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I started to learn about crypto two months ago. Bitcoin, Monero, Ethereum etc. make total sense to me.

I can't, however, understand why it would make sense to decentralize large online platforms like Youtube and Facebook. Or let's say: I don't understand how this could work.

Bitcoin has a decentralized ledger where all transactions are stored. How would that ledger look for a decentralized Youtube or Facebook?

Or am I missing something? Does decentralization mean something different in this regard?

Thank you!

PS: I'm asking because I again and again read headlines that say something along the line of "everything will be decentralized".

I think I've seen different projects that aims to have a decentralized social network but it didn't do good. People still prefer the centralized social networks because we've used to use it and it's hard to get away from it.

About decentralized platform like youtube, I think dlive suits the description of it.

Maybe something similar to YouTube and Facebook can get into existence functioning over the smart contract platform. The present platform can't be changed to be entirely decentralized. Also there is no need of making YouTube completely decentralized, because without reviewing the contents it isn't possible to broadcast to the public. Through smart contract it can be performed, but some contents create controversy.

Let's first take a look at what makes these platforms bad, and why centralization in this particular industry isn't that good.

There happens to be a lot of censorship when it comes to these platforms, and Youtube, in particular, is very well known for fucking over their creators, whether it's from demonization, copyright strikes, or other issues that comes to their content.

With the decentralization of these platforms, these issues would be non-existent, and the way this would be done would be via everyone controlling a bit of youtube, and it works in a decentralized democratic environment.

Facebook and Youtube switching into a decentralized thing is not an easy task to do. They are already good at their current status so no need or necessity for a big change. There will be lots of questions if they will plan for a decentralized concept. Cross fingers that they will not do something shitty in the future although chances are low.

But as how blockchain evolves through years, expect that more and more industries will adopt the idea of being decentralized.

Don't think about it too much or maybe there is something you need to know and we might give you a better answer without using Facebook and Youtube as an example.

Facebook and YouTube decentralized is something almost impossible, especially for Facebook, it is said that a lot of data has been leaked from there for different government fines, it is also a goldmine in information, it could not be decentralized, since Mark would not , or maybe think so, but with all the development he has had lately I do not think so, in fact even Snowden thinks that both Facebook and Google do not have good intentions.

The case of YouTube, is changing completely, has new policies where many influencers are complaining, far from all this I don´t see a decentralization.

These platforms can use Blockchain to have much more control and be able to do some audits, but controlled by their owners, a decentralization technology cannot be confused by applying the technology to already centralized platforms, it is like affirming that a bank will be decentralized because it wants to acquire blockchain technology or use blockchain.

I think it is possible to decentralize everything, even the likes of youtube and facebook. I cannot go on the specifics because I am not a programmer nor a coder myself but there are apps that are decentralized, popularly known as DApps. I think an app similar to youtube or facebook which is built on a distributed ledger is going to become a decentralized one. 

I think not, it doesn't mean that if you observed something that decentralize, all of the things around you can also decentralized. They have different levels of standard to be able to achieve that.

For example, let's say Youtube, it is a powerful and broad social media platform and nothing can influences it easily. You need to achieve those standards.

Absolutely agree.

I think both decentralization and centralization system have their plus and minus. Not all thing can and should be decentralized, for Youtube and Facebook i think it's better that way- centralized (but not too obvious/ much) . Different for financial transactions i believe decentralization will be so much better..

But do you think we can trust the system much more than what we have trust yeaarsss ago from bank? I mean, it'll be hard to be the part of something different from what's already in mind..

thanks guys, but no reply really answers my question how this would look in detail ;)

Can be done! Facebook and Youtube, both can be decentralized with some tweaking in the existing blockchain system so that the privacy of the users are not evaded! Distributed ledger usually means that your data will be available openly for public viewing, but that structure can be changed using an authorization layer to ensure only authorized people are able to see your profile and not everyone on the earth!

However, it literally makes no sense for these two conglomerates to move onto a blockchain! Blockchain is bette used in transactions based platforms and that's why it can be used better in fintech. Blockchain is not really made for large social media portals!

It would work with no one having full control of the content platforms, which means that they wouldn't be able to regulate their platforms unless everyone would agree with the moves.

Wouldn't it function like Wikipedia? So it would work that people require permission from everyone in order for things to be changed (so it would need permission from everyone in order for content to be taken down).

That's the way it should work - single companies don't need this much power.

But rich can pay people to spam the network with same point for it to be change... Anyone with money and power can change the truth and it can be centralized in some other way...

for facebook yes they should make it decentralized so that the issue of data breach are going to be fixed  but on youtube , there is no problem with it right now .  not just these two but other cex social media platform should turn to decentralized so that people are sure that thier datas were safe and wont be exploited by someone else because those people are only getting the benefit the most but it also harm us users  .

Not everything, crypto supposed to be decentralized but there are many who changes it's purpose. They tend to do it in a way that they will benefit like how those countries implementing their own token to ban other cryptocurrencies. Facebook and youtube will be that way, they will just use token maybe for the sense of having a currency that can be used in their platform but not as decentralized since they knew our infos.

