this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Technology
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If you've got some scientific papers handy, I'd love to see them!
The point I'm trying to make is that YouTube has an incentive to design their system to not let traffic travel further than it has to (users closer to a data center hosting the content they want will get it faster). They build data centers close to where their users live. Even then, delivery is likely less energy-intensive than video transcoding, meaning large, specialized data centers make a lot of sense for that task. They then distribute transcoded content to smaller, regional servers to improve user experience ... again, specialized systems for a specialized task.
This means that YouTube has already distributed their system across many different servers in many different regions around the world, so in many ways, they already take advantage of the efficiency benefits of p2p, but they can carefully coordinate to reduce overall costs in a way that p2p can't (yet).
But the Fediverse will lag in efficiency for exactly the reason you pointed out: it's running on low tech, general-purpose hardware. Energy usage has the largest environmental impact by far. Hardware that is specialized (like Application-Specific Integrated Circuits) or newer will always outperform general or old hardware.
Here is the study : https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/4238589?sommaire=4238635 It's in French, I didn't find something in English (maybe in the IPCC studies ). 47% of digital impact comes from users terminals (mostly from smartphone manufacturing).
I agree with you, but YouTube is also a big part of the incentive of building more and more new hardware. Plus as I said before YouTube isn't just for hosting videos but also metrics tools, content id, advertising, editing tools and such... All this needs also power to run.
Did you have any data regarding packet distribution on google services? Last time I checked (about 4/5 years ago) an email send from a gmail to a gmail traveled about 1,5 of the earth size. Which is a lot for 2 laptops side by side in the same room.
Lastly you're trying to make this a debate only on the tech aspect but it is not. They are ethical points at stake and they are equally important I think.
Interesting article (my French is not good, but with the help of translation I get the idea). Thank you for sharing.
Ahh so, I think there is room for confusion. Fediverse is "p2p" only in the context of the (federated) servers. PeerTube/Lemmy/Mastodon/etc. are still "centralized" in that your instance (e.g. programming.dev) is shared with many other users (possibly worldwide). This potentially increases the cost of delivery, because a user still has to find a server, and may select one that is ideologically, rather than physically, close to them. Because YouTube's servers are ideologically homogeneous, there is no reason to find a server other than the one physically closest to you, and thus the cheapest to stream from. So delivery costs to the end user's terminal should be even higher for PeerTube as compared to YouTube!
A completely flat, p2p architecture potentially eliminates almost all of the cost of delivery, but it does introduce other costs, and doesn't eliminate the need for video encoding. I don't have any research available, but I feel confident it will not be simple to compare with centralized services like Fediverse or traditional web services. I will keep my eye out for research.
There are many reasons to switch to Fediverse. I'm simply arguing that "efficiency" is not one of them :)
Unless everyone have an instance near home :) which is the case for me on Peertube, didn't checked for Lemmy though. I should check when I can. But for this to happen we need instances. Small, large, run by people, associations, communities, whatever.
Yes encoding is still a thing, but less analysis, online editing bullshit and advertising. So yeah Peeture is lighter than YouTube ;)
I agree that strict efficiency could be hard to tell on video diffusion only.