It's more than that. Would you devote 1-5% of your PC resources to others while you watch a video, if you could watch a video without ads? Yes. I bet so.

We are able to easily shoulder the burdens of hosting, yet Google wants to dominate us and force us to use their hosting at the psychological cost of being their sponge for anyone's paid information campaign. YouTube in 2016 was non-stop Trump ads. Non fucking stop.

FUCK Google.

[–] atetulo@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

I totally agree. We need more peer-supported services.

[–] Auli@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

No no we are not. How are we going to distribute all the videos. I don't think you realize how much storage youtube takes up. Could we have something yes would it be as big and vast as youtube not even close. I mean we can't even distribute a handful of reddits traffic without failing.

[–] elrik@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Storage is probably the easier aspect to address. Storage is cheap and decentralized storage systems have existed for decades.

The problem is bandwidth and latency. Most residential ISPs do not offer high bandwidth and low latency upstream connections, which means there's no good way to serve the content you're storing.

Residential fiber is becoming more common in some areas, but often those residential plans still limit upstream or specifically have terms in their acceptable use policy that forbid such activities. Here's an example from my fiber provider, which couldn't be clearer:

You may not use the Services to host any type of server.

It's a little silly of course, because if you were playing a game and hosting, you're probably hosting a server! But if I were serving videos to thousands of peers, I'm sure they would notice and take issue.