I think this decentralization and federation is what web3 is all about, without all the corporations calling everything to do with monkey pixel art that costs a million dollars “web3”
There actually already is! PeerTube is the fediverse alternative to YouTube, hopefully it’ll be able to grow more sometime in the near future.
I have a hard time imaging a free, open video hosting service will ever succeed. YouTube’s infrastructure is insane, and that’s reflected in their costs.
Any sustainable video hosting platform is going to need a solid monetization plan because the costs of hosting and streaming exabytes of video is just not sustainable on donations. Platforms like Floatplane or Nebula seem like good alternatives, but they’ve chosen for a subscription-only model - which I personally think is the fairest solution.
I agree that it’s difficult, although the whole point of having a federated platform is that no single node would have to host exabytes themselves but each instance could host a certain amount of videos that are relevant to its topic. This of course comes with other downsides but I don’t think there’s ever going to be a perfect solution.
That has the same problem as any federated service like Lemmy… all that content only exists at the whims of whomever is willing to run the server and foot that bill. If they decide to delete their server, or just screw up and it dies… all that is gone.
We’re basically relying on thousands of individuals to be good quality sysadmins and infosec engineers, all for free.
I guess we could move to a mirroring/caching concept so that no single node contains the only copy of loads of data, but then we’re duplicating huge quantities of data.
Like even today with Lemmy, there’s now thousands of instances stood up and I bet 2/3 of those will be dead within 6 months. So all those posts and comments that get made on those nodes will just go poof… which might be fine for a chat system, but for forums and microblogging (mastodon) that seems terrible
