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 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?