this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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It could be done if peertube used a scheme like BitTorrent. We are approaching a time where enough users have sufficient upstream bandwidth for video.
But then, even without hosting costs, creating videos takes much more time and effort than writing a short text.
Peertube does allow downloading from peers like bittorrent. But you still need to host the whole video, it only would alleviate data transfer. And I don't think you'd want to not host the video and rely entirely on people sharing your video and continuing to seed it for it to be available. So for running a channel or sharing videos that you have produced you will still need to host the files somewhere.
This is something PeerTube already does. Viewers of a video will be a peer and so can other PeerTube servers also be for each others videos.
Bandwidth isn’t the biggest issue. Storage is. The video need to be stored somewhere and storage is expensive.
We need something like Siacoin, that’s easy to use and easy to donate or sell cheap storage.
Nice idea, but then everytime a video that contains anything licensed by the content mafia is uploaded (even partly), the user in question breaks that license opening themselves up to lawsuits.
In a perfect world where only properly free content is shared that model would work. But that is not how most content shared on YouTube looks like.
not a word.
A long time ago I read a paper how to mitigate this. Without remembering the details, the idea was: 1. One peer never holds a complete file, only parts of it. 2. You need a key to find all parts of the file and get them in the right order. So Disney can only accuse you of having an incomplete and unusable part of their movie.
But copyrighted material is only one issue. Do you want your hardware to be used for distributing depictions of sexual abuse, or inciting hatred and violence? Any YouTube replacement will need strong moderation tools.
That is essentially how bittorrent works anyway. In Germany people lost in court over this. Also portions of a copyrighted file are a problem. If they can "proof" that they got a relevant portion (more than the typical fair use seconds) you are still on the hook.
'Landgericht Hamburg' proofing will be hard, admittedly. But doesn't BT just split up a file in x parts, so each part is watchable? What if you sliced differently, like every 100th byte of a file? Or even bitwise slicing? Not one 600 s snippet but 60000 10 ms snippets from throughout the movie.
That could help, but if a file is not shared that much (yet) or not many people are online at the moment, a single peer will still share many more parts, likely ending up with having shared significant amounts.
The concept is that will only happen if you have watched that video depicting sexual abuse, because your peertube client (the website) won't download videos you didn't watch.
I was thinking of a hypothetical system were peers provide storage for creators independently of what they are watching (in response to 'videos take too much storage for individuals to host' comment. For peertube, you are right.