From what I understand, they’re already getting paid pennies by youtube, which is why many of them constantly shill for patreon/nebula/curiositystream/whatever on top of sponsored content. So youtube is shit for the creators, shit for the consumers, and a net loss for google. It’s the same non-business model as food delivery apps: nobody profits, yet it still somehow keeps going because modern economics is make-believe.

Just some time ago, I was thinking about some P2P Video service, where everyone would provide the data they have - so like a BitTorrent YouTube

It’s called PeerTube. It uses activitypub, the same federation protocol as lemmy. Large creators could certainly afford to host their own videos. Some federation/self-hosting/free software creators already do. Can we have large free-to-use instances where individuals can upload their videos, like we do with Lemmy? I would like to hope so.

But just standing up and copying all of youtube’s content? Like I said, it’s a MONUMENTAL task. There are around 14e9 videos on there. That’s almost two videos for every person on planet earth. And I’m not even sure how useful mirroring would be. It’s important for archival purposes, sure, but it’s not forward-thinking. For a lot of pieces of content, the value comes mainly from the community surrounding it, not the content itself. Mirroring cuts the community out of the content. I believe that If archiving/mirroring efforts are to succeed at anything beyond occupying disk space, they must be focused on a specific type of content, and headed by people who are genuinely passionate about the content they are archiving, not disintrested data hoarders.

It would be a tragedy if youtube collapsed. There are so many useful and important videos on there. I passed the second year of my engineering bachelor almost exclusively by studying from youtube (the lectures at my college are useless), the vast breadth of content available on that platform simply does not exist anywhere else, and archiving all of it would be a monumental task. With youtube being a net loss for google for multiple years in a row, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that if they can’t make it profitable, they might just… shut it down like they did with Plus.

A lot of “hardware raid” is just a separate controller doing software raid. I thought I lost access to a bunch of data when my raid controller died, before I realized that I could just plug the disks directly into the computer and mount them with mdadm. But yes, hardware raid seems a bit pointless nowadays.