So Elon gutted Twitter, and people jumped ship to Mastodon. Now spez did… you know… and we’re on Lemmy and Kbin. Can we have a YouTube to PeerTube exodus next? With the whole ad-pocalypse over there, seems like Google is itching for it.
So Elon gutted Twitter, and people jumped ship to Mastodon. Now spez did… you know… and we’re on Lemmy and Kbin. Can we have a YouTube to PeerTube exodus next? With the whole ad-pocalypse over there, seems like Google is itching for it.
Reddit has 500 million MAU, and this is a conservative estimate. Youtube on the other hand, is sitting comfortably at 4x this number, 2 billion MAU.
Considering that, and the nature of the platform, I’m pretty certain they are too big to fail.
The thing I find fascinating is I only have 1 reddit account, but I effectively have dozens of YT accounts. Just on this device I have newpipe, and libretube. Libretube has around a dozen auto generated random instances associated. Both my laptops have Freetube. I had 4 regular YouTube channels with various gmail accounts linked from when I actually posted content. Practically every device I have replaced had random YT accounts too. I know what I like to watch and importing and exporting features usually fail.
Maybe it is just newpipe being screwy but in my watch history, newpipe shows how many times I’ve watched any given upload. Most stuff I’ve watched says some bogus number of views like 6-10 when I just watched it once. Some report correctly, but most do not. It would not surprise me if this is actually YouTube. I can say, for most of the stuff I watch I’m a solid 2 dozen subscribers or more.
No one is too big too fail. There just needs to be a better service, which right now there definitely is not.
And hosting text, images and links on decentralized servers is one thing. High bitrate video, plus the network infrastructure to serve it, is kind of a whole different ballgame. I could see this system working for some kind of torrent/file sharing service that hosts video but not a YouTube competitor.
Frankly, Mastodon already has trouble scaling just by serving up images and small bits of text, PeerTube would fall over almost instantly if it had to deal with even 1% of YouTube’s volume.
Nobody’s replacing YouTube, and from the perspective of a user who just wants to upload a couple of silly videos and watch thousands more, getting rid of the big corp that is willing to provide that ridiculously expensive to provide service feels like killing the goose that lays golden eggs.