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.
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.
BET live streaming still has 3+ minute commercial breaks, so i’m waiting for youtube to do the equivalent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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? EDIT: Nvm found it. Added the new hyprland video to my watch list.
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?
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.
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.
There are browser extensions that automatically switch from YouTube to an alternative platform if video is available on both.
Watch on Odysee Firefox LINK
PeerTube Companion
Firefox LINK
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.
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.
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.
You could make a service that is objectively better than YouTube in every single way but unless creators are getting paid >90% of them won’t use it. There’s a reason TikTok creators always try and grow their YouTube following and its because it pays significantly better.
I agree with you for the majority of “content creators”. But I think there’s a sizable number of people who aren’t interested in making videos for a profit and I imagine there’s a fair overlap with people in this community and the fediverse at large.
If I were to create videos I would make them on either peertube or Odysee. I wasn’t really aware of either platform other than vague whispers of them until recently, and I find it difficult to gauge the community sentiment on which of these platforms would be suitable for finding interesting content as well as posting it, hence this post.
Yeah, YouTube’s value is not so much the content creators but that its the go to place for the average person to upload something.
So if you need a tutorial on something like fixing something at home or finding an item in a game someone who hasnt uploaded since then can be the one who provided value.
And that’s the part that’s difficult to replace. Youtube is like a wikipedia video resource.
The problem is that there are no good solutions hosting and serving video with transcoding g is expensive. They do the best they can, but its not enough. This is where tech giants thrive, in the really expensive stuff that gets cheaper thanks to the economy of scale (is that the term? I forgot). Those are the big strongholds of YouTube, twitch, AI,
