Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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How do we replace YouTube? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 months ago by WhiteBerry@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Hi, my post is focusing specifically on YouTube since I observed the following categories have less intrusive solutions or privacy focused solutions, even if they are paid:

Operating Systems (Linux, for example)
Instant Messaging (Element, for example)
Community Messaging (Revolt, for example)
E-Mail (Proton, for example)
Office (libreoffice, for example)
Password Managers (Bitwarden, for example)

However, how do we distribute videos and watch them without data collection? I am NOT asking how do I use a privacy-focused front-end for YouTube, by the way, I am aware they exist.

I am wondering how we obtain a FOSS solution to something super critical such as YouTube. It is critical since it contains a lot of educational content (I'd wager more than any other platform), and arguably the most informative platform, despite having to filter through a lot of trash. During COVID, we even saw lecturers from universities upload their content on YouTube and telling students to watch those lectures. (I have first-hand experience with this at a respectable university).

I refuse to accept that there is nothing we can do about it.

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[–] 0laura@lemmy.world 9 points 2 months ago (3 children)

This seems like one of the few problems where crypto might actually be useful. It would allow people to automatically and anonymously pay both the creator and the host of that video. Maybe make it a federated system and every host gets paid based on how many Bytes they send. The creator gets a share of that money and the whole system uses something like Monero or whatever. Not sure what the costs of that would be, but I assume its not too outrageous. If it was, YouTube wouldn't be able to exist.

[–] readbeanicecream@lemm.ee 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Isn't that what LBRY is trying to do?

[–] 0laura@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

Basically, but I'm not sure how well it'll work longterm due to the website not really contributing anything to the system afaik. Though I have to admit I haven't looked that far into it, just posting my notreallyeducated guess. https://lbry.com/faq/host-content

[–] doodledup@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Youtube has a Google Search to back the 15 years of constant losses by Youtube.

[–] 0laura@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

That's true, you'd definitely have to charge more than what YouTube makes with ads. But I don't think Google would keep YouTube alive if it generated only like, 10% of the money it costs them to operate.

Edit: That's why I said "it's probably not too outrageous", I know that YouTube probably operates at a loss, but I don't think the cost is so great that noone would pay to fund a service like that. Though I'm obviously just guessing, I might be totally wrong

[–] doodledup@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Google is a whole package. They can earn money with youtube by serving ads on Google search that are fueled by your Youtube data.

[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 months ago

People are working on this for general decentralized storage, some of them have existed and been functional for 5+ years, I'm not familiar with all the names but there's jstor (jstore?), filecoin, etc. When you have a system where you need to manage a database (and everybody's copy of the database is the same) but you need to do it in a decentralized, P2P way, blockchain is really the only solution. A system which records who is hosting what and allows people to buy & sell storage is exactly this: a database with some buy/sell frontend.