated application of some sort unless browsers want to start integrating torrent download management -- actually that seems like it should be doable... I don't know enough about networking maybe that's already thing.
Webtorrents are torrents that run in the browser. From my understanding, they have all the features of torrents except that they run in WebRTC (because browsers don't directly speak torrent). If they do, then requesting specific chunks of torrents should be possible. Therefore, it should be possible to have torrents by resolution.
There could be preferences per user / per session to allow customisation of the seeding preferences with reasonable defaults depending on network speed.
As for hard drive space, it probably won't be an issue. Users can selectively seed what they want by using qBittorrent which supports WebTorrent. If there were thus a webtorrent solution, tools could also be written to download and seed videos depending on preferences e.g most watched videos, least watched videos, hottest videos in last 24 hours, maybe even a protocol where the server dynamically requests seeders depending on which video is being streamed by users, and so on and so forth.
WebTorrents in peertube could really change the video distribution game altogether.
Webtorrents are torrents that run in the browser.
Do they only run as long as the page is open? That's the core problem here as I understand it. Peer tube instances don't have the space to store every creators videos. Frankly, if torrents aren't addressing that core problem, they're just a gimmick and don't really do much for the infrastructure. I guess they prevent the page from being completely overwhelmed for things really popular in a moment, but that's pretty short term. The browsers need to speak torrent in some fashion so that someone can make an extension or something that can support videos for some time (indefinitely seeding if you're the creator, seeding for months or years if you're a viewer).
Torrents alleviate the distribution problem, not the storage problem. You can't tell me that distribution isn't a problem. A few federated instances won't be able to scale viewership if it goes into 1M concurrent views or so. Hell, even 100 or 1k streaming a 1080p video can easily bring a server to its knees.
There have been proposals to use IPFS for storage, but frankly, IPFS is nowhere near ready for production usage.
If it's not stored many places, it doesn't [matter if it solves] solve the distribution problem. If only one person (the instance) is distributing the video, it's watched and discarded (which it will be except in the case where multiple people are watching it simultaneously), then the distribution problem isn't really solved. If that instance goes down, the video is lost. Maybe peertube is meant to be a streaming service rather than a general video service, and you don't care about the more general, but then we still need a generalized federated video service.
Also, I'm not really convinced Torrents don't solve the storage problem. Why does the instance need to host any of the videos if the creator can put them on a torrent? It's not like creators delete every video they make after it's posted. If videos are then stored and seeded for a month after people watch them, I think you can get pretty reliable access. Store the videos in whatever resolution you watched it in and below. The people who want high resolution can live with higher storage costs, the rest of us can set aside a 5-10 GB and go about our life.
I'm not sure you're aware, but peertube also federates videos. Instances can choose to federate the metadata and the data too. That means if one instance goes down, there's a chance the data will be available on another peertube instance. Furthermore, as I said, using webtorrents will allow alternative clients (like qBittorrent) to store copies of the data. That's why I brought up (maybe in another comment) tools written around that which could, independently or with coordination from an instance, download and see the X "hottest" videos of the day, most viewed videos of interval Y, or whatever else.
Regarding torrents solving the storage problem: it's possible. The main instance where the video is uploaded to will still have to keep the primary copy of the video and all the different resolutions. You can't just upload the video, make a torrent, and then delete the content. It will have to be distributed to be kept redundant. And if the primary copy is deleted without any redundancy, you will have a problem. You could hope that all federated instances copy the data and that many do-gooders (probably archivists) decide to seed every video of every instance out there, but I think it's more likely that popular videos will be seeded and obscure videos only exist once on one instance.
One could imagine the main instance deleting the content after a certain seed threshold has been reached (e.g 500 seeders have 100% of the file), but that could be easily abused: somebody wants to take down a video and controls a few hundred IPs --> tell the instance you have 100% of the file, instance deletes video --> video is gone. So, again, I don't think it solves the storage problem. Federation could though. If instances have a max number of users they accept, users would have to spread out across instances and thus distribute the storage requirements.
In any case, webtorrents would improve the current situation. Right now in order to duplicate a video and contribute bandwidth, you must run an entire peertube instance. It's simply the "easiest" way to do so. Nobody, to my knowledge, has successfully written a minimal client that just communicates with instances and downloads, then hosts the video files and makes itself aware to instances as another instance (though stripped down).
