Can online platforms like Youtube and Facebook really be decentralized?

[mersal]

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?

[imstillthebest]

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

[beerlover]

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.

[Mometaskers]

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.

[blckhawk]

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.

[Kprawn]

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.  

[TastyChillySauce00]

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...

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.

[Dart18]

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.

[Google+]

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.

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.

[uneng]

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.

[audaciousbeing]

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.

[IadixDev]

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.

[IadixDev]

No, they have incredible amount of data, no one will store it

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.

[robelneo]

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".

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.

[joshy23]

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.

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.

[fiulpro]

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 ?

[alani123]

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.

[naikturun]

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.

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.

[uray]

If somebody wants to watch free content online, then contributing some bandwidth could be an option.

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 .

[IadixDev]

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.

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.