If a video is never watched after being archived for a set amount of time it gets deleted is the easy solution. See if you can find a reasonable amount of time you can set an unwatched time limit. Even 1 watch a year might preserve the video.
What is the distribution like on the user side of things? Are there massive uploaders of unwatched videos you could maybe monetize?
15 TB in a year with probably accelerating amounts of archiving and nobody watching all the archived videos. If there's people that use preservetube as their google drives (as I assume they are), then I can see why he wouldn't want to pay for that
That defeats the whole purpose of preservation though. The way I see it, this isn't supposed to be a YouTube replacement where people are spending a bunch of time watching videos. It's an archival service where we can still access videos once YouTube arbitrarily takes them down because they're full of Indian faggots.
Its an archival service that anyone can self-host, and for that matter it makes little sense to put all burden on one person/server. I stand by my idea of putting videos publicly on notice so that other people can grab them off preservetube dot com and onto their personal instances. I say grab them off preservetube because some of them are probably already off of youtube and there's no other way to get them.
Enough money for centuries of hosting at 50, but 65 kills it?
I had emailed you about setting something up but didn't follow up yet because it's a low priority idea at the moment. You probably need to reduce automated archiving and you should look into something that prunes enormous videos based on their value. There's a lot of YouTube on the Kiwi Farms I would want to keep a copy of though. If you can provide some sort of API to permit me to download videos, trigger archivals via webhooks, and make certain archives as high-importance to peg them from prunes, I'd be interested in all that.
If you have 15+TB a year, in 10 years that'd be at 200TB. In 20 years at 350TB. And realistically it will grow much faster than 15TB/year as more and more people (read: bots) use the service and more and more videos are uploaded in 4K. Oh and also storage got quite a bit more expensive in the past year.
Sure, but also I don't see why you'd need to preserve automated/bot uploads, for instance. Most of those are likely to be junk, and if people want something preserved then they can definitely take the 2 seconds it takes to manually add it to preservetube.
That's a good idea. Usually I feel like if something people actually care about is gonna get deleted and mirrored, the dangerzone I think is the first 8 months to a year. It would at least be enough for popular videos or things that cause a lot of controversy, that someone wants to hide, ban or forget about. Occasionally I've pulled things out of old archive sites from Sonic Sega Gamer or someone that were like 2 or 3 years old, but it's unusual.
Is there any way Null can help with USIPS? Maybe he can help?
I feel like that's a bad idea mainly because people may needs those videos if the original uploader has decided to DFE.
One simple mitigation would be to not delete videos that are deleted from YouTube. Delete videos that are still available (and accessible, not privated) on YouTube.
Genuinely I appreciate your hard work and effort you've put into Preservetube, it has been one of the best sites I have used for archival. See, the only way I can say getting more traffic to actually watch the videos archived to the site, you might have to become a video sharing platform visually, with an alluring front page design showing more recently saved videos front and center with a faster to access library through word tags. I know that sounds stupid since the site is already easy to use and has it's function as soon as you access it, but most of the population are legitimately brain-dead monkeys that click mindlessly at easy shapes and bright colors before reading anything. I think building a more visual identity might help. That could have people donating to upkeep the site too.
I don't think he wants people to start watching the archived videos, he just wants people to only archive videos people will watch.
Maybe a bad idea for an archive, but what if videos that aren't watched within a year get deleted? Like if a year goes by and nobody clicks on it, fft, out it goes. You could even put a warning on it or something so people have time to save it if they want.