I don't see these famous platforms decide to be decentralized. Decentralization entails a lot of things and on top of that is the control and censorship. Facebook and YouTube will never be multi-billion companies if they are not controlled platforms though they are open to the public still decisions on many matters are done by the corporate personalities and not by the users themselves. There had been many attempts to introduce decentralized social media platforms but up to now not one is flourishing all of them are still unknown and many are already dead.

If it is free, then the simple answer is no. Ever heard of "economies of scale?" It is about the bigger you are, the cheaper your service is. Youtube et al. can offer free service because of this centralization. They will beat small competitors in terms of the price until no competitors left.

The problem is they offer you "free" services, but actually, you have to pay it with your soul data. Furthermore, they can do whatever they want, including blocking unpopular speech (censorship), demonetizing, and clogging your feed with advertisements.

Now, if we want decentralization, we must pay for these services with money and not with our privacy/freedom. Then perhaps, fund startups with this business model.

A decentralized social media platform? No. Just with the problem with content itself, having it decentralized would already become quite a problem. Having a central decision maker actually makes social media platforms gain dominance over anyone using their services. This avoids constant change of rules which could be a problem in a decentralized system.

Besides, this could go to a situation where for example youtube has different implementations for each platform. America has x feature while India don't have it but India has y feature instead.

Basically, it's a pain when dealing with decisions. Comparing crypto to social media platforms in terms of decentralization isn't really that much of a good idea.

Of course, NO. Though internet is decentralized because the distribution must be one way or another, that doesn't mean such popular platforms must be decentralized. It has to be controlled though, 'cause if not it will be surely problematic. In addition, platforms has its own databases which in the first place has one single authority that regulates a certain platforms to avoid data breach, and other such information loss.

Decentralization could be applied to corporations like facebook, in terms of its leadership, decision making and authority structures becoming more democratic. A CEO based structure where Mark Zuckenberg ruled with absolute power could represent centralization. Decentralization could entail breaking up the power and authority of a single person and distributing it amongst multiple people. This would come with advantages and disadvantages of course.

The centralized arrangement could resemble a dictator state like north korea where Kim Jong rules within a centralized format. With decentralization being more like the united states where power is split between congress, a senate and a President.

Be decentralized? Probably yes. Just like Dtube(Decentralized Tube) a version on youtube that has been decentralized and free of ads.
This is like a youtube, a video platform that has built an apps version and utilizing the video content and the video creator awarded by uploading content. So, it is possible.

I like the logic you presented here. Kim Jong Un and the US.  ;D Actually, that is a very good example on how an ordinary individual can look at this scenario. So yes, these big platforms can play a decentralized system in some ways but there is some centralized part within its ecosystem. I think we can't avoid that.

In most cases 'we are building a decentralised xxxx' means they want your dollars and then they're going to disappear.

Most people don't want decentralisation in most areas of life let alone need it. They want someone to run what they use and whine to when it goes wrong.

When it comes to money there clearly is a case for it as financial abuse happens at every level which is why Bitcoin is still chugging.

For buying pants online or watching kitten videos why on Earth would I give a fuck whether it's centralised or not?

There might be better implementations, but here's one which seems to work well enough:


It apparently has over a million users, so if you're interested in the concept, this seems like a perfect starting point.

In fact, decentralization is a system not managed by any organization and even in a trading system, it does not need to be intermediated. That's why people call the crypto market a decentralized market. This helps prevent information from being leaked out and makes it easier to swear money.
As for YouTube or Facebook, all videos or posts have someone who can intervene and it is not called decentralized.

The Internet is not decentralized.
Stop paying your cable subscription and you will see how centralized it is.
How many times have countries blocked access? How decentralized is the internet behind the great firewall of china?

Besides, there are a few points where if you cut some cable you can shut down the internet in a whole country.
In happened with some drunk sailors dropping their anchors in 2008 and 2011 or when a granny (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/06/georgian-woman-cuts-web-access) was searching for scrap copper.

As for the decentralization of a platform, it reminds me of the old e-donkey and Kazaa times.
Because anyone could share a file and name it how he wanted you had a 49/49 chance of downloading either porn or viruses when trying to get a movie. Oly in the rest 2% you would really get what you wanted.
Take a look at how much fake stuff it deleted every day on TPB and why most torrenting website don't allow free submission.

Now imagine youtube with no laws, no registration required, no control....no nothing.
We already have thousands of scams and fake videos, it will turn to millions in a day.
And who will provide the space for all the crap that is uploaded?
Neah, it won't work.

Now even talking about the ads and redistribution model, without somebody to moderate bots will earn 1000x more than genuine content creators and will push those to seek another platform.


How can you buy your pants without checking the blockchain to see if they are indeed the brand name, where they were manufactured and if they really use natural alpaca fibers? The age when you will need a smart contract to take a dump is here.

