At some point we’re going to need a better place to put videos than YouTube. The lack of any democratization of bulk storage is beginning to be a real problem on the internet.

Yes, we have archive.org. We need more than that, though.

I’m sure there’s some distributed solution like IPFS but I haven’t seen any serious attempt to make this accessible to every day people.

> The lack of any democratization of bulk storage is beginning to be a real problem on the internet.

There are many thousands of paid hosting services, feel free to pick one. It turns out hosting TB of data for free is a pretty tricky business model to nail down.

There are: peertube, odysee, minds, rumble, bitchute web torrent)...

It is the same reason why people just can't get off IG. Network effect and in YT case a lot of disk space and bandwidth.

If you want to compete with YT you need to basically build AWS S3 in your own data centers. You'd have to find a way to make your service run cheaper than google can if you wanted to survive. You'd have to get very scrappy and risky. I'd start with questions like: how many 9s of durability do we actually need here? Could we risk it until the model is proven? What are the consequences for losing cat videos and any% speed runs of mario64? That first robotic tape library would be a big stepwise capex event. You'd want to make sure the whole thing makes sense before you call IBM or whoever for a quote.

The problem with bulk storage is that it will be abused at large scale.

CSAM peddlers, intellectual property violators, unconsensual sexual material ("revenge porn"), malware authors looking for places to exfiltrate stolen data, propagandists and terrorists, the list of abusers is as long as it is dire.

And for some of these abuser classes, the risk for any storage service is high. Various jurisdictions require extremely fast and thorough responses for a service provider to not be held liable, sometimes with turnaround times of 24 hours or less (EU anti terrorism legislation), sometimes with extremely steep fines including prison time for responsible persons. Hell, TOR exit node providers have had their homes raided and themselves held in police arrest or, worse, facing criminal prosecution and prison time particularly for CSAM charges - and these are transit providers, not persistent storage.

And all of that's before looking on the infrastructure provider side. Some will just cut you off when you're facing a DDoS attack, some will bring in extortionate fees (looking at you, AWS/GCE/Azure) for traffic that may leave you in personal bankruptcy. And if you are willing to take that risk, you'll still run the challenge of paying for the hardware itself - storage isn't cheap, 20TB of storage will be around 200€ and you want some redundancy and backups, so the actual cost will rather be 60-100€/TB plus the ongoing cost of electricity and connectivity.

That's why you're not seeing much in terms of democratization.

> I’m sure there’s some distributed solution like IPFS

Almost 25 years on the internet and I have not been able to download anything from IPFS. Does one need a PhD to do so?

I keep seeing ads on TV for Photobucket (Which I thought was dead) for 1TB of storage for either free, or $5, depending on the ad.

Maybe there is an opportunity for that company to expand.

Also, archive.org is in magaland, so that is a very endangered service.