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.
y’all won’t even watch the videos I post on mastodon.
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).
VLM?
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
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.
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.
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.
Every day is the right time to switch away…
I like the idea of PeerTube, but I tried running an instance and was unable to sustain the experiment for too long. I made it very open and it got quickly flooded by pirated TV series and spammy and heavy content.
After that, I had a difficult time at some point finding an instance to host some videos I wanted to upload - and, having had that failed experiment before hand, I can see why the instances that do survive are often those with more stringent filters and less generous with resources.
So, I am sorry to “chime in about the shortcomings”, but hosting a PeerTube instance can be a demotivating experience. You set up the infrastructure expecting to contribute to a space reminiscent of the old youtube, and you see it filled with spam. The signal-to-noise ratio is just awful and it is expensive. To avoid this, you can be an aggressive gate keeper - but this makes the platform less friendly to people who are looking to find a space to share their original content. Gate keeping is also an additional effort that you need to make. In the end I chose to just shut it off as it was more of a hassle than fun. By comparison, hosting a Lemmy instance is fun, much much cheaper, and little hassle.
I still haven’t given up on the idea of Peertube, though… I have some video ideas, and when I finally get to making them I plan to make another instance to host only my channel. Then, I would be able to host my own channel using my own infrastructure via a federated network. This use case would work very well for me, and it can probably work for many others. So that is one way of building the Peertube network.
General permissive video uploads is something that makes YouTube such a powerful platform though, and that is very difficult to replicate.
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.
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.
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.
Nebula is pretty great.
What does a different front end do for you? Serious question.
I’m not sure whether you’re asking why to use a frontend vs YouTube rawdog or conflating Odysee/Peertube with a YouTube frontend. I thought they were frontends as well for a long time.
If you’re asking why to use a frontend proxy for YouTube, there could be a few reasons. The obvious being privacy concerns, but other people prefer the less cluttered interface, no ads, no YouTube premium or sign in with google popups, no manipulative algorithm.
So my familiarity with front ends is extremely limited. I’m familiar with for instance someone writes a program that links to a database, but the database is still the database. So I figured the algorithm was still the algorithm since the videos reside on YouTube’s servers. I thought all you would be changing was the appearance, but it sounds like a lot of the annoyances go away. Especially ads. I don’t really watch the ads because for a long time I used ad blockers and when they failed, I succumbed to the extortion and paid for premium. Yes I know uBlock seems to have come out on top and when the subscription ends I’ll probably go back to that. I don’t really have a problem with the interface, but I don’t really care for a lot of the other stuff so thanks for the intel.
Now if only I could get some of my favorite YouTubers to stop making their own commercials during the content.
I was thinking about trying Nebula, but it kind of looks like there’s not that much content there. Thoughts?
I still watch YouTube but I block all their ads.
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.
