Ok so first let’s go over what YouTube provides: Storage, community tools, search algorithm, add sense, authority over copyright, front end.

Realistically you could probably cover the front end, search algorithm, and community tools with FOSS collaboration.

Everything else gets harder.

For storage, the VAST swaths of data, and forever growing nature of YouTube storage nearly guarantee its market dominance alone… if they can contain that infinitely growing monster forever. Its their greatest strength and can also be its Achilles heel. I would propose that video hosting would be covered by the creatives. This change creates a ripple effect that effect all the other challenges, but immediately raises the bar for entry, and with the exception of the highest earning creators, videos would have to be cycled out when their earning capability falls below cost to host. But! This has good sides, like the best videos would linger and bad videos would fall off increasing the quality of what remains. Creatives would have more control over their videos. You could also have a system that rotates videos between a cold storage and live videos, where cold storage would use a torrent like system vs the streaming of a live system, which would allow cheap storage of low earning videos to still have them available for those who could wait.

Copyright, so with the creatives holding the keys to the content, this new youtube would only facilitate the connection and front end, but would not regulate it. So copyright claims would have to be handled by the creatives. This is a sharp as hell double edged sword! You won’t be copyright trolled as successfully any more BUT your odds of ending up in court could be higher as there is no way to appease the record labels and what have you so readily. There would also not be a method to scan the videos to easily find other people who are stealing YOUR content either. And you would have to deal with the person stealing your content directly.

And ad sense. Without a unifying front to bargain with advertisers, it will be like the Wild West. Most advertisers don’t have assurances of enforced standards and will be very timid to employ this new system. They would all have to vett creatives separately, and it would work allot like Sponcers do now, but ultimately i think it would be a boon, but for a wile the money won’t be there.

You get me $10B annually or so, and then we can start to talk. Your single-fiber line and homelab will handle, what, 25 simultaneous users? Just have to scale that to a billion daily users or so, no bigger.

Also yt is "super critical"? Super critical is power for ICU wards and stuff, nobody is going to have a heart failure because they can't get their daily dose of #shorts. Also gestures at Wikipedia, who is glaring at you.

I think you're giving yt way, way too much credit, but simultaneously thinking that any one of us has the financial capability to not only have but risk that kind of cash. Companies have tried and failed. Users aren't doing it, chief.

Easy solution: host an FTP with all the videos. It has existed long before YouTube was a thing.

More advanced solution: Torrent ala Pirate Bay. High quality videos have been distributed this way long before YouTube even supported 1080p. Peertube is based on similar solution as this.

The main problem is to attract content creators to the platform. The problem isn’t technical.

I wish people would start uploading their videos to Pornhub so I wouldn't get embarrassed whenever someone sees the app on my phone.

/s...or am I?

Money. Lots and lots of it.

Hosting video on a significant scale is very expensive. Stupendously expensive.

Convincing people to join is also going to cost a lot of money. Consumers are on YT because creators are there, and they are already used to the platform. Creators are there because the consumers are there. And there is a robust infrastructure to make a living from content creation.

Financing is especially difficult for such a project, because companies are willing to pay way more for targeted ads. For which you need some data about your users. The more data you collect, the better the and targeting can be, the more companies are willing to pay.
Assuming there are enough users for companies to pay for advertising at all.

Peertube exists. Use it.

now I will admit that peertube is lacking content, but when you make something put it there. When you want something search there first and check out youtube last. This rewards those who publish there with your eyeballs

https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/

Look at the strangler pattern in microswrvice architecture. Applying this to your scenario, set up a front end to YouTube, cache the results locally (probably host in a place that allows it). Also host videos from other platforms like peertube. Once you have a lot of users, slowly prioritize "free" videos over YT content.

It's not likely to happen, but it's the pattern that FB uses to present news. First they showed a link to the story and you'd click through, then they required more of the story, then when all were hooked, they demanded the whole story to be displayed, effectively stealing all the users and the ability to advertise.

The biggest issue I've always heard people say when it comes to replacing a video hosting service like YouTube is needing storage space and bandwidth.

I feel like ipfs, the interplanetary file system, could be leveraged to do this but it would require a concerted effort to make a fast, stable, reliable, and federated YouTube replacement, and I imagine that we would need people to financially support it.

Honestly the biggest thing all of us is missing to take it down is financial capital.

To get the kind of capital you need to take down YouTube, you need investment money from the kind of investors who will force you to enshittify to afford paying them back.

The financial issue is the biggest one, when it comes to any and all of these.

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.

Check out FreeTube to privately watch YouTube videos, and PeerTube for a complete replacement.

I'm not sure if you can replace YouTube. It's too popular and has been a mainstay of the Internet for 19 years. We won't be able to convince people to just up and leave YouTube.

Best case scenario is to lead by example and start sharing videos from PeerTube.

Pray that Google enshittifies YouTube enough for any amount of creators to migrate to Peertube