Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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I understand where you're coming from. I'm not personally a Linux user despite a lot of what I value overlapping with the Linux community broadly. I do think much of the technology we use today can and should be replaced by open source alternatives and I'm optimistic about growing interest globally in that regard. I'm not at all suggesting we submit to the new corporate-controlled Internet or go back to a pre-2000s lifestyle.
But I think we're talking about different things, so let me just bring it back to YouTube. A lot of what we can do is limited by inescapable expenses: server costs and labor. We can say labor is optional because a lot of open source projects are developed and maintained by volunteers. But people do need money to live, so this project becomes the side gig, not the full time job. YouTube's already a mess with moderation. Imagine a video platform with no full time staff to review illegal uploaded content, DMCA requests, comments, etc. But the bigger issue is the scale of YouTube, trying to make billions of videos play seamlessly at all times all over the world and just work. I can't fathom the infrastructure needed for that. It would cost far more than it would make in donations if that was all it was accepting. No ads means the budget is that much smaller. If the small percentage of users with YouTube Premium doesn't bring in enough to keep things running, the open source version wouldn't either. And fewer people would be willing to pay for it.
This is what I mean by services that are unsustainable. Yes, clearly the technology makes it possible. But there is a cost to it and I think we're entering a time when we don't get those things for free anymore.
I think the primary difference in our views is that I don't think Youtube needs to be replaced by something like it to be replaced. I don't claim to have a viable approach in mind, but I'm certain one exists.
I would love a federated network of video platforms as long as they can all be searched collectively. Would be great if videos could even be migrated to other instances if storage becomes too limited on one of them. Yeah, it probably isn't ideal that YouTube is all one platform, but it certainly makes it easy to find what you're looking for most of the time.