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Should YouTube federate?

#EvanPoll #poll

  • Strong yes (33%, 115 votes)
  • Qualified yes (29%, 101 votes)
  • Qualified no (21%, 73 votes)
  • Strong no (17%, 59 votes)
348 voters. Poll end: 2 weeks ago

Evan Prodromou reshared this.

in reply to Evan Prodromou

If this means YouTube is a caching CDN for all the PeerTube instances, and all of YouTube computing and bandwidth is available for viewing videos from any PeerTube instance now and in the future: Yes, YouTube should federate like that

If it's just one-way, channeling into YouTube? No.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to Peter Rushforth 🇨🇦🇺🇦

@prushforth Yes, that would be pretty cool. We could definitely use a good place vocabulary, and it would be cool to also federate the location-sharing functionality.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

as much as I would love to watch YouTube videos from PeerTube without ads, there's no incentive for Google to do that. It wouldn't bring on any new users to YouTube and it would reduce ad revenue. More work for less money means it'll never happen.
Same situation with Instagram, sadly.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

I've said strong yes, but I don't think it'll happen because it's not compatible with their business model.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

If they can get more traffic (or present their existing users more content) without eating into their ad or subscription revenues then they could be keen.

It's intriguing that they've turned YouTube into a social network where channels can share images in addition to videos. Maybe they would benefit from federation allowing more seamless sharing of videos on other social networks, again with the proviso that they will want to receive ad or subscription revenue for video impressions.

in reply to Evan Prodromou

Some functions might be hard to bring over but subs and community posts would probably be easy as hell to implement, they have service friendly handles now too.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

Should it federate for the benfit of its audience and content producers? Yes. Should it federate for the benefit of its shareholders? Not a chance (imho).
in reply to Evan Prodromou

if there was a fragmented ecosystem of video platforms with comparable user share, or of YouTube was losing user growth, then yes.

I don't think that scenario is a foregone conclusion, but I don't see it happening without Alphabet totally fumbling the ball worse than it did during the adpocalypse, or without a large grassroots movement.

I think if you see that in the platforms that have turned on or promise to turn on AP (Threads, Tumblr, Flipboard) vs those that haven't (X, FB, Reddit)

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to Evan Prodromou

everything should. let only the public decide what goes viral on the new universal social web.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

YouTube displaying videos from other platforms "might" make some sense.

However, seeing YouTube videos from other clients is ALREADY a ongoing fight (in the sense that there are already alternatives and they already fighting them)

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to Evan Prodromou

Not anymore. 5 years ago? A qualified yes. Now? Strong no.

Almost everything at YT is now designed to play out ads and polarize. None of this has anything to do with the values of the Fediverse.

in reply to Evan Prodromou

qualified yes because I'm sure there'd be a catch somewhere...so whatever the catch is, my choice would be "yes, but without that catch"

(Didn't take time to think too deeply about what the catch would be)

in reply to Evan Prodromou

YT feels like a bit like Woolworths did in the years before it crashed.

Still some fun bits, but the shelves are mostly full of poor quality stuff that nobody wants.

I can see a future for YT Music and YT News but the rest of it seems to be going down the pan.

Unknown parent

Evan Prodromou
@nlupo we are allowed to have other choices.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

Qualified yes. They should support open standards, but without some sort of accountability, they could remove it at any time, or pervert any federation to harm the fediverse... It would be foolish to rely on it in the current climate. Perhaps some government mandate, like the adversarial interoperability Cory Doctorow has proposed?

Also their moderation is so bad that it's been radicalizing people into Nazis, so federation might make fedi more Nazi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right_pipeline

in reply to Evan Prodromou

I mean the classic Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish, YouTube certainly has the numbers to force people to adopt proprietary extensions to open protocols. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extinguish

But there are probably other evil options an adversary could come up with. What if migrating accounts, commenting, or following only works one way? What if things they don't like sometimes work, but are unreliable or slow? https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/

There's no reason to expect continuous good faith.

in reply to Evan Prodromou

I think I find it unlikely that they'll want to federate their videos given the market share they control right now

I could see them partially federating maybe? Youtube videos get federated as a title+link to the video (similar to how Mastodon renders articles). And then you could like/comment on the post. They've also have a sort of community feed thing where channels run polls or post status updates which they could federate.

in reply to Evan Prodromou

YouTube won't. It'd be a huge amount of work and expense to get that working right and there'd be no corresponding payoff. YouTube is *expensive* to run and, for better or worse, the bills do have to be paid. (Whether those bills are over-charged for, or by how much, is a rich source of people fighting with little knowledge, but those bills definitely exist)
in reply to Evan Prodromou

Interesting results. I'm a strong yes. It's a social publishing service with subscriptions, likes, and comments. It fits really well into the Fediverse model.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

An awful lot of people got mad that this could never happen and it wasn't worth talking about.

First, we talk about fictional things all the time. It's fun and harmless.

in reply to Evan Prodromou

Second, it's pretty clear to me why YouTube would federate.

One reason is if the Fediverse was larger than YouTube, it would be advantageous. With 2.5B MAUs on YouTube, I think we have a long way to go before we outnumber them. But maybe not forever.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to Evan Prodromou

Oh, I nearly forgot: a lot of people thought the culture and ads on YouTube would be bad for existing Fediverse users.

Which, like, it's really easy to block a server if you don't want to interact with them. We have the technology.

in reply to Evan Prodromou

ublock origin and privacy badger seem to do a great job of zapping the ads, at least.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

I wonder if it would be possible to build a federation-layer ad-blocker tool, designed to block any incoming posts which are detected to be ads.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

I voted for qualified no because we have a big problem in Brazil with far right buying so much ads it infects your algorithm even if you strongly oppose it. I worry that bleeds out here.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

I have been told, no, _educated_ many times that the base and rule 0 of Youtube is that One Gets Paid For Videos. And everyone want to get paid but do not want to pay for anything.
I am not sure that would fit with the Fediverse model in any way.