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A community to organize and discuss the growth of the fediverse as a whole

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What if this community organised a campaign to reach out to the top 500 or so youtube channels to join peertube? (vidiq.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Some of those channels have videos complaining quite loudly about youtube, some are tech channels that do talk about the fediverse sometimes, some aren't even aware of the fediverse but might be interested.

It might be worth drafting a message that explains that it won't cost them anything to just sign up to an instance mirror their videos to peertube as a first step. For more technical channels, they can setup their own peertube instance and mirror there - together or alone.

There might be more incentives, but that's for the community to discuss. What do you think?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The challenge is that top youtubers do this for a living, it's how they put food on the table, and peertube has no monetization and also no path towards ever having monetization. Unlike other forms of social media with federated alternatives, videos are high cost/effort to host and produce. Its not like mastodon or lemmy where its mostly just text that people throw out into the void for their own entertainment and to socialize with other people.

There are ways you could maybe implement some form of monetization that architecturally respects creators and viewers more, but I'm pretty confident they're not things peertube as a project would ever implement.

As it stands, it would be kinda like asking professionals to donate their work for free on an ongoing basis.

Unfortunately it feels like peertube is unlikely to ever really offer the same thing YouTube is, in contrast to other fediverse projects that offer a similar experience to their counterparts just at a smaller scale. But producing much of the content people enjoy on YouTube is a career, and peertube can't really be that without monetization :/

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That's the right attitude to have for sure. It'll make things happen.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I don't mean to be rude or shut down your idea, I'm sorry. But I think it would be difficult to find a successful strategy for growing peertube without understanding the challenges involved.

Personally I think you might have better luck asking smaller youtube creators who don't make videos as their only source of income. Many of those folks are still frustated with YouTube (though it's less of a big deal if it's not their income), and have more reason to consider a platform where they'd be publishing things just for the sake of putting stuff out there

But asking top creators on YouTube to consider peertube as a potential future option is a really difficult sell if it fundamentally can't provide them with income they're currently making by publishing on YouTube. It might mean they don't have to worry about demonitization or copyright strikes or whatever, but there's no reason those upsides would really matter much if they can't make a living there. For top creators YouTube is a job, and a demanding one at that.

I think it'd be cool to see peertube consider ways the platform could be monetized if it could be done well, with instances being able to enable it. I'd love to see optional, maybe opt in advertizing with robust controlls for users and creators. But those things are all extremely complicated to implement organizationally without money warping the nature of the project, and from what I know about framasoft I don't think they would ever even consider anything along those lines.

And the product of that is that peertube can likely only really be a place to host videos that people just wanna put out into the world for their own entertainment. It can't be a platform for the same kind of high effort, highly produced content that a lot of folks watch on YouTube.

Patreon is kind the only thing that could fill that gap for creators, maybe that helps make it a more real consideration, I don't know. Patreon/merch is a huge part of income for content creators. I'd love to be wrong and see a couple big creators start publishing on peertube too