My real worry with Google’s voyage into enshittification (thanks to Cory Doctorow @pluralistic the term) is YouTube.
Through YT, for the past 15 years, the world has basically entrusted Google to be the custodian of pretty much our entire global video archive.
There’s countless hours of archived footage — news reports, political speeches, historical events, documentaries, indie films, academic lectures, conference presentations, rare recordings, concert footage, obscure music — where the best or only copy is now held by Google through YouTube.
What happens if that archival footage becomes unprofitable?
#tech #technology #Google #enshittification #youtube #video @technology #capitalism
Archive.org is where a lot of these videos are getting archived.
They don’t have the space to archive it all. No one does. It’s the reason it has grown so big without real competition.
No one can do it… or at least make money doing it.
@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
Then we will quickly learn which people were prudent enough to keep backups, and which were not.
@AlexanderKingsbury @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
Agreed! It’s an important point of redundancy. If it’s worthy, should be stored and distrubuted even if the most popular way is unavailable (I say)@AlexanderKingsbury @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology With TransIP in NL there was once a free 1000GB of cloud storage on HDDs when they moved the paid accounts to SSDs.
The agreement was Best effort, but for lost data they were not responsible as there would be no backups, unlike the paid accounts.Yes, there came a time when a disk crashed in the RAID, and then while rebuilding a 2nd disk crashed…
Yes, bye data.
Apparently some people were upset that their data was lost…
So, >2
@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology @tsturm Unfortunately, we’re probably going to find out.
Always mirror your content on a few PeerTube sites. When 1 goes down, its your responsibility to re mirror
Very true. The Dead Media Project of the 1990s showed that even if profitable, media can go dark.
Some things are made to exist and then go away, like dance or radio. But if you want to make something to last, digital is not the way to go. Not at all.
A fine short (digital) work on why digitizing everything is not the answer…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKNbhMCB_3g
:jrbd:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=yKNbhMCB_3g
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
The same thing that’s happened with numerous print newspapers around the world. When they downsize, sack the backroom staff, and move to shopfronts they dump - literally - those priceless collections of photographs, negatives, and, yes, glass plate negatives, as though they were old office furniture.
Ask any Dr who fan. The BBC did this as well back in the day…
@Throsby @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology old microfilm will get vinegar syndrome if it isn’t stored properly and if it is older acetate microfilm. Eventually it will become unusable. It’s expensive to replace just one reel of microfilm. Old newspaper clippings will all eventually crumble. I believe librarians and archives are the best place to save our history and culture. Unfortunately they are often not well-funded.
@Throsby @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology I wonder how much of this is captured by the local library? There was a time I could check old newspaper content on microfiche.
@kneworldodor @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
We do have that. The libraries scrupulously keep copies, but not necessarily physical media.
@ajsadauskas
That’s why #peertube is so important! Everyone should be migrating or at least mirroring there ASAP… It will happen.
@pluralistic @technology@lps @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology When YT’s “musk kitchen sink” moment happens, I’ll switch over
For now there’s a few things missing, like HDR, and current leadership at YT is surprisingly understanding how to keep an ecosystem fertile
But already I know to actively maintain a backups folder of all my uploads. Which is interesting — so do they. YouTube preserves every upload, and has periodically reprocessed the originals to higher quality (less downgrades).
@ckent @lps @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology If you have a backup of all your video’s anyway, why not upload it to a peertube server too? By keeping you content exclusively available on YT you actively strengthen Google’s video monopoly.
@AstaMcCarthy @ckent @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
This is a very valid point. If you do create content that you intend to share to an audience, it’s quite easy to find an affordable or free instance to simply mirror your content.
Once it’s setup, it will sync automatically with no additional effort, and we can ALL celebrate that we are not feeding the monsters.
It is very much an ethical choice, and I think we can all agree we need to slay those beasts.
@lps @ckent @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
Personally I would go one step further and invert that. So primarily publish on free and open platforms and sync from there to less free places. See https://indieweb.org/POSSE@AstaMcCarthy @lps @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology I’m all down for that, especially for non-video. For video I’ll have to self-host as if it’s Web 1.0 because PeerTube will reprocess and mangle my videos.
@ckent @AstaMcCarthy @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
There is an option, if you do self-host peertube, to retain the original resolution if no other options are selected. I’m not sure if that avoids transcoding, which I think is what you’re looking for.
