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 3 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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[–] Wistful@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I was just reading this issue on Github last night and I really don't see how PeerTube is any better than a traditional server for hosting videos. The peer part of it seems to have such a miniscule impact on the whole thing that it just feels like a gimmick. I've read that the biggest problem for PeerTube instance hosts is storage and not the bandwidth. The only thing that peers can save you is tiny bit of bandwidth from what I understand.

So from what I've gathered, relying on peers only for hosting the video is completely unviable. And that makes sense, especially for old, unpopular videos, there will be no peers to begin with. Even if every video on the site is being "seeded" by viewers, the reliability of connection and bandwidth would be very bad because you can't know if the peer is some guy on the dial up connection. Even in the perfect scenario where everyone had very reliable connection and good bandwidth, the fact that browsers don't support p2p protocol and rely on a hack/workaround to use it, will mean that there will be delays. So starting the video and rewinding would be painfully slow.

Is there something that I'm missing, or is PeerTube really not that much better than a "normal" video hosting server?

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 months ago

Peertube uses webtorrents, not regular torrents, and doesn't even hook into the larger torrent network, which is seeding most of media on the net.

You're correc, the peer part of peertube is mainly a gimmick at this point, and it's nowhere close to being what torrents already are, a decentralized hosting network.