I don't think even a decentralized service could hold a mass equal to youtube. That would require that either the owners of all instances pay from their own pockets with mostly no income to support it, or that every user paid up, which is not going to happen, at least not in a service like youtube.

That doesn't address the issue of storage and compute power for streaming to the absurd amount of users.

There's been attempts before and it all comes down to file transfer time and storage (because at the time the servers weren't transcoding for streaming the file. Secondary issue of buy in, like what we see with niche communities staying on reddit instead of moving to the fediverse.

There already exist a number of projects out there like peertube. Take a look at how even the most popular instances are doing. It's not well.

The closest thing was around a decade ago, the popcorntime or popcornflix or whatever it was called app/program that was just a nice front end for torrenting videos and watching them before they finished downloading. Each individual user was responsible for their own storage, network connection speed, and compute power to render the video for themselves. Each end user was also contributing back through helping others to download the file via standard torrenting p2p stuff.

So now you need a front end to host the magnet links to the files, and a robust set of seed servers so no video is ever truly lost. That still doesn't cover a significant portion of youtube's functionality like reccomendations, comments, allowing creators to edit/adjust videos after the fact.

Unlike reddit, youtube is technologically complicated and impressive. Hell, read up on some of the stuff Netflix has had to do to achieve reasonable streaming quality and speed on an insanely smaller curated library.

A decentralized federated solution is possible, but there's a shit ton more that would have to go into this than just appealing to the concept.

It's still just as expensive, you're just adding administrative overhead.

You'd also spread the cost to more people, true, but who would operate a server for free (based on donations, but if it's federated why should I pay for that one server?). Also, do you trust all those people to keep operating the storage for years to come? Or are you done with losing access to videos, because someone lost interest in running their instance?

Storage and bandwidth costs for video on demand are so incredibly high, I don't think we'll get a federated alternative to YouTube any time soon.

https://grayjay.app/

peertube started with that idea. Unfortunately is poorly maintained, also because humans are inherently evil, it's a nightmare to moderate.

Honestly this feels like the only possible way to win against Youtube. Goal could be to just create standardized decentralized platform where number of different companies/organizations can host and serve their own content while still being searchable and accessible from single client application.

Major problem with Mastodon, Lemmy and Peertube is searching and browsing content from multiple instances is still difficult.

I think it could work if most users contribute to the maintenance cost of their favorite instance. It’s just like mastodon and lemmy, but everything costs more.