Creating a Reddit alternative is easy because you only need to host text, and text doesn’t take up a lot of space. The entirety of Wikipedia’s text, for instance, can be compressed into something like 22 GB, which is small enough that it can be stored on low-end consumer hardware from 20 years ago. The more difficult problem is getting a user base: people don’t want to switch unless they have a compelling reason to, and even with Reddit shitting the bed recently, Reddit alternatives are still pretty empty.
With video, you have both problems. Like Reddit alternatives, getting people to switch and produce content for the platform is difficult as hell. However, even if you somehow manage to succeed at that, video takes up an enormous amount of space. It simply isn’t feasible to host that much content without millions/billions of dollars of funding available if the platform takes off, and no company wants to invest that sort of money on a low probability gamble competing against one of the largest companies in the history of the world.
But in a federated alternative, no one party is responsible for hosting everything. Altogether it’s a lot of data, yes. But it’s not like Google has the whole of the internet stored on its servers.
It might not be that hard to store. A lot of Youtube videos are just filler, you wouldn’t want your instance to store massive amounts of mixtape videos for example, neither would you want to store 10 different encodings of the same video. On the flip-side, you can get 20TB drives easily enough if you have the pipe to run the server locally; and distributed storage makes it more feasible to use consumer grade hardware that’s more prone to failure.
No chance.
Creating a Reddit alternative is easy because you only need to host text, and text doesn’t take up a lot of space. The entirety of Wikipedia’s text, for instance, can be compressed into something like 22 GB, which is small enough that it can be stored on low-end consumer hardware from 20 years ago. The more difficult problem is getting a user base: people don’t want to switch unless they have a compelling reason to, and even with Reddit shitting the bed recently, Reddit alternatives are still pretty empty.
With video, you have both problems. Like Reddit alternatives, getting people to switch and produce content for the platform is difficult as hell. However, even if you somehow manage to succeed at that, video takes up an enormous amount of space. It simply isn’t feasible to host that much content without millions/billions of dollars of funding available if the platform takes off, and no company wants to invest that sort of money on a low probability gamble competing against one of the largest companies in the history of the world.
But in a federated alternative, no one party is responsible for hosting everything. Altogether it’s a lot of data, yes. But it’s not like Google has the whole of the internet stored on its servers.
It might not be that hard to store. A lot of Youtube videos are just filler, you wouldn’t want your instance to store massive amounts of mixtape videos for example, neither would you want to store 10 different encodings of the same video. On the flip-side, you can get 20TB drives easily enough if you have the pipe to run the server locally; and distributed storage makes it more feasible to use consumer grade hardware that’s more prone to failure.