Pretty soon, we will all get an answer to this question, including you. There are several projects that somehow try to recreate the analogy of video streaming services such as YouTube and Twitch on a decentralized basis.
So far, such services have not gained much popularity and some kind of mass character in their use.
However, you need to understand that such platforms are difficult to develop and it is not always possible to make them more convenient than analogues that are very strong competitors.
An ordinary person often does not see the difference between a conventional service and a decentralized one, but it is possible that in the future the advantage of such services will largely outweigh the shortcomings of their old competitors.

so far i see many project want to create something like that , but nothing good.
recently , we hear about BitTube, the next YouTube killer , but as the time goes , that just another dust on market.


nah , i guess it not will be happen, many many exchange right now requiered KYC for buying or selling, and i guess all of decentralized will be Centralized, can u see Dex exchange still un popular .

Not at all. Youtube is owned by Google and are the experts in data mining personal user data for advertising. So is Facebook. Not sure why there would be a notion that you could possibly decentralize these giant corporations considering the fact they are publicly traded companies which owe it to their share holders to drive a profit.

"Decentralization" is a huge buzzword these days, but I suspect that's all it is.  It makes sense for things like crypto, and in fact that's one of the biggest advantages of bitcoin, that there are miners all over the world maintaining its blockchain, and the fact that this job isn't being performed by a bank or government agency.

Other things, though?  Decentralization just doesn't lend itself to everything, and that probably includes social media sites.  I'm not even sure how that would work anyway, and if there was an advantage to a decentralized facebook, twitter, or youtube I suspect such a beast already would have been created and adopted. 

OP, you might want to give some thought about what the term means and why it's important to crypto but not necessarily everything else. 

Youtube isn't hard, it can be done via good old torrenting - you already can stream videos on some sites this way. Of course it won't be 100% like Youtube, since you can't take down your videos once they are there, but we can just call it a feature.

Facebook, however, is much different - it is inherently stateful, and immutability is unwanted here - imagine you want to delete some photos that you have made while you were drunk, or a post that you now regret - blockchain would make sure that it stays there forever.

Technically speaking you can make a similar decentralized service but if you'r asking whether youtube itself can become decentralized the answer is no.

Why would they want that? They want full control and they already have it and are making money through it. They will never willingly decentralize their company because that would mean stepping away and giving it to the users.

In my opinion not everything can be decentralized, especially social media that are currently developing like youtube and Facebook.
I don't think it is possible for a platform as big as YouTube and Facebook to be decentralized, they are quite satisfied with income
earned until now. So from that where could they give up their full control, I think they are want to continue to control its users so
they can maximize the income they get. Not to mention the role of the government who wants also involved with a platform as big
as youtube and facebook will not give permission for that platform to change to decentralized.

I believe it can be decentralized but the real answer is, is it effective? there are so many projects out there trying to decentralize literally everything and ended up failing because no one uses thier product. Youtube can be decentralized, but then there'll be some technical problem occur if it's p2p and a decentralized social media is already existed I believe but not that popular.
Decentralized is good indeed but not that needed in some aspect of our life, it's just like how if things become too centralized it will be bad. Youtube and facebook are alrady having a good time with their centralized nature so I guess there's no point of switching over to decentralization, they will also have a hard time to manage everything including ads if that to happen.

I am not sure where you get that information from, but not every platform has to be decentralized. Decentralization doesn't work for everything, not a must for social media like Facebook and YouTube that are already big and working with the government. They wouldn't agree to do such, because that's not how their business works. The business they are doing is mostly with the information you're giving to them, and things like that. Of course, there are platforms that are decentralized, but such is new and people don't show interest in them. Maybe as time goes by one of those will be able to climb up the ladder and gain recognition like other big names.

But if you ask me, I don't really see why these platforms should seek to be decentralized, I don't see any problem with how they are and the kind of service they offer. I'm good with it. When I think of decentralization, the only thing I think of is a cryptocurrency and nothing else and I don't even look forward to them gaining mainstream adoption, it's okay as it is, and you should use it just when you feel like it.

You can't make Facebook and YouTube decentralized since it's a large company controlled by their creator. It's already been established and a big company so how come the owner of it would want it fo be decentralized? They're earning a lot already. It's not an easy process. Because people are already satisfied with what it is...

Totally agree. People here want to decentralize everything but don't realize that you don't have to do that, and that whatever we currently have that is decentralized, is not attracting a whole lot of demand.

Centralization is actually a good thing in case of YouTube because they can scale the platform endlessly and can easily manage the content uploaded to the platform.... decentralizing YouTube would mean the end of that platform.

Decentralization isn't a wonder pill that makes the world a better place.... only a few fields can benefit from decentralization, and then it's still a question whether people actually need it or not.

One of the problems with blockchain solutions is that a lot of times they are trying to solve problems that do not exist. Platforms like Facebook and Youtube are not personal repositories for people that you can complain about "privacy".
If you are so concerned, then there simply is no need to announce yourself to the world.

The other concern is about censorship. We can all agree that certain content does need censorship and should be given no space for propagation. Yet, absolutely disgusting stuff easily finds its targets. Censorship related to ideas is something that is worrisome but it is again only a reflection of the way society is evolving. What maybe cool and politically correct today may not remain so tomorrow. Should the masses all  be left in their own silos of "decentralized platforms" where nobody has any control or can moderate what trolls can spew. I don't think so.

