cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/5294605
Youtube, for so many years, was just too good. Yes, they changed the 5 star rating system to likes and dislikes and a few years later disabled dislikes altogether, but their algorithm mostly digs up interesting content and it just works for creators and viewers.
This might change soon. Their new strategy to disallow ad-blockers will frustrate a certain kind of viewer. Those who dislike surveillance and like open-source tech, those who use uBlock Origin and know why.
Just like a few years ago mastodon suddenly reached a certain kind of popularity, because twitter had their first big fuckup, maybe Peertube is next. It certainly is the most polished decentralized solution that doesn’t use a blockchain. Creators or fans could easily host their own videos, fans can watch it, without ads.
The problem with a decentralized video platform as compared to forum/microblogging (lemmy, mastodon) is that it takes a ton more resources to host videos. While anyone can host a lemmy or mastodon instance in their bedroom, hosting videos requires more bandwidth and storage that costs money. Sure there will eventually be bigger instances that will emerge that are professionally maintained, but they will still rely on donations and the instance admin’s own time and effort to do so. I would love for this to happen and actually make a dent on youtube’s monopoly, but it’s not as easy as it looks.
Sharing video is such a big problem that even Google couldn’t solve it when it was their time. They just bought their biggest competitor when their own platform didn’t get traction. And then operated at a loss for years and years.
I’d love to see descentralized video platforms as the next guy but there are serious barriers that come with the medium
And the only other way that a bigger platform would grow is by ads being displayed on the Instance that brings you back to square one.