Should YouTube federate?

#EvanPoll #poll

@evan

If this means YouTube is a caching CDN for all the PeerTube instances and all of their computing and bandwidth is available for viewing videos on any PeerTube instance now and in the future: Yes, YouTube should federate like that

If it's just one-way, channeling into YouTube? No.

@evan never thought about it

@dottorblaster you're welcome!

@evan Should maps federate is at least as interesting

@evan as much as I would love to watch YouTube videos from PeerTube without ads, there's no incentive for Google to do that. It wouldn't bring on any new users to YouTube and it would reduce ad revenue. More work for less money means it'll never happen.
Same situation with Instagram, sadly.

@santisbon Threads.

@prushforth Yes, that would be pretty cool. We could definitely use a good place vocabulary, and it would be cool to also federate the location-sharing functionality.

@evan I've said strong yes, but I don't think it'll happen because it's not compatible with their business model.

@evan Some functions might be hard to bring over but subs and community posts would probably be easy as hell to implement, they have service friendly handles now too.

@evan Should it federate for the benfit of its audience and content producers? Yes. Should it federate for the benefit of its shareholders? Not a chance (imho).

@evan

everything should. let only the public decide what goes viral on the new universal social web.

@evan YouTube displaying videos from other platforms "might" make some sense.

However, seeing YouTube videos from other clients is ALREADY a ongoing fight.

@evan
Not anymore. 5 years ago? A qualified yes. Now? Strong no.

Almost everything at YT is now designed to play out ads and polarize. None of this has anything to do with the values of the Fediverse.

@evan i don't see the point of this poll. They won't. Ever. Why would they?

@thibaultmol They have RSS!

@nemobis well yeah, but they won't ever care about federation I mean

@evan qualified yes because I'm sure there'd be a catch somewhere...so whatever the catch is, my choice would be "yes, but without that catch"

(Didn't take time to think too deeply about what the catch would be)

@evan
YT feels like a bit like Woolworths did in the years before it crashed.

Still some fun bits, but the shelves are mostly full of poor quality stuff that nobody wants.

I can see a future for YT Music and YT News but the rest of it seems to be going down the pan.

@evan you forgot "it's up to them"

@thibaultmol you're free to skip the poll.

@markdarb can you imagine any conditions where it would be beneficial to them?

@jszym you can't imagine any situation where it would be beneficial to YouTube to federate?

@nlupo we are allowed to have other choices.

@CartyBoston it's ok to tell companies what they should do.

@evan Qualified yes. They should support open standards, but without some sort of accountability, they could remove it at any time, or pervert any federation to harm the fediverse... It would be foolish to rely on it in the current climate. Perhaps some government mandate, like the adversarial interoperability Cory Doctorow has proposed?

Also their moderation is so bad that it's been radicalizing people into Nazis, so federation might make fedi more Nazi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right_pipeline

@skyfaller "pervert any federation to harm the fediverse"?

What is that supposed to mean?

@evan If they can get more traffic (or present their existing users more content) without eating into their ad or subscription revenues then they could be keen.

It's intriguing that they've turned YouTube into a social network where channels can share images in addition to videos. Maybe they would benefit from federation allowing more seamless sharing of videos on other social networks, again with the proviso that they will want to receive ad or subscription revenue for video impressions.

@evan I mean the classic Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish, YouTube certainly has the numbers to force people to adopt proprietary extensions to open protocols. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extinguish

But there are probably other evil options an adversary could come up with. What if migrating accounts, commenting, or following only works one way? What if things they don't like sometimes work, but are unreliable or slow? https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/

There's no reason to expect continuous good faith.

@evan YouTube won't. It'd be a huge amount of work and expense to get that working right and there'd be no corresponding payoff. YouTube is *expensive* to run and, for better or worse, the bills do have to be paid. (Whether those bills are over-charged for, or by how much, is a rich source of people fighting with little knowledge, but those bills definitely exist)

@evan

What does this mean?

@evan if there was a fragmented ecosystem of video platforms with comparable user share, or of YouTube was losing user growth, then yes.

I don't think a scenario is a foregone conclusion, but I don't see it happening without Alphabet totally fumbling the ball worse than it did during the adpocalypse, or without a large grassroots movement.

I think if you see that in the platforms that have turned on or promise to turn on AP (Threads, Tumblr, Flipboard) vs those that haven't (X, FB, Reddit)

@adnan The problem is that RSS is only one way, it would be nice to have it all be federated and actually social, but it is a big ask from a company like Google who are more worried about their bottom line than the freedoms of the creators on their platform

It's going to be on creators to start branching out and crossposting and doing more in-video sponsorships (which actually end up being way more profitable than AdSense anyway, so it's certainly doable)

@adnan After some time, the whole thing could theoretically hit critical mass where people no longer feel the need to use YouTube to view content, which would mean that it's in Google's best interest to federate YouTube, but that's also highly unlikely to happen now

If the Fediverse were more popular during the Adpocalypse, that might have been more the case, they're lucky it wasn't

Interesting results. I'm a strong yes. It's a social publishing service with subscriptions, likes, and comments. It fits really well into the Fediverse model.

An awful lot of people got mad that this could never happen and it wasn't worth talking about.

First, we talk about fictional things all the time. It's fun and harmless.

Second, it's pretty clear to me why YouTube would federate.

First, if the Fediverse was larger than YouTube, it would be advantageous. With 2.5B MAUs on YouTube, I think we have a long way to go before we outnumber them. But maybe not forever.

The other reason is if regulators required it.

Thanks to everyone who answered and commented.

@evan I had a good time

Oh, I nearly forgot: a lot of people thought the culture and ads on YouTube would be bad for existing Fediverse users.

Which, like, it's really easy to block a server if you don't want to interact with them. We have the technology.

@evan I voted for qualified no because we have a big problem in Brazil with far right buying so much ads it infects your algorithm even if you strongly oppose it. I worry that bleeds out here.

@evan ublock origin and privacy badger seem to do a great job of zapping the ads, at least.

@evan I wonder if it would be possible to build a federation-layer ad-blocker tool, designed to block any incoming posts which are detected to be ads.

@adnan They still do and Vivaldi will still detect those even though they do not expse them correctly. Also if you subscribe you can watch videos right from the feed reader.

@evan I have been told, no, _educated_ many times that the base and rule 0 of Youtube is that One Gets Paid For Videos. And everyone want to get paid but do not want to pay for anything.
I am not sure that would fit with the Fediverse model in any way.

@ch0ccyra1n how would we ever find out about it?

@evan that's a good question. I'm honestly not sure.