Like Pennyworth told Bruce in The Dark Knight, "Some men just want to watch the world burn". They will spew hatred and venom just for the sake of it. Decentralization doesn't work in this case, Centralization does.

Since the advent of this blockchain technology, decentralization is the keyword here. Most projects that is utilized with the feature to decentralization. But this technology new that some industry is not yet ready, that's why the project adoption fails. Though we are going there, but slowly.

Well, Blockchain is not really built for large files like video or audios. There are other better ways to decentralized such files, eg ipfs, freenet etc. I think we already have couple of video & social media sites that sre fairly decentralized. They store the large files mostly on ipfs.

Decentralized social media is theorytically possible but not possible practically unless because social media means they will upload larger files so it will take time to verified on the nodes,correct me if I am wrong?

You got a point bud  .  Because social media mainly compose of photos and videos , and the size of those files are mainly huge  . It'll be congested if upload on the a blockchain like storage   . And btw  Social media means public right ?  You want your pic and videos show on the world so i don't think that being decentralized can be a good idea because when I hear the the word decentralized , I also think of the word privacy or anonymous.  It makes no sense tho to become a social media if itll become private

Can they be or will they be are totally different questions. For example you can build a system where youtube is decentralized, anyone can upload any of their videos to their channels and "channels" will be basically their blockchain address and people would be willing to send them money.

Twitch for example is as close to decentralization as possible while still being central, you do not have to pay them anything and you don't need ads, there is nothing forced for you but if you pay subscription you are basically supporting the streamer, you can make a decentralized version of this where the streamer gets all of it. So in the end, you are basically looking at a thing that is "doable" but it is difficult, plus who would want to build a decentralized thing that they wouldn't profit at all and spend hours upon hours for nothing in return.

I don't know if there are blockchains large enough to handle all that data. Now just imagine if it'll have live features like streaming and chat.

Maybe it can just be like torrents where there'll be several people hosting the file. If you're just going to watch a short clip rather than download, it probably wouldn't require a lot of people seeding the file for it to buffer properly.

Rather than have everyone in the network have a copy, the copies would just be split amongst a dozen people. There should be incentives for people to keep their PCs running of course.

I can't see how these websites would implement decentralized systems. It would generally need more complicated framework just to give you the content you want. I see however, that their server might be decentralized in a way that their servers are split and located in different geolocations to make content delivery much faster on a local geographic location. They may be decentralized on terms of location, but these servers would actually act like a centralized server and there's no publicity in their data. It's also to bring security and control what goes in their website, as long as have some performance advantage over decentralized systems that would have their access times depend on the nodes actual processing power.

One of the main reasons why people move to decentralized networks is basically to make it difficult or almost impossible for someone to take it down.

Some companies would decentralize their storage for instance to prevent hackers or rogue governments to hack a single centralize database and/or

to prevent one single disaster to wipe out their service. (Like a massive earthquake or Tornado etc.) The big boys have several data warehouses

for their storage as a redundancy measure to counter these threats. (This is part of their disaster recovery strategies)  Disruptive technologies that

are taking on these giants, use decentralization to prevent governments or the competition to take them down. (Bitcoin and other Peer-to-Peer

networks like BitTorrent etc.. are good examples of that)  So, if the big boys wants to go Peer-to-Peer, they would have to trust public nodes

with the reputation of their company and I do not think many companies would do that. The performance issues will also be a problem, because

not all nodes have super fast internet access.  ;)

people always wants more I guess. The people who are not really into tech always prefer something that works regardless whether the service they are using is centralized and decentralized this kind of thing is definitely out of their understanding anyway. Platform like Youtube and Facebook will definitely not turn into decentralized anytime soon because they are corporate and only seeks for profit. They also need the authority to take down any content they deemed harmful to the community they maintain.
It's just a no brainer that a platform that already success and having a really good revenue stream will definitely not change their entire system and risking their entire existence just because of such frivolous matter.

The real question here is why they will not use bitcoin instead of creating something brand new that would apply all the changes.

Here is the thing. They want to create their own coin.
Question is why?
You want a semi decentralized exchange. Again! The question is why?
There is already a working decentralized exchange. Why not pick it?
You want something as your own which you can control. Again!!! Why?
We will go back to the question over and over again.

it is true that blockchain technology can only be used to store data in the form of encrypted writing on every transaction that uses blockchain technology which is why youtube and various video platforms that make development with blockchain are a bit more difficult to happen, whereas for the facebook platform I think it is still possible to do decentralization.

I fear it's not possible. These platforms, especially youtube, have powerful and expensive datacenters to keep their data. It must be profitable for them as company and free for its users at same time. If it were decentralized, would that be possible?
And these files are constantly increasing in size, as more and more informations are uploaded each new day, only a big business can handle it.

Decentralization and centralization is not something a company will stumble upon neither is what they will meet along the line or a conviction that they can accidentally get and then switch gear. Its something fundamental that you either have it or you don't. Its a way of life that will guide all of the inventions that will come from such group of people and the unique thing about it is that, its not for the motive of fame or profit or recognition now these two companies you have mentioned, which one is contrary to profit or recognition? So, no they cannot be decentralized.

