Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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How do we replace YouTube? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi, my post is focusing specifically on YouTube since I observed the following categories have less intrusive solutions or privacy focused solutions, even if they are paid:

Operating Systems (Linux, for example)
Instant Messaging (Element, for example)
Community Messaging (Revolt, for example)
E-Mail (Proton, for example)
Office (libreoffice, for example)
Password Managers (Bitwarden, for example)

However, how do we distribute videos and watch them without data collection? I am NOT asking how do I use a privacy-focused front-end for YouTube, by the way, I am aware they exist.

I am wondering how we obtain a FOSS solution to something super critical such as YouTube. It is critical since it contains a lot of educational content (I'd wager more than any other platform), and arguably the most informative platform, despite having to filter through a lot of trash. During COVID, we even saw lecturers from universities upload their content on YouTube and telling students to watch those lectures. (I have first-hand experience with this at a respectable university).

I refuse to accept that there is nothing we can do about it.

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[–] [email protected] 138 points 4 months ago (14 children)

I refuse to accept that there is nothing we can do about it.

I don't think you quite understand just how stupendous the amount of data Google processes from YouTube alone is. There is basically no way for hobbyists to provide an equivalent service. Very few companies have those kinds of resources. If you want, you can of course try running a PeerTube instance, but you rather quickly run in to problems with scaling.

I find it almost miraculous YouTube exists to begin with. It is no accident Google has very few competitors on that front, and I don't think YouTube is even profitable for them. Without Google's deep pockets and interest in monopolizing the market, YouTube would have withered a long time ago.

Trust me, I want a solution too. But 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute. All of that is processed, re-encoded, and saved with multiple bitrates. You can't compete with that. YouTube might eventually keel over from Enshittification and its own impossibility, but replacing it with anything meaningful will be a challenge.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Counter-point : every single one of the videos uploaded to youtube already lives on the creators hard drive, usually in a much larger format. All that's needed is for them to create torrents for them.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

I think the largest challenge though is maintaining the distribution and managing the associated upfront costs.

Existing large content producers could likely afford to handle this but new producers could struggle paying to seed their content.

Though I do think overall this is more achievable than people give it credit for:

YT videos don't need huge bandwidth for a sustained period; only for short bursts. Most views come in within a week.
Content is probably localized to specific countries. Less need to replicate across the globe.
Let the source prefer to seed the highest quality and other peers downsample and replicate as needed.
Doesn't need YT scale. Tons of YT "content" is spammers leeching essentially free hosting from YT. No one needs to seed their videos if they don't want to.
1080p is still fine for YT videos. h265 is very efficient (though downsampling 265 isn't great). Don't need 4k for most videos.

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