We all hate google and youtube, but overall as a community we’re all simultaneously lukewarm and non-committal about pushing towards using an alternative. I admittedly cling to invidious frontends for dear life.
It seems like whenever somebody asks for an alternative to youtube, they’re offered Odysee and Peertube, but inevitably many others chime in about the shortcomings of both of those platforms.
Can we as a community come to a consensus as to which of these platforms should be pushed forward?
I don’t even think it needs to be a binary choice. Obviously youtube cannot be immediately replaced for it’s archival of educational and tutorial videos, but we can at least push newcomers towards using invidious frontends for those instances.
Maybe Odysee is better for some type of content over Peertube. Let’s discuss which platform works best for what and try to be more active about sharing and promoting them not just to viewers but potential creators as well.
If you go to share a youtube link, try to see if that video exists on an alternate platform first and share that link instead. I think that’s a good first step towards getting away from youtube in the privacy community.
But youtube alternatives are still very much on the fringe and I’m hoping this post will at least inspire some discussion about changing that.
So. Some unfortunate news here. There was never a time to be on YouTube in the first place.
It’s kind of wild to me that the alternatives to YT aren’t… better. I mean, it’s not as if YT is brand new.
The PeerTube iOS app is just a mess. And I’m not sure, but I think the Odysee app hasn’t been updated since the Second World War.
Holy crap, my entire response sounds like a whiny kid. Maybe instead of me complaining, I should throw up a PT instance and do something meaningful.
Storing and serving 4/8k 60 fps video is extremely expensive. It’s not like twitter where you could run it of a phone if you wanted to.
Fair point. I’m sure many would disagree with me, but for web video anything more than HD is pointless except for very niche content. But even HD streaming at scale is taxing and expensive.
Airlines make the majority of their money from a small percentage of flyers paying business and 1st class. I think there’s a world where this principal can be applied to something like peertube hosting in some form.
That’s true, I didn’t even think about that. Having a mastodon instance can be super cheap. But it’s also not usually storing high quality media.
Yeah but peertube is being developed by just ine guy from backend to frontend and they have dine great work. It will get better ig but still uts very very difficult to make users and creators change platform
They may be better than YT was when it was the same age. IIRC, Youtube used to use flashplayer, and most videos were something like 480p.
I mean I did throw up a PT instance and publish my videos exclusively on it, and I’m getting decent views if the topic is interesting and I promote it on hacker news, I’m getting several thousands of views. But that does not fix the PeerTube mobile app, nor the fact that finding content is practically impossible and the subscribe mechanism constantly randomly stops working, there is no app for my TV (like SmartTube) etc.
I’m all in with PeerTube as a creator, but as a user it’s a terrible experience.
Do you mind sharing your channel?
And can I ask how you find other interesting channels?
I’m sure you weighed the pros and cons of Peertube vs Odysee. What made you choose peertube?
There are browser extensions that automatically switch user to an alternative platform if youtube video is available on both.
Watch on Odysee Firefox LINK
PeerTube Companion Firefox LINK
I can’t run my own Odysee instance to be independent of third parties which might moderate away my content if they don’t like it. My content my rules.
Oh and finding new content is kind of impossible, I wish PeerTube was set up more like Lemmy with communities which you subsribe to instead of channels people need to follow explicitly.
SepiaSearch is the best I’ve found for finding content on peertube.
I have it build in into my instance and while it is the best, doesn’t mean it is usable.
Can you make money on peertube like you can on YouTube?
Not like on YouTube, but differently.
How so?
Sponsors, paywall, using it to advertise or support your business, etc.
I’m honestly not sure why PeerTube isn’t bigger than it is, aside from a few things.
I would love to have PT as a nice, open competitor to YouTube, like Mastodon is to X and Bluesky (I know Mastodon is much smaller, but you get my meaning). I’d love to see, say, bands throwing their music videos there.
If nothing else, having people yoink YT content and chuck it onto PT. I know they probably can’t, but still.
Nothing can compare yet to YouTube.
The main reason is: YouTube is not only a distribution channel. It is also its own promotion channel tied to a search engine which magnifies that promotion.
You open YouTube and it offers similar videos tho what you’ve been watching. You search for something and there is probably a video (or many( matching what you are searching.
Other platforms are currently only distribution channels. You upload the video and promote it through other channels. Whether your own website or posts somewhere else.
Si, if you are a content producer and want to share, the current fediverse solutions are great, however it will need critical mass to attract content consumers.
And without content consumers, it will be hard to attract content providers who want a broad distribution and exposure.
So, let’s start moving out own content to the fediverse and use other channels to promote them. Let’s create a snowball effect. We could even post to several and see where the content consumers gravitate to.
however it will need critical mass to attract content consumers.
My guess is that that’s the reason why OP wants to focus on one platform. Pick a winner and bring the traffic.
Let’s be clear : how YouTubers will survive without ads money on another platform ?
Probably like most opensource developers begging for donations and having a regular job somewhere.
Yes, maybe. Or certainly sticking to YT where the money is, and that’s a bit sad.
To play devil’s advocate, I could argue the monetization of YouTube has lead to all of the quirks of the platform people like us hate.
- Shilling scams and shitty products
- Biased reviews
- Corporate pressured censorship
- Age restriction
- Algorithm optimized content
- The general corporatization of YT (see YouTube Rewind feature Will Smith and a bunch if other celebrities)
The list goes on.
Although I agree there should at least be some way for creators to recoup the expenses they put towards producing videos. An ad-free patreon style donation system seems the most practical and balanced from what Ive experienced.
Isn’t most of their incomes from sponsorship? What YouTube offers is a large audience that makes sponsorship valuable to advertisers.