I think it is possible.

Data can just be indexed in the blockchain with proof of existence, and the data being stored/shared separately.

Such apps would need user (or site) level filtering to only download data based on address/pubkey white/black list or other filtering.
 
Data set is much less problematic to verify than transactions, no quadratic signature problem or complex validation, or ordering problem, so it can scale virtually at machine speed.

Data can be stored in crypted form and private key shared with diff hellman key exchange.

In a full decentralized scenario, each user would run their own node and store personal data locally, then it needs some routing system to route clients toward the nodes hosting the files.

For setup like social media, there is not even a huge pressure for confirmation, because lot of data is new data that doesn't depend on previous state unlike transactions, so there is virtually no need for confirmation once the new data is in the memory pool with the signature that prove its origin, it can be considered as confirmed and will be integrated in a block sooner or latter. And it can be relatively easy to filter the data you want to have locally, like data from friend list identified with public key, if all content is signed it can allow all users to verifiy the authenticity of the message, as well doing filtering based on public keys.

For video like youtube it seems relatively hard for all reason mentioned before due to economy of scale, and seem hard to beat youtube where you can upload gigabyte everyday for free with high availability, plus all the tools of encoding/reencoding that can become costly and probably too much for most user especially if it has to be free as youtube, seems complicated. For audio or photos it could be viable though.

The other issue is that content can't be modified or deleted after it's integrated in a block, but if only the index is stored on the blockchain, and the data stored only locally, deleting the local file would make it unavailable to other nodes.

The best would be to figure a flexible fee system that can be settled by the miner to avoid object/file transaction to be cancelled because of the inputs used for the fees, to have priority objects based on fees that can still be confirmed instantly given some garantees to the miners about the fees. But even this is not a big issue for new content that doesn't depend on previous state (like new posts on social media), as it can just sit on the memory pool with no fee and cannot be canceled anyway, or some portion of blocks size can be reserved to store such data, as the problem of block size is much less acute for data than for transaction validation.

Not every nodes have to store everything, only the index and public key/signature of the data. Each node can store locally only the data it needs.

But i don't think either blockchain are really going to be competitive for mass free social networking, more for archiving or small to medium user base, for less than 100k posting users or so it can be manageable.

Or it needs some sharding, but that could be easier to do on applications or social networking that already have information on circles and groups, like data for a group would be very easy to shard, and not everyone has to store all the data from the all groups, while data integrity as well as origin can still be checked publicly.

But at the scale of facebook or youtube, handling millions or billions or user seems difficult, or with a very efficient sharding, because all together most user only need to access a very small amount of the whole data, and data relationship/hierarchy can be made easy to shard, as the relationship of new content with existing content can be made easy to figure out in lot of cases, unlike transaction where any transaction can potentially reference any other transactions, content on platform like facebook can still be segregated more easily.

But the advantage is also not huge, because what make blockchain interesting is in the way it can settle disagreement on transactions which can include ordering or dependency problems, with files or social media there is not a huge need for conflict resolving and it's easy to end up with the same data on all nodes, as there can hardly be some mutually exclusive branch, unless it rely on access on limited resources like transactions depends on coins, there is not much at stake with the consensus on regular application data like for social media, the advantages would be content signature and timestamp, making the application easy to distribute in a secure manner with the cryptography, making it censor free on the global chain even if all nodes can filter the data they want to have locally and/or serve, and making page generation and data sourcing publicly verifiable.

Social media also generate lot of waste and temporary data that is only going to get viewed for short period of time, like instagram or instant chat, so for casual non important temporary data, blockchain are not necessarily a good target, but for a target like archiving, or blog post that are supposed to stay and be viewed for a long time it could have an interest.

Facebook and Youtube have never been decentralized they are a corporation and had a board of directors and they are a profit-driven company, they will always never show you how much they are really making, and they will not go decentralized they have an interest and a profit to protect.
Remember Facebook was fine for data breach I don't think they will ever shift to being decentralized, they don't want to exposed.

The company have it's centralized system and they already earning using this for sure there's  no way for them to migrate. Though the possibilities
in case that the demands of blockchain increases, who knows maybe this two giant companies will also adopt, it's business and they will take for
considerations if they have see good potentials.

Online platforms cannot be decentralized because there is a reason towards everything there are people responsible for it , there are governmental issues regarding this body and one should understand that Making then decentralized would not only affect the market it would also affect these companies , now someone can hold someone credible and it could easily turn upside down when even these things are made decentralized , it would be a mess and who would take care of the updates and frauds concerning this ?
And why would someone give up the profit ?

To be honest, I think the use of p2p technology is perfectly well suited to some applications for video streaming. Streaming video is too resource intensive and services that need reliability better than youtube are already utilizing the resources of their users to spread their content and reduce usage of their servers' bandwidth and processing power. For this, we are already seeing major providers such as TV channels using it in their websites. We don't need a cryptocurrency attached to these IMHO. If somebody wants to watch free content online, then contributing some bandwidth could be an option.

