You're going to get a flood of porn, pirated content, illegal-for-other-reasons content, and, of course, nazis who have been banned from all the other platforms.

Which will, of course, drive all the normies away. (Well, okay, all the pirated content might not, but then you'll also include 'all the media companies' and 'the government' as your list of enemies.)

And if you add federated moderation (Like Mastodon did), you're going to quickly understand why federated moderation is a labour-sucking, drama-ridden, centralized-censorship, tire pyre.[1] (Like Mastodon did.)

[1] Mastodon instance administrators blacklist instances that produce problem content and problem users.[2] (Child pornography, nazis, furries, etc.) These ban-lists are centralized, because nobody has time to investigate every single other instance in the network. I hope you trust the person running those centralized lists!

[2] Oh, and if a troll group does not like a particular person, they can follow him around, shitting on every instance that he posts in. How do instance operators deal with this sort of thing? By banning[3] the target of the trolls, because then they can stop wasting time playing whack-a-mole.

[3] https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17801404/mastodon-harassm...

I think the “niche aggregator” part of the proposal (c) completely addresses your moderation concerns.

No, it doesn't, because that is exactly how Mastodon instances work - or rather, fail to work.

Really what I'm proposing is just a protocol between hosting services and aggregators, that they can use to accept sources from any supporting hosting service, if they so choose.

The aggregator can build their site however they want. So then the moderation and community guidance is their responsibility. Maybe the site doesn't have comments, maybe the site has a 30 day source verification timeframe. Unsurprisingly I don't have the solution to the internet's cultural problems, except to say that moderation is probably the hardest problem for any internet community, and YouTube hasn't figured it out yet either.

In some countries, the hosting services would also be on the hook for policing of content on their hosting. Not everywhere has safe harbour type laws, and some authorities have the ability to take down servers they deem break the law.

Of course, an aggregator could accept all public sources, and inevitably succumb to the unmoderated internet.

Do you have a link about mastadon's moderation problems?

In addition to Wil Wheaton's experience linked above, we have:

https://nolanlawson.com/2018/08/31/mastodon-and-the-challeng...

https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-water-888c10e... [1]

https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentr... [2]

[1] See section on identity and moderation - you can't decouple them when you have a hybrid between a content platform and a social media application (Which is what any video hosting service that allows comments, or shows recommended videos, or cross-links to other distributed aggregators is.)

[2] Bad[3] people show up to the community, everyone loses their mind, hard-coded bans starts happening, because the community interfaces with things like app stores, and app stores have policies that don't care one whit about your federated free-as-in-speech ideals, not to mention that developers and moderators are human beings too, and maybe they personally can't stand allowing furries/commies/fascists/homosexuals/homophobes/Englishmen in their space.

[3] For whatever someone's definition of 'bad' is.

[2] seems more like an instance where we need more app stores that understand how the internet works. The idea that we're going to ban Tumblr because it has porn on it but allow web browsers is so horrendously misguided that it's a singularly unique example of corporate doublethink.

Wil Wheaton is a poor person to choose here; He is an incredibly toxic personality who's presence on the internet causes more people to turn to the alt-right.

I say this in good faith, as I'm not part of the alt-right nor do I agree in any way with them. But toxic people are of all kinds and we should be aware of those in our camp who do harm to our causes by acting in deleterious ways.

--

However, it raises a more valid point about 'what do we do about controversial figures' in general, and you would expect, as with most federated services, to be able to prevent "non-local" personas to be blocked from interacting with local users.

In those situations though it degrades the experience; the best part about mastadon though is that you get to choose who you federate with, so you could, in theory, have linked mastadon installations for government officials (who are often controversial) and signup could be linked with an oauth2 identity system that ties back to a real identity somehow (this would be possible in Estonia with their e-ID systems).

Out of curiosity, in what way is Wil Wheaton incredibly toxic and how does he turn people to the alt-right? I did some googling, but couldn't find anything specific.

It's not just one or two things; it's his general demeanour and method of engaging with people who disagree with him on any small thing.