Some people have managed to diversify their income, but a hefty chunk still comes from ad money. That income is also wildly unpredictable, so it really makes economic sense to diversify. Being entirely dependent on a single source puts your business in a very precarious position. If your company fails as a result, it’s just bad strategy. On the other hand, you could also blame YT for being unpredictable, wild and turbulent.
The way I see it, the core of the problem is economic. Making videos takes money. Storage and bandwidth cost something too, so doing this on a small scale won’t make much sense.
There are a few smaller platforms like Nebula, and they seem to be doing just fine. IMO those platforms are the way to go.
It’s a bit of a mixed bag. Sponsorships, merch, patreon and ad revenue usually all play a significant part of medium sized channels and bigger.
I use peertube as much as I can, but there’s only like 3 people that I like from Youtube that’s also on Peertube: Veronica Explains (@veronicaexplains@tinkerbetter.tube), The Linux Experiment (@thelinuxexperiment_channel@tilvids.com) and Gardiner Bryant (@gardiner_bryant@subscribeto.me). I guess I watch Tafotin (@trafotin@spectra.video) from time to time as well.
I hadn’t even used Odysee before, but just a cursory look I did find someone whose content I enjoy there, Naomi Brockwell. From the looks of it, it has some sort of crypto feature? (ew)
Also, how in the world does decentralization work there? There’s only one website, that’s odysee.com, that doesn’t seem very decentralized to me.I’m just so sick of the censorship on youtube, and the shadowbanning of comments. It feels like 90% of my comments aren’t seen by anyone, not even myself.
PeerTube is the ‘YouTube alternative’ I can somewhat get around but the issue I have it has few content creators I would watch. Otherwise, just seems more of a concept than an actual replacement for now.
I hate Odysee, it has many far-right content creator which I remember seeing much of pro-nazi video on there. It’s beyond me people keep suggesting that god awful platform for people that hate YouTube for allowing far-right wingers on YouTube and doing barely anything about it.
It’s a shame crypto has such a stink on it.
I mean, I despise crypto-bros and just don’t want anything to do with any cryptocurrency or tokens of any kind.
However, in another universe it might have been a nice way to do micropayments to support content producers.
Like I’m not going to click on an ad so the platform gets $0.02 and the creator gets $0.01, but I would click a button to give the creator $0.01 if that were a thing.
Yeah, in theory I’m pro-crypto, except that people are treating crypto more like stocks than anything else which is what gives me the ick.
BET live streaming still has 3+ minute commercial breaks, so i’m waiting for youtube to do the equivalent.
Well, would it work if we get a few 1$ a month VPS and run mediacms on them ? each one could probably house a couple hundred videos and they have about the capacity to serve, maybe 100 users on gigabit internet with 4TB a month traffic allowance. That’s still a lot of serving video for not a lot of money.
The best time to switch away from youtube was several years back, after the growth phase of our few remaining tech players ended and maximizing revenue started.
The next best time is now. They will only get worse, and bow to powerful interests even more. Them demanding we prove age by providing commercially valuable info they will keep no matter what they say, should be the last straw for all of us.
Find smaller competitors, youtube and google are lost causes we need to quit both.
very much on the fringe
When mainstream is mostly consumerist attention grabbing bullshit, is it genuinely a problem?
Nebula is pretty great.
The last I heard Youtube actually makes a loss in terms of cost and ad revenue but is worth maintaining because of the user data it makes available to its parent company. The low ethical standards and backing of one of the worlds biggest corporations allow it to outcompete any alternative.
If we’re serious about dealing with the problem we need to deal with antitrust and privacy.
I doubt they will do it but video creators need to organise and put pressure on government to enforce the law on this.
YouTube has been profitable since 2019
We need to split clients from providers.
Invidious and freetube could diversify to accept multiple alternative sources besides youtube content.
If the content exists on multiple platforms the user could set a preference and orded or backup providers.
As creators make a switch to smaller platforms the users who use these clients are unaffected. It works similar to our fediverse, a community can just change instance and everyone can still access it the same.
Creators could test migration by posting to multiple providers themselves. Those reliant on YouTube money specifically could premiere on youtube and after some time reupload elsewhere.
Those that dont rely on youtube money can do the reverse where the later youtube money served more as an ad to their alternative main channel.
Doesn’t Grayjay from Futo do this?
I’ve not used it yet, but to my understanding this is exactly what it does, or very damn close to it.
This is actually a brilliant idea.
Grayjay is built on this idea
That immediately came to mind. But is there a way to have it reroute to a different platform if the video is on an alternative platform? I follow a few youtubers in grayjay that I only recently discovered mirror on peer tube. Grayjay didn’t give any hints.
I have no idea, to be honest
I still watch YouTube but I block all their ads.
It’s very difficult to get away from YT, too long time with free hands converted it to a monoply with all its abuses. Yes, there are alternatives like Odysee, PeerTube and some others, but they lack of contents, front ends, like Invidious, PokeTube, etc are getting killed more and more by Gargle. For music there isn’t such a big problem, most content can be listen in Bandcamp and other streaming sites, but for other contents only can be found, eg. in the homepages of the Public TV (Movies, Live streams, Documentals,…). Another possibility are Desktop clients, but eg. FreeTube relays on Invidious and with this most Videos are blocked, VLC or SMplayer still working mostly. It’s certainly a Mess and it will take years to be able to substitute really YT. Only manner until now is to use protection against the profiling and tracking (VPN, Proxies, ad/tracker blocker anyway mandatory, etc).
Peertube. Then, you can use a peertube search engine like Sepia search to search across many peertube instances, replicating the youtube user interface. Sepia search has a long way to go but if peertube grows it will get there. Searching technology is already a solved problem.