Yes but if viewed from the development of Yes little by little industry has adopted the blockchain starting from tourist attractions or payment tickets, then the bank will also start to use the blockchain technology. I do not know if BTC and alt included It.
But if seen from time to time I suppose that YT and FB will also do it for development, such as Libra for Facebook.

It could be an option moving forward when some application comes up with a p2p model and bittorrent is trying for a similar model and if they are able to fulfill that then it would be a great success, the original team tried the p2p streaming model but they did not succeed completely and now and different team is working towards the goal, lets see how that goes.

@OP youtube and facebook as a centralized company will be making use of the decentralized network to power their servers and services round the clock but do not expect them to change their financial model .

But it needs to be a different model than youtube, because youtube hosts lot of low value content, without very advanced content promotion, so it's hard to see a competitor to it that could host large amount of data for free.

With content that has more value density, with paid streaming it could be workable, as nodes that host / stream the content can be rewarded on the streaming value.

I thought this was the case with plex where you can be your own server and provide people with your resourced or the other way around but I can't see it any more efficient than the traditional thing called youtube. The thing is, people want the implementation of blockchain into this streaming platform which blockchain is not suitable for in my opinion. Imagine if the size of every content takes up an entire gigabyte and then it accumulates that'd be sill. Also the method you mentioned some torrent apps are already have the feature of streaming torrent nowadays so it's no different than creating new ones.

Paid streaming and watching has been an idea behind certain altcoin projects. But I guess they all went unsuccessful quickly.

In a centralized setting, there will be no central controller that would screen and review the videos being submitted. This will somehow encourage many people to flood submissions with many of them actual low-value and low-quality videos.

I started a project like this for music before, already was into this years ago, even before YouTube :)

But its a tough thing, most content producer are tied for life to a distributor ( even on some planet not yet discovered for some contract) , and there are very few good quality producer who are independant, and distributor generally took the habit to hate internet and in the end no real plateform of decentralized content distribution really existed. Majors did everything they could for this not To happen.

And now with competition as YouTube which is totally free with gigabytes of low value content uploaded / seconds, its hard To really compete with a serious plateform, either it will be free and based on volunteer and not very stable or professional, or it needs To be non free, and will be hard to attract users.

Even kim dot com wanted to start being a content distributor before he got arrested.

I stil think the current state of things with content production/distribution is not ideal, and blockchain could add a stone, but it would need some user attracting content producer associated to it that user would pay for. Lot of labels and producer are starving as well, so they could take any solution that bring them profits.

The main income from YouTube remain ads and it would be hard To force people To watch them in decentralized setting. Maybe it could be linked To a faucet and people would require tokens To watch certain content.

But it would need something différent than YouTube anyway.

Not entirely. But there are significant progress made in terms of striving towards decentralisation.

You look at projects such as Steemit, which used to be extremely hyped up and had actually a lot of quality content, but as soon as the money incentive dried up there is now a lack of users for the platform which is concerning.

Perhaps new innovations can come that solves this issue, but I doubt it'll be the near future. I think decentralisation of ideas is certainly a needed concept though.

The main problem of steem IMO is it lacks good content and users indexing, all the rating is uni dimentional, without proper indexing/category its very hard to find the content and users you can be interested in, and the rating is mixed with ROI for whales and it doesnt help.

I've checked all the post and your post so far you have not come back, to clarify if any of the answers suffice already suffice you, both social media have no hint to become a decentralized platform because they are successful on what they are doing, maybe in the future, this can change, once they faced a competitor that is using a decentralized platform, and this posed a big threat to their supremacy

only affects the reaction of the trust of users and shareholders, more matters relating to monetization will be the main obstacle. But for system changes it is still possible, like many other comments about p2p etc., But still this is not possible because they are real business products and have binding rules regarding limiting ideas from the use of alternative systems.

I think this is theoretically possible, but difficult. In addition, not everyone wants to use such a service. These are large platforms that do not want to lose their good reputation, so it is unlikely that in the near future there will be any steps in this direction.

This will happen soon because what a man can think, he can achieve too and once this happens, things will change for p2p lovers. With Facebook and YouTube, the decentralized world is their opposite. Moreover, they wont implement such a thing for their servers. It has some risk involved certainly. These companies cannot survive without keeping track of every single event that happens in their vicinity.

I dont think that is gonna happen, we know that these two social media platform has an organization or group of people who are managing that particular platform, so it is not possible for them to be decentralized. If that happens, it is not good, no one can regulate everything especially data that are coming, we know that facebook is known or famous and used also by children, what if there are malicious data that are being uploaded, no one can really delete that. That is why regulation in some platforms is good giving some laws that we have to obey to keep formality.

 I think it will never happen that Youtube and Facebook become decentralized because it is an organization managed by a group people. They have rules and regulation to be follow. Also become decentralize of everything is not good  because decentralization has a both good and bad effects to us and to our government.

The decentralization simply means not restricted to certain region or group to be in total charge. It is opened to many other hands without discrimination.youtube and facebook operation is decentralized but is under the control of certain groups. Although, anyone can make some ways from their advertisement.nothing should stop both from been decentralized too as long as it will not bring negative effect.

