One advantage of linking a YouTube video in an aggregator setting is if the video goes viral, everyone is spamming Google’s server for delivery instead of hammering smaller services. Video is pretty expensive, so for now I see no issue abusing YouTube (assuming everyone here is already ad-blocking & DNS sinking anyhow).
Peertube uses the torrent protocol to distribute the load among active viewers.
I found a $15/mo server with unlimited (10Gbps) bandwidth for my personal instance. It would only become expensive if were to open it up for public registrations and use a lot of cloud storage space. Anything I upload can theoretically be viewed a billion times at no extra cost.
That’s still a lot of monthly money for a lot of folks which hurts accessibility for many, not all. The fact that we can’t agree on codecs throws yet another wrench in things as you need multiple resolutions & formats. I’m happy it exists tho & uses distributed serving.
In my case, I was already paying for this VPS to host other services, so the cost of adding peertube was essentially nothing. The server has enough storage and bandwidth to support dozens of users and hundreds videos, so the cost per person would be pretty low.
There’s a cost to doing the (re)encoding & storing multiple version of video. It’s relatively not more data to send one codec versus another, but storage & processing aren’t free either (especially with AV1 requiring hardware encoding unless you want to grind forever on a file).
That’s has to do with the backend server that’ve been chosen at the preference page. Servers becomes unavailable all the time, and the frontend don’t change a server when it happens. Just choose a few servers that works well and you trust, and switch back and forth when needed.
Here’s a little hack if you do have to use youtube:
Every ad: you swipe down, close video, restart,… After a couple of times doing that, the abuse-filter kicks in and it will just show you the video. If you keep doing that a while, ads just stop for a while as it thinks it’s being abused. 😅
Probably will stop working one day too, but still works for me today.
Insidious and Piped are great but I hate it when people post them, it’s always a gamble on if it’s a legit instance or a malicious site. IMO YouTube or redirect.invidious.io are the only ways people should share YouTube videos
This is a bit of me-thing, but yeah, I’m annoyed that YouTube is the way it is. It’s non-trivial to embed videos from there without violating the GDPR, so embedded videos are basically not a thing these days on general-purpose social media.
And personally, I also want to avoid the tracking from clicking through to a YouTube video and Google encourages long-ass videos, so I always hesitate before clicking through. Also, people without ad blockers go through a completely different circle of hell before a video starts.
Basically, I miss the days when memes could just be short videos. Where everyone could see on the embed that, oh, it’s a 30 second video, I can watch that. And then they’d just click play, without leaving the page.
I do understand that likely no one would care to provide the bandwidth for dumb meme videos on PeerTube either. But yeah, I just dream of that being a thing.
If I could find a good Peertube instance, I’d take it upon myself to reupload everything I like there. I collect the 1080p(60h if available) clips locally for Kodi anyway…
So just use Googles resources, build decentralized identities (@ all content creators!) and you are just fine for the dooms day when Youtube uses DRM or something
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