I believe that Youtube is unsustainable in the long run due to the sheer amount of data it needs to store and process, and sites like Peertube won’t succeed either.

Youtube is the most popular video storage site for one big reason. It stores all the videos users upload to the website for all of eternity, or at least until they decide to start deleting old videos. You can find some of the oldest videos on the platform still there, in all their pixilated glory, such as the famous Me at the zoo video.

However, this advantage is also a very big disadvantage. Youtube has to store all the videos that has ever been uploaded to the site, even all of the random 8k 120FPS HDR stock footage channels like to post for the hell of it. And that practice takes up a lot of storage space. A lot. Even if the Google engineers are tech geniuses, they can’t beat physics. You can only compress data so much before it becomes shit. Youtube servers also have to process all the uploading and downloading of videos to millions of users simultaneously. This obviously puts an enormous strain on Google’s servers, and there’s only so many hard drives you can buy before you need to start the enshittification, This has actually already happening, with Youtube banning adblockers and increasing ads in a bid to earn more money to make their business profitable. I think it’s only a matter of time before Youtube decides on a drastic measure to try to start to get money to grow on trees. (figuratively)

On the other hand, alternative video streaming sites like Peertube have a hard time of getting popular due to them not having the immense catalogue of videos that Youtube has. Adding a large amount of videos to your Peertube instance puts a big strain on your resources. There’s also not that much discoverability. Usually when you hear about a Peertube instance, its because a Youtuber hosts it to store their own videos, and only their own videos. Other than that, you won’t have any luck finding any instances on search engines if you don’t know where to start looking.

On a side note…

I’m sorry for the short blog posts lately. Schools has been extremely stressful and busy, and I haven’t been able to make any long blog posts. Once I finish some of my projects, I will certainly make some longer blog posts!

EDIT 15/9/2024 Mental Outlaw just made a video covering this topic of Google running out of storage space! Check it out here.