So Elon gutted Twitter, and people jumped ship to Mastodon. Now spez did… you know… and we’re on Lemmy and Kbin. Can we have a YouTube to PeerTube exodus next? With the whole ad-pocalypse over there, seems like Google is itching for it.
Memes and text comments can be easily self hosted, but video hosting requires an expensive server farm with petabytes of SSDs, bandwidth and lots of GPUs for transcoding. Ok if you make a subscription only service like nebula or floatplane, but it’s impossibile to host an ad-free service and rely on the few donations.
Linus Tech Tips recently did a video where they go over the cost and complexity of running something like YouTube.
Frankly I’m surprised 4k video wasn’t locked behind Premium from the start.
Part of me wonders if YouTube could have scaled up more gracefully if they pushed a subscription option earlier (and priced it better, I hate how it’s bundled with a music service I don’t want).
Ads fucking suck, but I think most people recognize they are a necessary evil in order to run any kind of free social video platform at a meaningful scale.
i agree with that video also, free 4k video for something that most times it’s just entertainment when you’re doing something else, it’s a bit pointless
i have a 4k monitor but most of the times i watch 720p from my invidious instance because i prefer saving my own bandwidth to the visual quality for this kind of content.
If it’s a movie, then it’s different, 4k it’s a must
If a platform didn’t do transcoding, and requested content creators do it themselves, I wonder if that’d help enough to make it more feasible? Then its just bandwidth and storage, and storage has only gotten cheaper over the years.
