No one understands the astronomical bandwidth, CPU/GPU intensive calcs, and data storage necessities required to do anything close to what YouTube currently does.

There is no way under this warm sun that a fediverse version of YouTube will ever be feasible, unless someone like literally yourself is willing to pay extraordinary high amounts of money for all the required infrastructure and daily maintenance to run it.

I would want to see some data on costs, because I think you might be overselling the difficulty and cost a bit (I don’t actually know, just my good faith belief). Imagine if every content creator ran their own instance. Instead of needing to worry about every user coming to a single group of servers, the Creator only needs to worry about the cost of hosting their own content and the traffic they get.

With the number of YouTubers who have to get sponsorships and Patreon anyway, it doesn’t really seem that infeasible or unreasonable to expect content creators to run their own thing or pay to have someone else to do it. Doesn’t seem like the YouTube money is that lucrative, anymore, so not like it would be all that different, either.

gbtimes.com/how-much-does-youtube/

fastercapital.com/…/YouTube-cost-structure--YouTu…

Estimated annual server cost: approximately $1 billion

Estimated annual data center cost: approximately $5 billion

Estimated bandwidth cost: $3 billion

Sure, but you’re assuming all content is on one server. With something like PeerTube, content is federated.

That said, I don’t think federation is the solution here because a popular video is going to completely swamp that instance, but something P2P would probably work if you can stream from multiple seeders. Even if you copy like we do w/ Lemmy, you’d still end up with a handful of instances that are way more popular than the rest and those would get hammered if there’s a particularly popular video.

If you can spread that $6B (ignoring bandwidth here) over 10M people, you end up with a very reasonable $600/year, and costs would go down as more people join the network. I also assume a lot of that is duplication to handle demand spikes, which is baked in to the P2P system, so a P2P system would probably be way cheaper to scale up.

Sure, and none of that is necessary with a proper P2P system. If I’m torrenting something, it’ll naturally pull from seeders near me over seeders on the other side of the planet, so load balancing happens by every client being greedy.

The complex load balancing is only necessary because it’s a centralized service.