• nibble4bits@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 hours ago

      It’s always a question of money. It costs money to make quality content. YouTube has content because they share ad revenue to their content providers. That expands the more popular the content is because there are more ads displayed. That revenue lets the creators expand their capabilities with better gear and stage sets. Federated networks usually depend initially on volunteers and alternative ways of earning revenue for those instances besides ads.

      • The Menemen!@lemmy.world
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        8 minutes ago

        Tbh money could be the initiative. So many content creators nowadays have platforms beside YouTube. Often even self hosted weboages. If a federated alternative would come up, they could just set up an own server and keep all the earnings.

        This would somehow need to get started though. No idea how.

      • moonbunny@sh.itjust.works
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        2 hours ago

        It’s even more difficult since the content has to be stored somewhere, and needs to be streamed which requires storage and processing power, with the latter needing to be able to scale so the user experience doesn’t get bogged down by new people joining.

        The entire revenue model of compensating the host and content creator does require a rethink, but it’s hard to see how that could be done without paywalling access to host, view, and/or both of the above.

      • Suite404@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        Kind of. I think more than that YouTube has the traffic and people go where traffic is. Especially content creators. Many content creators have patreon accounts or similar to help pay the bills. And I rarely watch YouTube without an ad blocker, which I would assume is becoming more common. Can’t exactly pay creators with revenue that isn’t there.

      • AnjunaSouls@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        Yeah, and the platform is set up in a way that hinders onboarding and discoverability of what’s there (at least, compared to youtube’s approach…). These are all problems that prevent it from replacing YouTube. If you read Peertube’s official site they even say upfront that they’re not trying to be a YouTube replacement