PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

You are making the argument that because centralized systems have been proven to be able to solve certain kinds of problems in an acceptable way, that it follows that centralization was the magic bullet that made the systems successful.

This argument is analogous to saying that because all wars that have been won to date have been fought using swords, that all future victories will be won with swords.

In the myopia of any era, such statements seem trivially true, yet they are shown to be false again and again.

Let's break down what Youtube actually consists of: It's a hosting platform for videos, a security model, a content recommendation/discovery platform, a piracy/abuse prevention moderation system, an advertising platform, and an affiliate platform (content creators make some of the ad revenue).

All of these can be created as federated systems. There are some significant inefficiencies that give a federated system a bit of a disadvantage, but building it in a decentralized way also offers tremendous advantages.

Such a system will certainly replace Youtube at some point in the future as long as each of the mechanisms Youtube offers is available and performs with similar quality to what Youtube offers.

We've seen some fairly remarkable examples of distributed cooperation (blockchain systems) that many would have thought impossible a few years ago. Critics of such systems still point to centralized control as the inevitable way of humanity, but get proven wrong every day as decentralized systems gain credibility.

Credibility is the key. You are right that the average person who wants to flip around and watch funny content doesn't care how the system was built, but average users do care about the massively annoying ads, the freemium model and the myriad dark patterns that try to squeeze every last penny out of the ecosystem.

Analogous to how Microsoft took a big nose dive soon after reaching "peak annoying" with its tiered OS offerings, $1000 office suite and many other gimmicks that signal impending disruption, Youtube is getting very close to this pinnacle.

The little gimmicks that gradually autoplay you toward the most viral content and ads are pernicious dark patterns that create psychological pain for users and even though they are viewed as successful by the "engagement and profitability metrics" approach, they are creating a bigger and bigger void for some other service to fill.

The problem is, Youtube has created a category leading centralized product, which is now very easy to replicate. Just as Bing was able to easily steal much of Google's search market simply by copying many years of Google R&D in a few months, playing trending videos with interruption marketing is now a known product and any missteps can result in massive loss of market share. Google knows this and will not take risks to expand the platform's features.

So all it takes for a federated model to succeed is some insight into the things that the market wants that Google is too blinded by dopamine-fueled ad watching to worry about building.

You don't run your website, necessarily, on a local home computer, why would you assume the same for this?

> But distribution is the easy part on the internet. It’s aggregating attention that is the hard part.

ATM for video the content hosting, distribution, discovery, indexing, consumption, and commenting are all centralized. Let's say PeerTube brings the video world inline with podcasts and knocks that list down to just discovery and content indexing. That would be a really big win. That would be way more decentralized than what we have now.

If you're right, and solving all of those problems are the easy part, then PeerTube will probably be an incredible improvement to the video ecosystem.

Podcsts may not be perfectly decentralized, but they're pretty stinking close. Services like iTunes are basically card catalogues at this point. The podcast app I use doesn't even include iTunes ratings, reviews, or suggestions, so they've obviously made the decision that these aren't features their users care about.

My experience with podcasts is I get recommendations in a decentralized manner from friends, family, social media, and online articles. Then I go to one of several centralized card catalogues and search for the podcast by the name. Then I add the decentralized source to any podcast app (all of which work with every podcast regardless of who developed them) and use RSS to download a file to my physical device, which makes it easy for me to back up or mirror the file to other devices if the source ever goes down in the future.

If 99% of my experience is decentralized, does the centralized 1% that basically boils down to a list of urls and a regex expression override that? Especially keeping in mind that nearly every podcast app still provides a mechanism for you to bypass that list whenever you want, and any good podcast app allows you to search for a podcast across multiple preloaded sources at the same time?

There are other UIs for Masto e.g. https://pinafore.social/ or https://brutaldon.online/ The benefits of open source :).

There's a spectrum from "random home video" to "professional". At the "home video" end, the risk of getting sued is low, and built-in tools to help handle DMCA etc are enough (e.g. enable automatic takedowns). At the "professional" end they can afford to have a lawyer on retainer. That leaves the middle: where people are trying to make nicely produced videos, but they're not big enough to afford keeping a lawyer on retainer.

Let me try to make a case for how insurance could fit in here. Insurance like this is often predicated on the insured meeting various conditions. I could see a forward-thinking insurance company offering terms like these:

1. Require the producer to pre-declare exact claims of all source material for both music and video. For example, "1:02-3:55; Public domain music. Sourced from ...", "0:00-0:10; Licensed stock intro. License details ...", "5:07-5:15; Fair use news clip. Source at ...", "0:15-15:35; Original footage. Taken with X camera at Y location on Z date.".

2. Perform random audits on videos including tracking down all claimed sources to make sure they're documenting their sources correctly.

3. Offer running video through a ContentID system that can automatically check claimed sources with an internal database of known content. By opting-in, you can reduce your rate.

I think these bring the risk down to similar levels in other industries that insurance companies currently serve. Figuring out the exact rates, plans, kinds and amounts and limits of coverage, rates for different content etc etc etc is all the job of an adjuster. For example, fair use claims might have a higher rate of being contested, so maybe using them would be restricted and/or more expensive. It's in the insurance company's best interest to reduce the number of lawsuits and claims, so they will pursue anti-SLAPP judgements (and lobby for them!) to recoup legal costs of frivolous suits, thus reducing frivolous claims. The producer will have a well-known coverage and be able to manage their risk.

If the pre-declared claims sounds onerous to you, I could see video production tools being able to read specially formatted claim metadata embedded in any source and automatically outputting a properly formatted list of claims with timestamps embedded as metadata in the output. As long as the producer uses properly tagged sources it can be automatic. In fact, this could even be backed up with cryptographic signatures to allow in-place verification that you've purchased a particular license.

Another benefit: My apartment requires me to maintain renters insurance. Similarly, you could provide your cloud provider with proof that you maintain this kind of insurance, in exchange for them promising they won't disconnect your account due to copyright claims (and forward them to your insurance company instead). This combats the "walking up the stack" problem discussed in other threads.