He will denigrate, attempt to belittle and often pick very bad faith arguments about the smallest of issues.

To give an example of his demenour: https://youtu.be/pHckKckhBYc

There's also this account from a fan, which goes into how he is: https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.874144-I-need...

He also called PewDiePie "A Racist Piece of Shit Bigot" and while PewDiePie did use a racial epithet and there's no excuse for that, he did apologise profusely and regardless that's not a decent way to engage a stranger. https://boundingintocomics.com/2019/04/02/wil-wheaton-attack...

He will block you for any disagreement; and I don't mean people being crappy to him, anything that goes against what he says: https://steemit.com/blocking/@awgonnerman/is-this-why-wil-wh...

For whatever it's worth his introduction to mastadon was mired in controversy after he bleated calls to have a user blacklisted from the platform for the following joke:

> “Hey, did you watch that awesome show on Bofa last night?”

> “What’s Bofa?”

> points to crotch “Bofa deez nuts down here.”

And when Mastadon wouldn't (couldn't) blacklist the user from the platform he got viciously angry.

EDIT: His fans are on hackernews; please don't "downvote to disagree"; he is known to be toxic and curates blocklists of anyone who slights him in any way. If you disagree, please prove me wrong.

A federated system is better for this, since the instances can decide to ignore / blacklist other instances hosting content they deem unsavory, and each instance can set their rules, like PeerTube.

I'm currently working on something just like this.

https://www.mynexus.io

(It's 95% ready but still a WIP, so excuse any clunkiness and the lack of content)

It's a content aggregator for content creators (plus custom postings) -- Make your YouTube channel, Vimeo Vids, Twitch streams, etc. available to your audience all in one spot.*

My hopes is that once this catches on, it will become easier for new video hosting services, etc. to pop up since the huge current barrier to entry--providing an audience for content creators--is no longer a necessity. The only thing new services need to compete on it the value they contribute as a content host.

This isn't quite as technical a solution as what you described, but the current problem is that of coupling content hosting and audiences, and I believe severing that connection will bring about many improvements to online content creation and distribution.

Feel free to respond with any questions or email me (yaniv <at> mynexus <dot> io).

*The list was about to include Mixer too, but that opportunity faded away, unfortunately. Will be adding more content sources over time as they are requested by creators.

In other words, separate "curation/recommendation" from "hosting."

I've been thinking the same thing about Amazon lately: things would be a whole lot better for the experience of buying things "on Amazon" if "Amazon.com, the storefront website" and "Amazon.com, the platform+marketplace that sellers register with" were two separate businesses.

I'd love to use the latter without the former—to use some third-party "Amazon client" that talks to Amazon's marketplace backend but has its own way of searching, browsing, and recommending products, with its own curation, its own reviews, its own ratings, etc. added on top. In the end, you'd still be putting Amazon.com warehouse SKUs into your Amazon.com shopping cart, but those SKUs might be ones Amazon.com the website would never have surfaced for you no matter how much you searched.

For just one thing, someone could build a "classic Amazon" frontend that filters out SKUs coming from "Amazon Marketplace" sellers.

For another, someone could build a version that applies actual modern spam/scam-filtering techniques to the SKU database, paring it down such that any random thing ordered from the "safe" subset should actually be what it seems from the listing. (Not the approach that most benefits you if you're Amazon.com-the-website, because its listings might look empty; but certainly a niche to be filled!)

Video storage and delivery is expensive. YouTube can make money because they're piggybacking on Google's massive infrastructure.

Building a tracker/aggregator (like PeerTube etc) is straight forward. It's actually getting video content to clients that is challenging. Video is both large and sensitive to internal ordering. You need packet 1 before you can do anything with packet 2, if you have those but packet 3 is stalled you can't go forward.

To serve video you need enough online storage to actually house it but then enough upstream bandwidth (and good latency) to serve it to clients in real-time. Serving up HD streams at a reasonable bitrate will quickly saturate a gigabit connection.

