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.
What about Nebula? It’s paid subscription but you can pay for once off lifetime subscription for $300, and the content creators even encourage users to opt for the latter. Edit: wording
Is the video catalog larger for paid customers?
I searched for my topics of interest and hobbies but barely got any hit.
Sucks they don’t have a trial period.
I searched for my topics of interest and hobbies but barely got any hit.
Oh yeah, it is worth noting that Nebula doesn’t have as many options as in YouTube, I’m afraid. That is the limitation of platform. New content creators do come in to Nebula but not as often as it would be on YouTube.
Personally, I love nebula because it does have the topics I am interested in, which is mainly history, news, video games and politics. There are also long form video essays on variety of topics. I would say that Nebula is more like nerdy because of prevalence of those topics. I haven’t come across Nebula videos that are more niche like, let’s say, woodworking or metalworking etc. I do photography but I think there is only one Nebula content creator that does photography.
I didn’t know that was a payment option. That’s really cool.
Nebula is terrific!
It does take some time to find everything. It’s not (much of) an algorithm, so I just had to explore and start subscribing to things.
Nebula fucks, I had been putting off the lifetime sub for ages and finally bit the bullet one day and I’ve been using it more than YouTube. Feels good knowing the creators get more stake in it and are literal stakeholders without all the alrogithm nonsense.
They’ve made it seem like the lifetime sub won’t be around forever though, worth noting.
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.
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
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.
So you can get actual YouTube content without the ads? Does it include an ad blocker or is it inherently resistant to ads?
I get 0 ads with uBlock Origin on Firefox. But that’s mostly for desktop/laptop style computing, not on mobile. For that I use New pipe, though rarely.
This is precisely what I do. Works flawless (on PC and mobile)
That’s a trap. It keeps the powerusers on Youtube instead of motivating them to seed a new platform.
I still watch YouTube but I block all their ads.
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.
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).
During my DeGoogling, dumping YouTube was easy, and was made easier when they started permanently banning leftist feeds like Party Girls. The struggle for me was Google Maps. Lots of substitutes, and I do use CoMaps, but none are quite as slick as the Google version…yet.
I mean if peertube was based on torrents…would that work?
I’m not sure how Peertube works, but from my current knowledge, torrents seem like a great (and obvious?) option, especially from an archival pov.
Not sure that streaming them is great (mostly for skipping around), but theres a lot of streaming players out now, maybe it’s good now with well seeded torrents.
If I’m being naive, I would love to know in which ways.
The very platform you’re clinging to is on Death’s Door and they’re actively breaking YouTube’s terms of service while still using the service.
None of the other platforms are even close to replacing YouTube. They can’t handle the scale or the features. And none of them are heading towards being able to accomplish this.
YouTube is a capitalist utopia funded with more money than God. They provide unlimited free storage and transmission of all videos sent to their platform. They fleece videos for copyright and legal impingements. They gather corporations willing to spend on advertisements and link them directly to end users uploading data, and when they reach a threshold, they pay them.These funds pay for the unlimited amounts of storage at levels that no other platform could handle.
The other platforms that are open to us don’t make enough money to do any of those things. We’re relying on the funding, development, and administration of a couple of generous strangers.
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, but IMO it’s not the whole story.
You’re correct that youtube is not going to be dethroned in the foreseeable future. The thing is, I don’t want an open platform to replace youtube, I just want some content to be available on that open platform.
There are a couple of peertube servers that aren’t horrible. TILVids is particularly decent.
But until somebody works out monetization for these people, it’s probably going to be Slim Pickings.
At a minimum, peertube is going to need to support private videos for Patreon to have proper effect.
This. I’ll leave YouTube when I can have a similar experience and support all of my favorite content creators somewhere else. Until then, everything else is just a lame video hosting site I’m not interested in.
I think one of the biggest challenges is alternate choices for creators. If everybody posted their content to YT plus another platform, things would naturally start shifting.
If a channel I follow posts to Odysee then I watch it there. I follow multiple channels that also post to Nebula, so I try to watch it there.
But there’s no clear standard for what platforms are good for what. There’s also a paywall issue with some (like aforementioned Nebula) that not everybody will be able to pay. I’ve also tried Curiosity Stream, and never watched it because there was no content I found worth it.
Then there’s the technical issues. I can’t believe that I am paying for Nubula when their app sucks so badly. (I will probably cancel but haven’t yet). Odysee is so much better than when it launched but it’s still a pile of dung. PeerTube I never felt worked well at all, so much so that maybe I’m missing something. But while I might not be the sharpest tool in the shed if I can’t figure it out then its a bad platform.
So in all reality, there isn’t a replacement for YT. I wish there was, but there isn’t. There should be, but there isn’t. Yes, we should try to post alternate links and such, but that’s not going to make much of a difference in the end.
And sorry, this all came out significantly negative sounding. I don’t mean to be crapping on the post or the idea. I just mean to point out that the issue is much deeper than user interactions. There’s an infrastructure problem first (we need a viable working alternative), then a content problem second (we need to convince creators to move there), and only last is there a user interaction issue (which this post is discussing).
Using a front end like Grayjay is important. When it can abstract multiple back ends, YouTube. Tube Patreon Mastodon etc, if you are subscriptions are available on multiple platforms, then it could just source from a better platform. Helping you wean yourself off of YouTube
And providing content creators a consistent audience, and incentive to post multiple platforms
I agree, but the lack of solid alternate platforms is the main issue.
I am trying to - there’s no direct replacement, but I’ve removed the YouTube app from my phone at least. Also signed up for both Nebula and Dropout, which both do some sort of direct profit sharing with creators.
y’all won’t even watch the videos I post on mastodon.
Probably over a decade ago.
Peertube is the future. It only needs more people, just like everything else federated.
Anyone trying to say a federated option is not the solution is a useful idiot and should be written off accordingly.
The problem is the content. We would have to get content creators to cross post to peertube.
Can’t RSS bots do this?
Is this a suggestion to set up a bot to crosspost videos from YouTube (with the original video owner’s consent and knowledge)?
Probably but not without permission of the owners of the channel. Possibly ask them to repost automatically if they agree?
Yesterday, but today is good as well. :-)
I personally run two. My own at video.firesidefedi.live.
And started a nonprofit that I’m still working on getting 501© 3 status in the US called BT Free, and currently running a moderated instance TubeFree.org. open for sign ups, but if you want to post video I need to see it first as again, heavily moderated. Eventually I plan on having storage costs for tax deductible donations, but idk when that’ll be. And hopefully in the future can do revenue sharing or have a way to post creators.
I know Ben Pate, whom I talked with on fireside fedi and is creating emissary and bandwagon, is working on pay systems. As well as other folks.
I’m not coming at this from a privacy perspective but I have gone through the alternatives to see what (if any) I can practically use because I want to extricate American tech from my life.
There are three categories (ignoring a tonne for obvious reasons):
- Region Specific:
- Bilibili (China)
- Niconico (Japan)
- etc.
- Alt-tech:
- Odysee (US/Decentralized)
- Peertube (France/Decentralized)
- Rumble (Canada but close Trump affiliation)
- Bit Chute (UK)
- Standard:
- Nebula (US)
- Daily Motion (France)
- TikTok (China)
I use Nebula, have briefly tried Tiktok, Peertube, Daily Motion, Niconico, and Bilibili. Perhaps I should consider the alt-tech platforms too but there’s nobody on them and their reputations have been damaged by the far-right flocking to them when banned from YouTube for quite justifiable reasons. All platforms seem to have the issue that basically nobody of note uploads to more than one platform.
