If the fediverse had to deal with the amount of traffic and content from YouTube in its current state, it would collapse immediately.

The Fediverse would be a very different place if it was hosting anything remotely close to YouTube tier traffic. FFS, how much of the Fediverse is even outside English speaking countries? None of our systems are getting bombarded with hundreds of gigabytes of Good Morning messages like Whatsapp is dealing with in India, for instance.

So much of the content on these big services is both trivial in terms of audience and enormous in terms of relative file size. My sister-in-law sent me a thirty minute compilation video from their latest summer vacation, which she hosted to YouTube. That video is going to get maybe five views, unless one of us goes back to watch it a second time. How much is it costing YouTube to host and stream? Obviously far more than what they make from any of us.

Now scale that up to millions.

The Fediverse isn't trying to do anything remotely like that.

All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit. And so here we are.

Or that’s what we’re led to believe. Someone could say the same for an OS, but we have many open source alternatives. We need an open source alternative to YouTube, and perhaps with some innovation that may be possible. You don’t need storage, for example, if content is just streamed in a p2p manner, even with a time delay so people can watch something whenever

Edit: some context https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P2PTV

For the idiots downvoting explain why, or I’ll just believe you’re YouTube shills

Yeah that's what I did when reddit shit the bed. I'm spending the free time with books and getting back into gaming. It's an improvement really.

Nebula is paid, you can also pay YouTube and remove ads.

Nebula is cheaper but it also has a very small fraction of the content that YouTube has. So I really don’t see why moving to another paid service with less content is a solution for anyone.

PeerTube. Except nobody's going to use it until everybody uses it.

That sounds like the perfect beverage to keep my reactions razor sharp while I enjoy the split-second thrills of playing League of Legends with my attractive, ethnically diverse friends.

You think Google didn't already think of that? From Youtube's ToS:

Right to Monetize

You grant to YouTube the right to monetize your Content on the Service (and such monetization may include displaying ads on or within Content or charging users a fee for access). This Agreement does not entitle you to any payments. Starting November 18, 2020, any payments you may be entitled to receive from YouTube under any other agreement between you and YouTube (including for example payments under the YouTube Partner Program, Channel memberships or Super Chat) will be treated as royalties. If required by law, Google will withhold taxes from such payments.

It might be doable automatically. If they inject the ads at the time of viewing and not before storing the video, then it's possible that two downloads just a few sconds apart will have different ads. So if yt-dlp downloads twice and compares the two files, theoretically it can get a pretty good idea with high confidence of what content is ad and what content is... well... content.

That technique of course would require multiple downloads of the same file, but yeah. I suppose yt-dlp could also keep a backlog of "fingerprints"/"signatures" of ads its seen in the past that can be used to remove ads from later downloads with the same ads without having to download twice.

Also, even absent such a technique as what I just described, programs like NewPipe and such will still probably allow for manually skipping ads where I'm sure the official YouTube app or the web interface would deny/prevent skipping.

Edit: Actually, it also occurs to me that in order to make ads not skippable, the server will have to send messages to the *official clients saying "and here's the portion of the video you can't skip." In which case yt-dlp or NewPipe or whatever could just be like "oh, cool, that's the bits I need to skip atuomatically." And if the server doesn't send that metadata, then all ads will be skipable on the official clients. (Though I guess I'm assuming that they'll move exclusively to these injected-into-the-video-stream ads and away from the ads as they work now.)

This isn't really representative of how server side ad injection works, it doesn't imply anything being different about the UI when it comes to ads. Many of your favorite streaming apps use SSAI, you still get the ad indicators.

It's just that the content and the ads are both coming from the same source, so that makes it challenging to block ads by deny-listing ad serving domains, the same infrastructure is serving both.

Stop this tantrum throwing and just buy premium.

No. I don’t think I will.

Please watch this ad or pay to remove the ad, in order to submit your useful response.

YouTube used to host and stream videos for free, without ads, for years.

I wouldn't piss on Google if it was on fire. They will never get another cent from me. They are a charter member of the Tech Axis of Evil.

Took me less than a minute of googling to find "hey, I'm paying for premium, why am I seeing adverts?" and it turns out there are a whole pile of exceptions that means YT can show you ads even when you're paying them not to.

They're not getting a penny from me while they host hate on their platform, for one.

Second, fuck em. Am I supposed to care about Google? The company that routinely ruins everything good in every product they've ever had? Am I to assume their bullshit ends once they get my credit card?

I paid good money for Google Play Music for years only for them to destroy it. I paid for Google Drive for years only for them to break the desktop syncing functions. I've been paying for Android since it started, and they have routinely broken my ability to use my own phone the way I please, and now they actively punish me for it.

And you want me to keep paying them?

Nah. I'm not helping them. If they can't afford to host it for free, fine. Let it burn.

Youtube is already being paid in my data and I support the creators I watch already. So no thanks.

Thing is, ads are fine, ads that are mandatory and break the experience are antithetical to the very notion of user centric media. This is not a linear broadcast medium.