Webtorrents would allow somebody to just grab the torrent file (or magnet link) paste it into qbittorrent, and be part of the swarm without having to go through weird hoops or run an entire instance.
Yeah, I don't really understand networking, so I apologize if I say stupid things. I guess I was under the impression peer tube already used webtorrents, but if it doesn't I can see how that would improve things by allowing the creators to seed their own content.
Why does the main instance have to have a copy? This seems like it creates a major storage problem for running a peertube instance, and I don't understand why the creator couldn't just seed their own videos -- again, it's not like creators delete their own copies anyway, the creators should be the primary source. Setting up a laptop running a torrent program isn't a serious challenge, nor is backing it up on another computer. If the instance wants to hold a copy (particularly for new videos or popular creators or some combination depending on their available storage) to make sure everything runs smoothly, I think that's a reasonable thing to do, but ultimately the creator should be responsible for their own work.
Again, I think there needs to be some system for viewers to seed persistently. Even something as simple as some javascript where the like button copies you a magnetic link to whatever resolution of the video you just watched would improve things. If normal torrent clients then had a dismiss after age or seed ratio toggle on each torrent, that'd be half the battle. Obviously it'd be better if the everything talked to each other and operated seemlessly, but even a rough version would improve things.
I myself care 0 about resolution. And yeah, a lot of times videos are listened to instead anyways.
So? There isn’t anything on YouTube that is a must watch.
Yes. Thats the issue, theyre way too damn big.
However, a simple easy to use video platform still seems impossible right now. Peertube is beyond the technical know how of a lot of folks who want to make videos.
Could you just tell us what this is about? I started watching the video but am 100% lost. Nowhere is anything explained. We're just dropped into something.
Oh no problem. I made this kind of quick to get it out there, thats why i tried to preface with "I'm not sure if anyone is following the series .."
Long story short , Ben is trying to get $200k worth of Lego's back for this 87 year old man in bad health that sold them on consignment with a contract to Bricks n minifigs. Seems like not a huge deal right? Tell them (BAMF) to give the Lego's or money back, because otherwise they are literally stealing from an 87 year old man and breaching a legal document.
However, it gets DARK. The store owner and CEO are in deep with the Utah mormons and the police department, and the corruption is insane. They (police) were illegally tracking Ben (likely using flock cameras) , constantly doing illegal traffic stops on them for no reason, searching them for heroin for 3 hours because the bricks n minifigs store owner told the cops they had drugs (total lie ofc. None of them do drugs), it even came to the point of them getting SWATTED and being brought to jail for starting a gofundme. Also, police muting/covering their body cams while discussing that nothing Ben is doing is illegal, but they need to find a way to arrest him anyways.
Then, the BAMF corporate is doing everything they possibly can to defame Ben and get his videos deleted so it can all blow over (in a letter from BAMF to their employees they say "our PR team says the internet usually forgets about things like this in 5 to 7 days")
Then, YouTube is putting random blurs on bens video in random spots and they refuse to remove it. And then telling Ben to delete it and reupload (thereby losing millions of views)
I don't know about you, but it sure sounds like someone with big corporate pockets is driving YouTube to do this (because BAMF themselves said they want to stomp out all the media coverage of this by getting Bens videos deleted, in short)
Not to mention, Ben has infiltrated Scientology ceremonies in the past to show their disgusting behavior, so who the heck knows what kind of evil deeds could be going on to get him arrested.
Just seeing this level of injustice is driving me to be even more privacy conscious. This awful use of tech is what drives a lot of the power the police and corporations have and it needs to stop. It goes wayyy deeper than just Lego.
I do highly recommend watching all of Bens videos on the matter. Of course, he makes it a little "cinematic " for viewers but that doesn't change the core outright corruption of all of it.
Is this in the US or Canada? Must be US, right? It seems like more than just big tech. Has this Ben character thought of uploading to peertube? Then random blurring and take downs wouldn't happen.
Yeah US (land of corruption)
Yea, I wish there was a better platform but at least peertube exists. I can't say ive ever found a video on there myself.