It is really distressing to see how many of the videos in my, admittedly quite large, favourites list are gone by now. Even ones that I only added in the past few weeks. Either simply "Deleted", "Private" or "Removed/Blocked by the copyright holder". In most cases I have trouble even finding out what the title of the video even was.
This is an example of the dichotomy between "the internet remembers everything" and the inherent ephemerality of electronic data (effort is required to ensure it remains un-destroyed).
I self-host some things because I like the technical challenge, and what I've found is that the effort required to maintain the online presence of the data is quite demanding. Less so if it's outsourced, but without actively 'tending the garden', it will inevitably disappear at least from the public-facing internet.
The ephemerality is also exacerbated by Google / Facebook account terminations.
The internet remembers everything applies much stronger to text than to rich media. I can still find a mention of myself from a 1983 newspaper article that has been duped across a bunch of content harvesters (and also on the way back machine’s view of the newspaper’s site).
One layer of the internet is about packets, another is about ordered sequential streams — and both are widely supported protocols. Above these could potentially sit a dissemination layer, retaining and persisting anything of interest. But in a legal system where information can be speech or property, it is problematic to do that as a standard protocol. Instead we have archive.org, The Archive Team, BitTorrent, and a million progressively less durable options from there, including some of us running youtube-dl on videos of interest, grabbing PDF’s off Arxiv, SSRN, etc. I’m not sure what to do about any of this except a yearly donation to archive.org, and accepting the great distributed fitness function of fate.
Wonder if archive.org and the EFF could get a video site up to compete with youtube, or work to back something like bitchute or otehr alternatives to raise awareness and push back on overreach takedown requests. YouTube/Google just seem to cave, and apparently so does GitHub.
So does everyone who got owned by a multinational megacorp. That's when all the human vision goes out the door. Because there's no mechanisms to keep it there, it will eventually wither.
We could have had so many nice things if it wasn't for those things.
It's almost as if there's somewhere a country which acts as a fertile breeding ground for these uncontrollable unregulated monstrosities, to grow really big, and at some point left roaming wild for other countries to deal with "yeah we don't do that here" (by which I mean stuff like false advertising and reasoning like "if it's legal and I make a profit then I get to do it").
I've been distraught at the same thing. I had a few playlists that I grew over time, and it's annoying to go back and see gaps of "[Deleted video]" where your favorites used to be. I'm curious to know if you've found a solution for this.
Personally I've started locally saving anything I think I would want to watch or reference again. When favoriting something or saving it to a playlist, I download it too. I started off with using youtube-dl on the command line and have experimented with the "Import from YouTube" function on Peertube but ended up with a tiny cobbled-together video platform, importer (youtube-dl wrapper), and Firefox extension. I think the next step will be easily saving non-video things - probably recording WARCs?
I beefed up my browser cache to remember everything and have a server in the background downloading any youtube channel I visit. Now I know that anything I've ever looked at via the browser is now accessible offline.