A network of HTTP servers or even an overlay network like IPFS don't help solve these problems. Video needs a lot of storage and is very sensitive to a server's upstream capacity.

Torrent based streaming can distribute that load but introduces its own problems. Torrent based streaming clients just request video content blocks in sequential order versus normal BT clients just accepting a random ordering of blocks. But again unless you've got a bunch of high bandwidth seeders it's difficult to serve content at playable rates. If the content is encoded to use 5Mb/s in order to play it back without buffering you need it delivered at least that rate.

Both methods to distribute video suffer from popularity problems. If transitional servers stop hosting old/unpopular content or seeders for it drop off it becomes unavailable on the network even if it's still referenced in the aggregator.

Not that YouTube is an overall good service or that monopolies in the space are good but online video is an area that gravitates towards centralization if not monopolies. If you want to compete with YouTube, or more likely Vimeo or another smaller player, you'd need to replicate their infrastructure. That's the difficult/expensive thing to build and maintain. Other self-hosted services are trivial by comparison.

I feel like cryptocurrency micropayments could 'solve' the seeding problem with torrents. I think licensing is the biggest issue - need a mechanism to give seeders confidence that the true content creator authorized them being compensated for seeding without being exposed to liability for IP laws.

I'd love to set up a seedbox that works like a ~bitcoin mining rig but consumes upload bandwidth rather than CPU/gpu time. However I'm not sure anyone has figured out a good way to do this while avoiding copyright issues.

I don't think micropayments (cryptocurrency or not) do anything to help the situation. The costs of seeding (electricity, bandwidth, the actual hardware) are all macroscopic costs that micropayments are never going to cover.

End users do not want to deal with micropayments, they'll just watch one of the billion hours of content on YouTube. Few content creators have any sort of following that will follow them to SelfHostedTube.

Self hosted video streaming (of any configuration) is competing with "free" and convenient YouTube. Unless some independent service offers a similar level of service it's not going to catch on.

I think these are all technical hurdles that would be solved by the hosting middlewares that pop up to serve such an ecosystem. While it would be possible for a creator to host their own, my expectation would be that they would upload them to "Source as a Service" type hosting platforms that handle this. You would also get aggregators of all sizes and advancement. From small aggregators of niche model train videos serving directly from the source, to large aggregators with their own hosting solutions they serve the source from.

You're right though of course, which is why we have a YouTube monopoly in the first place.

Middleware doesn't and can't solve the distribution problem. The aggregation of content is a non-problem.

Video distribution is expensive and technically complicated.

Say I've got a video channel and most of my content is "talking head" style. Encoding 1080p using in a widely compatible h.264 configuration (Main profile level 3) I could easily get good quality output at a data rate between 1-2Mb/s, let's say 1.5Mb/s. That's about 11MB per minute of video for storage purposes (for that single config).

In order to serve those videos to streaming clients I'll need 1.5Mb/s of bandwidth for each client. Any lower of a transfer rate and the playback will stall. Faster data rates can allow for a larger buffer but the file's data rate is your transfer minimum to actually play the content as it downloads.

So back to our video channel. Self hosting on my residential connection means I'm limited by my shitty upstream bandwidth and throttling from my ISP if not outright T&C violations. My home connection I could serve maybe a half dozen clients simultaneously. So long as my content is unpopular that might be ok. Bubbling up on an aggregator or just making an interesting video would DDoS me and no one would get to see it. It I want to spend ~$60 a year on cloud hosting I could serve a lot more connections. Then I'm out $60 a year or more if I want to make a longer history of my content available, remember 11MB a minute.

If I want to have better compatibility and broader reach I would need to encode a couple more versions of my videos at the cost of storage and my time.

So self hosting either costs me money or severely limits the availability of my content. P2P distribution can help a little but it has its own issues. Even an aggregator offering paid hosting doesn't really solve the issue because I'm still out some money. Were I to make any money from advertising or patronage that hosting cost would come right off the top.

