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.
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.
Every day is the right time to switch away…
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.
Personally I feel that YouTube’s data centers need to be a public resource. Nationalize them, pay out Google appropriately for their value, and then turn it into public property. YouTube can remain just the way they are and will undoubtedly retain market share because they’re recognizable and everyone already has a YT account, but other people can spin up their own video front-end services to compete, while drawing from the same leviathan-sized backend data store which would now be publically owned.
There is just too much general knowledge available through YouTube for me to say it’s a good idea to let it all rot behind a corporate firewall. I would love to force YouTube to shut down to then in turn force the availability of third party options. But if we shut it down without a plan to recover their server data then we’ve just lost a massive international educational platform. Just think of how many people you know personally who learned to fix their car or write code via YouTube University, then expand that to encompass the entire internet-connected world.
I don’t think there’s a chance in hell this would ever happen, because Google would never open its datacenter to become a public resource no matter how many infinites of dollars you paid them to do so, and the American government (where Google is based) would never legally force them to do so. But I really don’t see any other viable path forward to dethrone YouTube and de-monopolize the video sharing industry.
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 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.
VLM?
y’all won’t even watch the videos I post on mastodon.
No consensus. We should never look for that, because we need diversity in options and usage.
Discussion is peachy tho.
getting apps into appstores would make a big difference but if someone follows a particular person or if its free on youtube they are going to go there. I watch colbert on youtube.
Nebula is pretty great.
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.
My sister has been using the torrentio addon for the stremio app for months, almost finished chowder.
BET live streaming still has 3+ minute commercial breaks, so i’m waiting for youtube to do the equivalent.
I think piracy is the answer. If a creator is not on odysee, make a channel of the same name an re-upload all their content, everyone can do it basically for free. If you run a peertube instance, pick a few youtube channels you like and mirror them to your instance and keep them updated with something like ChannelTube or TubeSync.
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.
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.
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?
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 LINKI 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.
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.
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.
Yeah but peertube is being developed by just one guy from backend to frontend and they have done great work. It will get better ig but still its very very difficult to make users and creators change platform.
edit: typo
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.
