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The web is already federated, YouTube just happens to be one of the most popular nodes. Fediverse systems like PeerTube are great, but they don't change anythin

The web is already federated, YouTube just happens to be one of the most popular nodes. Fediverse systems like PeerTube are great, but they don't change anything; in a world where something like PeerTube is as popular as YouTube we'd see the exact same complaints about the most popular node.

indigochill 6y ago
> The web is already federated, YouTube just happens to be one of the most popular nodes. The network layer of the web is federated, but the application layer usually isn't. That is, if you care just about who you send TCP traffic to, then yes, the internet alone is sufficient, but if you want to think about federation at the content level, the internet alone enables that but doesn't make it very easy. Something like PeerTube makes it easy. And you need to pull it up to the content/application level if you want to do things like implement content searching/filtering across a federated network of hosts. > Fediverse systems like PeerTube are great, but they don't change anything Disagree. Nobody can host their own YouTube server. That's the point of federated video hosting: (a) anyone can spin up their own host (or join a host they agree with if they don't have the tech skills) and (b) these hosts can network with like-minded hosts to build a YouTube-sized content library without any single entity owning the entire library. A world without PeerTube would not give typical users this option. > in a world where something like PeerTube is as popular as YouTube we'd see the exact same complaints about the most popular node. We are starting to see this problem a bit on Mastodon because people are piling into the most popular node and having their opinions about how it should run instead of understanding that the point is if they disagree with how a node is run, it's (relatively) easy to run one of their own (or bribe a technical friend into running one). But I'd argue this is a problem in the domain of user understanding/education rather than a problem built into the nature of Mastodon whereas centralized global-scale moderation is a problem baked into YouTube.

indigochill 6y ago

> The web is already federated, YouTube just happens to be one of the most popular nodes. The network layer of the web is federated, but the application layer usually isn't. That is, if you care just about who you send TCP traffic to, then yes, the internet alone is sufficient, but if you want to think about federation at the content level, the internet alone enables that but doesn't make it very easy. Something like PeerTube makes it easy. And you need to pull it up to the content/application level if you want to do things like implement content searching/filtering across a federated network of hosts. > Fediverse systems like PeerTube are great, but they don't change anything Disagree. Nobody can host their own YouTube server. That's the point of federated video hosting: (a) anyone can spin up their own host (or join a host they agree with if they don't have the tech skills) and (b) these hosts can network with like-minded hosts to build a YouTube-sized content library without any single entity owning the entire library. A world without PeerTube would not give typical users this option. > in a world where something like PeerTube is as popular as YouTube we'd see the exact same complaints about the most popular node. We are starting to see this problem a bit on Mastodon because people are piling into the most popular node and having their opinions about how it should run instead of understanding that the point is if they disagree with how a node is run, it's (relatively) easy to run one of their own (or bribe a technical friend into running one). But I'd argue this is a problem in the domain of user understanding/education rather than a problem built into the nature of Mastodon whereas centralized global-scale moderation is a problem baked into YouTube.