I don’t have anything nice to say to you, so I’m just going to leave it at that.

For everybody else, consider how venture capitalism allowed for an otherwise completely non-viable product to come into existence. This isn’t a monopoly, it’s a product that could not exist any other way because of the expense of running it the way that it’s run.

You’re totally welcome to take your business elsewhere and it’s totally possible to live without YouTube. The fact is for most people (perhaps up until this point) there hasn’t been a significant motivation to create an actual alternative and get funding for it (or enough wrong with YouTube that people will actually pay what it costs to run a “YouTube without ads”). Rumble exists because the right wing wanted a similar service where they could talk without Google’s moderation policies.

I’m not endorsing Rumble, but alternatives can be started if the funds are put in place to do so and there’s a market for it. Like Lemmy, people just have to use the alternative over the existing dominant option (in this case Reddit).

PeerTube is an option as well of course, but I don’t see it taking off due to the expense and the inability for big creators to monetize on it. Floatplane has a better chance in that respect.