Its not a question of can anymore.

They can they should and they will.


The corporate and illumens use google & fbook to further their mass mind control agenda over humanity.

Control the flow of information and you literally control a person's reality.

to answer your question.

Facebook esp n youtube has special teams in place and special algorithms to censor information they dont like from public view.

Decentralized network would mean they cannot censor any information as everything is decentralized and in the public's hand.

Ofcourse I know many people in the world would kill to make sure decentralization alternatives of facebook n google dont manifest.

I will try to answer Your question.YouTube as a service does not need to be decentralized. But the traffic with which the content is broadcast can really be decentralized.The technology by which this can be implemented is described on this site:https://noia.network/ (https://noia.network/)

Youtube and Facebook both media social platform where they not available for investing, both of them just an entertainment and not decentralized for investing like bitcoin and altcoin, but Youtube and Facebook are giving best solution how to promote and make bitcoin become popular in the world by giving opinion about how using bitcoin as currency payment and investing way.

The answer is no. Facebook is so centralized that in the current scenario is buying all competitors to set up a monopoly.

Yeah but you can still earn through those sites by getting your channel monetized. The more famous you are, the more you can get likes, views and comments thus more money in return due to the high traffic you create (which is a better place for advertising).

Anyway, I don't think Youtube will attempt the decentralization simply because FB somehow "failed" in their attempt of creating their own digital asset (though backed with fiat ;D). So I think much better for them if they solely remain as big social media companies, they're already good in that field.

I think that such decentralized platforms can work on technology close to torrent technology. In addition to the lack of censorship, such platforms can be attractive in that no one will be able to delete your content, channel or video. I think in the future we will be able to see a full-fledged decentralized video platform and peer-to-peer social network that can compete with existing flagships in this industry.

I think I and you have the opposite of the theory of decentralization. In my opinion decentralization is one of the platforms organized to transact directly and there are no rules there. For example, exchange platforms in the US such as Nasdaq are decentralized and they do not have a rule about the liquidity or the price of stocks traded by businesses in a day. In general, all is free.
And for YouTube and Facebook, there are rules and are controlled by the people who created it. It has its rules and if you don't comply then you lose your account.

Oh my god, where do you people come from?
Nasdaq is decentralized and it has no rules!


Yeah, it works with new stuff..till it won't work anymore:P
Torrenting is the technical solution but what it lacks is an organisation from the seeders.
You want to download Jurassic park, you can do it even now, there are hundreds of seeders, you want to download an episode from live pd two seasons ago? Good luck I have my seedbox opened for two months and still haven't managed to come across a peer with the full file.

So, you will need to have some sort of distribution model, where at any time a file is available and the upload speed from the peers is enough.
And you can make this possible only ...with a central node, that knows at any time where and if the files are available. :P. So, goodbye decentralization.

Only cryptocurrency by the help of blockchain technology can make decentralisation true. The transparency that blockchain aims to achieve will not be done by these two giant platforms. Remember, facebook and youtube are giant social media tech and they need to centralize everything so that the control is upon them. If they will make it decentralised, rules will never be set and conflicts might arise.

Smaller content creators would have to seed their own videos. Also, I remember some shitcoin wanted to integrate itself with torrents to incentivize seeding - I don't know what came out of it, but maybe in the future it could be done with Lightning Network.

Youtube has been unprofitable since its inception and only recently it started to break even, so the Youtube that we know was indeed only possible due to centralization and Google being a giant corporation. A decentralized tube would most likely be in some ways worse than Youtube, but it would also be more free.

there is a crypto project that has a concept like youtube, but we are paid with tokens when making videos, upvotes, and shares,
the project is Tokentuber, if youtube does the same, i am sure it will be better than them following Google's footsteps

Of course they could and there has already been a decentralized alternative for both of them. But the problem with decentralized platform is how to make it a safe place for different group of people and stop illegal contents and save copyright claims. Monitoring would be difficult and lengthy, if we speed up, there could be content war between different group of people, countries, political ideas and parties.

they can still filter out published data systems on a regular basis.

it will still be centered and still must abide by the principle of geo-company. implementation will also be hampered by any policy reforms that do not benefit the public, their system has entered the commercial and strict domain with various censorship of freedom. Implementation of decentralization will not work perfectly.

That is the challenge for decentralized platform. How they can manage the people. Because the people are the one that working to the system. There is no head, no chief who monitors the system.
However, I think that these gigantic social platforms can handle that situation specially that they have the brightest and talented worker for their system.

I can't imagine these platforms being decentralized. YouTube, for example, is focussing on their greatest and biggest content creators which is why they are earning a lot of money. If no one will be able to control the algorithm, I think it will be more chaotic for smaller content creators and that would totally destroy that platform.

We already have a product for people who want a decentralized Youtube, it's called Flixxo.