@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology This is why it’s important to own one’s own content and only post it to social media, etc., as a secondary copy.
@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
Curious if you are aware of anyway of downloading one’s content off YouTube for this all but inevitable moment?
I use Downie (on Mac) but there’s a video downloader app for every platform. It doesn’t download the ads either 😉
@VoxofGod @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology 4k videodownloader is great for downloading everyones content <3
Yt-dl.
Command line tool, works on all desktop OS’s, can handle things in batch, download full playlists, etc.
I believe the current up to date/maintained fork of it is yt-dlp
@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology Some of it is saved by public services (for content in french, by INA).
@bortzmeyer @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology we can’t have one service archive everything, maybe even @internetarchive … But could we make a service/browser plugin to tell if a video is archived already somewhere and propose where to add it? If it’s in French -> INA, and so on…
@bortzmeyer @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology @internetarchive Maybe there’s some collaboration possible with SearxNG? (I recall writing the INA search addon)
@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology Anyone who’s put all their precious eggs in one basket controlled by someone/something else is a fool.
@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
I have mentioned this over the last couple of years. The cost of maintaining all those server farms is getting prohibitively expensive. Just recently google has stopped archiving webpages
& cache searches are no longer available. We cannot trust for profit companies to be the repository of all the art, literature, history, music, research, writing, etc that we want preserved. They will only preserve what makes them money. And even if a nonprofit or govt wanted to be responsible, they can’t. Climate collape, cyber attacks, wars, energy costs, etc make it impossible. The fanatical republicans want to make anything their cult doesn’t like illegal & impose their beliefs on the public, on businesses, and on society. They want real history & other people’s cultures erased. And they’re fine with trampling on other people’s rights to erase it. It was always a pipe dream that everyone would be able to just login & find anything. And now libraries are targeted.@shekinahcancook @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology I have cancelled my family #YouTube premium membership and am migrating away from YouTube video, podcast and music. I want to echo the voices here mentioning #peertube. For #music, I’m trying to pay the creators and download #mp3 instead. I’m listening to #audiobooks in #mp3, paying a higher price and getting a narrower selection. I have #libretube on Android which circumvents the algorithm, the ads, and supports downloads of YouTube videos.
Unless the public puts literally billions of dollars into funding and expanding public libraries to catalog all this video media into numerous publicly owned gigantic server farms that maintain the capacity to upgrade digital storage indefinitely, all video media is doomed to stay with privately owned capitalistic multinational corporations that are influenced by foreign governments to censoring various things at will, and all video media is destined to die forgotten and overwritten by future shitty memes and useless influencer garbage.
Should be govt supported online libraries. Not under regular copyright rules (but they aren’t allowed to profit or redistribute it either) but for potentially culturally relevant content that is 5 or more years since publication.
@BaroqueInMind @pluralistic @technology @ajsadauskas
We should all contribute to a global, distributed, federated, and resilient database, keeping a disk at home and (securely!!) sharing it with the world.
I wonder if the technology is already there?
@gvlx @BaroqueInMind @pluralistic @technology @ajsadauskas
One guy is using AltaVista to enable searching for Gopher content.
https://benjojo.co.uk/u/benjojo/h/f91xCT53LZG1GJfk5R@gvlx @BaroqueInMind @pluralistic @technology @ajsadauskas The @internetarchive would be happy to accept your donation (I give regularly). Their scope is global, though based in the #UnitedStates, and they’re not affiliated with #government or any #Capitalist #corporation. As well as their continuous #WaybackMachine web scraping they also have #Video and #Text archives plus some niche things like the #CoverArt archive.
https://archive.org/donate
@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology Youtube is basically my entertainment. I do not have cable or TV of an kind. I am very selective in my viewing. If you appear to be a decent human ie: not racist, not misogynistic, not fascist or nazi I will probably watch anything you have to offer. If you are an asshole I will block you.
@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology As a professional video editor with an add’l interest in audiovisual archiving, I spend a lot of time discussing how it’s not in my clients’ best interest to put their media legacy into YouTube/Google’s hands. Not only is it a compressed version, which isn’t good for repurposing (editor hat), there’s absolutely no guarantee it’s going to be there for the long-term (archivist hat). If they want to use it as a delivery platform, fine. It’s not an archive
