Edit- thanks for offers to help. I do have one small project that is a step in the right direction and I might have it up ready to go (at least a start) in the next week or two. I will post again and link to this post when I do, and PM people below. Is there some way to get connected now that our communities have been nuked so people can share skills ideas and projects and collaborate?
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I've been thinking a lot about alternative content sharing platforms and the problems they face for the past few years and also wrote my CS diploma thesis somewhat related to this (not saying college matters, I regret wasting my time there). One of the biggest issues I see is the network effect: established mainstream platforms have a huge advantage because of the amount of content that their large amount of users produce (this includes comments). The vast amount of content further incentivises people to use an established platform, rather than joining a new one.
What I think we really need is a "meta" video sharing platform. Take video sharing platforms for example: this meta platform would fetch content from YouTube, BitChute, Odysee, Rumble and store the metadata on its servers. It would implement its own search and recommendation (discovery) engine. This solves the challenge every new alternative platform faces: lack of (diverse) content.
It would also allow registered users to add multiple existing video sharing platforms via OAuth (crucially YouTube) and when they would upload a video it would post it to all the different platforms the user has added to their account. On this "meta" platform same video on multiple platforms would be seen as one video, with comments/likes from multiple platforms merged together. This means the content (including comments) posted on this meta platform would also be seen directly on YouTube by people who never heard of this platform.
I would focus on the following meta platforms the most:
Platforms of this type would need a lot of compute (scraping all content from other platforms, indexing, recommendations). Storage requirements could be reduced by only storing the metadata and textual data, while embedding the videos directly from YouTube.
I think platforms of this type would face a lot of legal challenges, since the most effective way to build it would be to scrape the publicly available data from YouTube /Twitter/FB (since fetching the content via an API can be easily disabled by BIG tech). Most of the legal challenges are the result of years of lobbying by BIG tech - they are only legal, not moral challenges, since the content on those platforms is in principle made and owned by its users, not the platform itself. Making the project open source and allowing anyone to host an instance is one way I see to make it more resilient and hard to shut down, even in the face of legal pressures.
I'd be happy to answer any questions someone might have and brainstorm the most ideal implementation further.