Sure, it takes a bit of effort. But if you replace your routers with ones that have open-source firmware or actual workstations acting as gateway routers and running business-class open-source software, you can create a personal VPN between everyone involved that shows only one exit point to world+dog.

The trick is with ensuring that all YouTube stuff gets properly and comprehensively funnelled through this exit node - VPNs can easily leak data if not configured properly, and sometimes do so despite good configs - and implementing this even on other devices that require individual VPN connectivity (roaming, like phones).

Plus, having a mobile device’s VPN auto-recognize when it’s connected to a known good network, and have it automatically disable itself in favour of the VPN on that network, is not something that’s easy to do.

Finally, doing so without a high-quality, high-speed ISP plan can easily lead to an unusably slow VPN. The “mothership” exit node, in particular, would have to be gigabit or better - and symmetrical as well, so fibre and not cable - because it has both the node and connections to other homes and devices. If everyone started suckling the YouTube teat at the same time, things would likely slow down pretty fast on anything significantly less than a symmetrical gigabit connection.

highly likely that many videos will quickly die as well

Ideally, everyone would just post their own stuff from their own disk. As things got popular, the fans would cache it for others. We'd just need the self-hosting angels to help us with discoverability.

Realistically, a quick death is probably a fortunate way to save resources if a video can't gain traction from being useful or entertaining.

Go on vacation? Believe it or not, banned.

The vast majority of videos don’t do well so… that means this solution won’t work for most people

If a video doesn't do well, it doesn't need cached because it's not being watched.

They pay to store their flops.

I was reacting to this:

Realistically, a quick death is probably a fortunate way to save resources if a video can’t gain traction from being useful or entertaining.

I'm even more confused now.

You mentioned with the number of dead torrents that videos would die quickly.

I mentioned that unpopular videos probably should die quickly.

You mentioned that the solution won't work I suspect your definition of not working is probably different than my definition of not working. But I'm not exactly sure at this point.

I thought you wanted videos to only be hosted through peers, without any server storing them, just like torrents

I said that would mean most videos would die

Seems there is a market for spoofing specific IP addresses out there. What if they don't know you are not at home? I ha e no clue how any of this works...

I pay for it. No ads. Background playing on mobile, and YouTube music included.

Okay, yeah, that scans.

By suggest the peeeing app, I'm also suggesting a change to the architecture then I've talked about previously, probably have not made clear here.

The peering app works more like a torrent client. It's not just caching things that you've seen, but you can also place your content there.

We would separate the content from the indexing. A peer tube provider could offer both roles. People could store their own data locally or pay the provider a small amount to use their storage. Maybe even IPFS style that would just pin it for you for a fee. It would make the model sustainable.

Everyone is responsible for their own seed content that way. Nobody is required to pay millions of dollars to store a bunch of bullshit for nothing that they don't care about, which would end up making what monetization that can happen more effective.

Advertisers are just pouring billions of dollars into YouTube. They could have direct payments to smaller providers much easier without all that waste. We just need a sustainable storage method in a way for people to get paid.

I pay for it, also no ads except the sponsor plugs, which are pretty easy to skip. Overall a better experience than the non premium. I don't live in the USA so my cost is like $5/month.

It will still be relatively niche, people don't want to seed for hours and also don't want to pay

Vinegar seems awesome. Thanks!
Also, the dev’s other apps are pretty amazing too!

You can sideload up to three apps without a paid dev account, they just expire in 7 days. Use something like AltStore (or better yet SideStore) and you have an easy way to install and re-sign two other apps. They also have the ability to essentially “offload” apps so you can have more than two other sideloaded apps, but only two can be active at a time (other than the signing app)

So you're using SponsorBlock as well, or you're watching videos without sponsors.

It’s not pirating if you’re obtaining a video that they’re making available to you for free lmao.

Otherwise it would be “pirating” to just load up YouTube.com in your browser and watching any old video.