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.
The very platform you’re clinging to is on Death’s Door and they’re actively breaking YouTube’s terms of service while still using the service.
None of the other platforms are even close to replacing YouTube. They can’t handle the scale or the features. And none of them are heading towards being able to accomplish this.
YouTube is a capitalist utopia funded with more money than God. They provide unlimited free storage and transmission of all videos sent to their platform. They fleece videos for copyright and legal impingements. They gather corporations willing to spend on advertisements and link them directly to end users uploading data, and when they reach a threshold, they pay them.These funds pay for the unlimited amounts of storage at levels that no other platform could handle.
The other platforms that are open to us don’t make enough money to do any of those things. We’re relying on the funding, development, and administration of a couple of generous strangers.
This. I’ll leave YouTube when I can have a similar experience and support all of my favorite content creators somewhere else. Until then, everything else is just a lame video hosting site I’m not interested in.
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, but IMO it’s not the whole story.
You’re correct that youtube is not going to be dethroned in the foreseeable future. The thing is, I don’t want an open platform to replace youtube, I just want some content to be available on that open platform.
There are a couple of peertube servers that aren’t horrible. TILVids is particularly decent.
But until somebody works out monetization for these people, it’s probably going to be Slim Pickings.
At a minimum, peertube is going to need to support private videos for Patreon to have proper effect.