The situation is even more difficult if you consider mobile access which is a huge portion of online video access. For a lot of reasons self hosting from mobile devices isn't practical. P2P from a mobile device is likewise impractical. So for anyone with a mobile device as their primary computing device, a non-trivial number of people, they would have to pay for some third party hosting without a meaningful self hosting option.

Demand from mobile devices also significantly increases your need for multiple encodings of a video. Mobile streaming needs to respond to much more drastic traffic conditions than your laptop on your home WiFi. This increases storage requirements meaning less historic content or increased storage costs.

There is no doubt video hosting is hard, but I think you have misunderstood my proposal. The aggregators don't need to host nor do the content creators need to host. Once they are significantly big they could choose to tackle the technical problems themselves to improve UX. In the mean time, video hosting companies fill the need for content creators hosting while making it as easy as using YouTube to upload their videos.

TrainVids.com doesn't get many hits so for now they rely on the source' perfomance, but CatVids.com gets millions of hits and they long ago invested in a redistribution layer. Meanwhile ContentCreatorMatt pays $5/m on his source hosting with burst protection should a video go viral. Hosting can afford this because they have thousands of creators who never get a hit video. While CreatorTom only submits to large platforms with redistribution so he doesn't have to pay for traffic.

I wouldn't use P2P nor expect people to host the videos at home because that would never work for the reasons you outline. But think of live streaming and how that distribution works and that is just one possible method an aggregator could choose to increase performance of slow sources.

The idea is to break up the video platform monoculture and make the space competitive again, so that there will be some variance in performance to end users depending on the aggregator they visit isn't an issue.

I get what you're trying to say but your ideas have to compete with YouTube et al which are not only "free" for the content creators but can actually make them some money. A content creator already has a non-zero cost to make a video, having to pay more money to host it just makes them less likely to keep making content.

There probably are ways to keep a catbirds.com running but as the difficulty increases the likelihood of the site's maintainers keeping with it decreases significantly. If the site tanks all of its hoisted content goes with it. Ask all the people that had their content wiped from MP3.com how that feels.

So from a content creator's point of view, why hitch their wagon to catvids.com? It costs them money and isn't guaranteed to be around in a year. They're also far less likely to make any money no matter how much traffic aggregators send them. Sticking with YouTube is way less of a hassle and gives them a far better chance to make money if nothing else to break even to keep making content.

You're right and I absolutely agree it's unlikely to work. YouTube is so much more than just a technical solution too, it's success is strongly tied to it's community dominance.

The aggregators don't own or host the content in the system I am thinking of, they just consume and redistribute their sources. So if catvids.com goes away the creator's source is still online. It's also probably syndicated to a bunch of other cat video sites simultaneously from that one source. Thinking through it more, it's pretty much an RSS feed but for videos. In fact I would probably just use the RSS protocol if I were ever to try and get something like this off the ground. Have an open source aggregator template so it's easy to start one, and then monetize it by starting the first video source hosting as a service company.

I don't think it could ever take off though, the "Next YouTube" will be another massive corporate, closed platform with deep pockets or venture capital.

You just invented video podcasts.

Well now I can't help but feel you're intentionally missing the point to be reductive. To spell it out, the core value proposition is that Platform A, and Creator B, actually want to work together to syndicate video for profit, because we have solved for Video Hosting by creating an ecosystem that makes it profitable. The technology isn't important, and nothing has been invented. I was just using it as a language to convey the platform/ecosystem I had in mind. Could it work? Probably not, I don't think users would go to hundreds of different websites to find what they want.

Sounds like tvlinks with links to megavideo and friends

you have reinvented peertube

Actually I would avoid peer to peer technology, as that takes a large group of peers to work well, and you can end up with practically orphaned content if it's not popular and there's no peers for it. Maybe the latter is a solved issue with new P2P networks, I haven't torrented in years.

The other part of avoiding peer to peer is to ensure there's money in it for hosting and advertising. I hate to be cynical, but for companies to play along and join in, there has to be money in it.