For the rest, you can stay on youtube, a platform that became pretty much what it was supposed to fight against, internet tv with mandatory ads and censorship

https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-wants-to-create-a-decentralized-standard-for-social-media/

Jack Dorsey himself has now kicked a plan into action regarding this, though it doesn't quite fit the remit completely. As noted in a tweet in that article it seems like it's more like Twitter releasing an Android-esque system and then setting it free and seeing what happens.

It would be interesting to see what a fully free for all version of the big platforms would look like. My guess is that they would be totally intolerable.

In order to decentralize youtube you need to have a datacenter that is fragments of the data all shared by the people which combined becomes a video. Or some other method I can't think of, I mean think about it if you have a facebook type of thing that is decentralized all you need to provide people a "wallet" that you can store information yourself and people will see it when they go to your "wallet" but when you do a youtube type of video thing you need everyone to be able to suggest stuff like youtubes recommendations and trends and what not, your facebook message doesn't become a trending topic, but youtube video does.

I feel like a decentralized social media like twitter is quite possible but the more complicated it gets the harder it is for people to decentralize it.

As long as big corporations handle these platforms, it's obvious that they will remain as is and will continue to do so until the end of these platforms' popularity. Though anyone can start their own decentralized platforms, the thing is most big names and people are invested and have their eyes fixed on these giants. Though there might be a few random groups of enthusiasts that cling on small hubs of unknown platforms, it still is not enough to defeat these giants on what they do, but at least they are alternatives.

Just checked back this thread, thanks for this news which I haven't heard yet. I wonder how Bluesky will go through with this but I think it'll be "decentralized" more regarding the moderating, so Mastodon (which I only heard through this article) does seem right. Twitter will still call the shots what content gets posted and they'd still cancel people they don't agree with.

But making youtube a decentralized platform would just be like the early stages of decentralized video streams today, no users and no income. And by that how are they going to handle their users? If no one's in control, how about the content creators and their content and materials? No on will manage it? I cannot imagine myself using a decentralized platform of social media.

It is still in deep to talk with twitter making it open and decentralized. No need to tall about it since it has not started yet, decisions isn't final for the whole team.

These two social media platforms can never be decentralized because of it popularity and because they never started out in that part.
The only thing that can make them to consider or take up that part is if there is a huge competitor that is decentralized that is capable of sweeping them off guard, aside that I don't see it leading that part.

I see a lot of people abuse word "Blockchain Technologies" and "Decentralization", that's because these words look attractive and innovative and you know, more likely people are interested with innovative things. In reality, at least to my mind there is no need of decentralized youtube and facebook analogues, there were many attempts of creating decentralized social platform but no one explained well what pros it had and why would someone choose that over facebook or twitter for example.
Can 100% say the same on youtube, it can't be decentralized because someone has to manage content there, for example someone may upload movie that is against copyrights and it's not acceptable, such content needs to be removed. There are still a lot of examples to mention there.

Lol, leave these greedy folks out of a transparent and decentralized ecosystem. I don't know much off Youtube but definitely Zuckerberg is not the kind of person who will cherish entrusting power to the people. Facebook is the controlling type of platform, these days everything is regulated and you have to pay to boost your views when you make a post.

I agree to this point and in fact the reality into this industry.It wont easily be beaten or replaced up by decentralized ones.Ive seen in the past on a certain project that trying to build up a
decentralize social media but it looks like they have failed due to lack of support or funding which indicates that interest into these field isnt really that high for them to succeed.
But it isnt really bad to push up this idea if theres someone do have the capacity and dedication to clash up their main competitors.

You're pointing out Facebook ads, right? So what's the problem with that? Google ads also is a paid platform to advertise. Everything is paid and you can expect good results if it's done well.

But yeah, Facebook is also controlling one especially when it have the access to our information and privacy. It's just quite annoying that why some wanted to make everything decentralized? I know we hate being controlled but YouTube and other social media platforms is better to stay that way.

Well let's see how it all pans out. Facebook is looking to launch its own crypto Libra. A lot of controversy there at the moment but we will see

Despite the fact that the world now is fully digitalized, I still dont believe that Facebook and YouTube platforms will be decentralized. This two largest social media networks had been run by a group of people for several years and Its impossible that they will make decentralization with this two platforms. There are a lot of things to consider before implementing such kind of management innovations, and the main factors to consider here is the advantages and disadvantages of decentralizations for this two largest social media platforms to all the users worldwide.

Yes, it's very possible to have such platforms fully decentralized. However, I believe you won't expect that to happen because non of them will interested in going towards that direction. This is because full decentralization often leads to loss of control and non of those billionaire owners would want to lose control of the platforms they have built over the years that have made them what they are today. Yes, YouTube and Facebook can be fully decentralized but that's not going to happen.

Decentralization in this case is all about cryptocurrencies. If you want youtube / facebook. I think the system will be centralized on one server. I still can't imagine if their system is decentralized. unless they issue their coin / token which is crypto based. If you think everything will be decentralized, I think maybe it will in the end. but it still takes a long process to get there.

Nope facebook and Libra are doing their moves to keep distance from each other as Libra is now changing Name "DIEM"  i don't know whats the real score about this action but at least clarifying that this tend to separate libra from Facebook,So this might be the reason from facebook decentralization .