As much as I like the privacy frontends I think 'we' have to move to alternative platforms sooner than later and pull the bandaid vs. continuing to indirectly be dependent on google as the base platform.
Content creators won't follow because there isn't any monetary incentive to do so. I have been regularly checking out Peertube for 4 years now and it is mostly a backup option for those that one day YouTube might delete their channel.
I remember early YouTube where there wasn't a financial incentive to make content and they clearly did not suffer from a lack of content.
People weren't saying "Oh, well, you can't make money on YouTube so why would you" back then. They made content because they wanted to and because it was fun.
YouTube is just entrenched in the public consciousness much like television was when YouTube came around.
I hate saying that it was different back then, but it just was. Social media was not seen as the way normal people become famous the way it is now.
It was just people attempting to create cool stuff and find a community.
The way we have PBS and NPR, I really think we need to start talking about community shared content hosting. It could go a long way in preserving knowledge without succumbing to corporate greed.
community shared content hosting
It's technically still a thing you're not supposed to do, for the most part. Still something can be sued for, civilly liable, and when you get to hosting for a massive group of people, you're risking entering criminal liability territory. However, private torrent trackers exist, and those generally function as those types of communities. Some trackers even have nice people on them.
Further, the depth of knowledge these people have about encoding/color profiles/sound engineering etc. is fucking astounding. It's always people doing it for the good of the community who seem to have the most real competence over a variety of disciplines. It's not surprising a lot of them live and breathe FOSS and GNU/Linux.
I am talking about publicly funded data hosting.
It wouldn't be used for piracy, obviously, but for what people were originally using YouTube for.
Think of all those video series from back in the day where some random dude just walked you through step by step of a house building process. Those videos are still there, but no matter what you type, you are unlikely to find the videos you really need. Just fully forgotten by the algorithm and buried on page 14 or 15, long after you gave up.
Whereas your local National Public Hosting affiliate would have every reason to prioritize that content.
Wait, what? I don't think they were talking about piracy. They sound like they're talking about something more like a C-Span type thing, envisioned as a YouTube alternative.
Compare the production values of channels like e.g. philosophy tube and old AVGNs. Times have changed.
Philosophy Tube is available on Nebula. I think that place is a viable alternative to YT if you’re mainly watching educational stuff.
It is but there's just not enough content to get me to fully stop YouTube yet. YouTube still has so much long form content only on YouTube.
That being said, nebula is amazing and you all should check it out and support the creators using it.
It is but there’s just not enough content to get me to fully stop YouTube yet
I don't think anyone is proposing an overnight switch. You've got to take the long view. That said, I do think when it comes to federated activity pub style projects, Mastodon has gotten off the ground, Lemmy has exploded, pixel-fed seems to be doing pretty good, but the video stuff appears to be a tougher nut to crack.
My gradual migration from YT has resulted in a very fragmented landscape. Many cool vids on Nebula, some on Odysee, but still way too many in YT. Let’s just hope the enshittification of YT speeds up and people respond accordingly by switching to another platform.
I miss the old days of Youtube where people made stuff for fun or because they were passionate about a topic, before the big Youtubers pushing shit out the door to get as many views as they can.
People nowadays are greedy. Youtube it is.
Peertube etc need a monetary incentive.
Greedy, yes. But also lots of people believe since long ago that some things on the Internet should be "at no monetary cost" (gratis) It should become common for people to donate money for some things even if it is very little.
As long as trash like mrbeast is watched by so many people, I have no hope that the broad public will use anything like what we want in the near future.
Monetization shifted the focus from niche hobbyist content to gimmicky shit that is tailored to get a bunch of views. When I see a thumbnail of someone with a weird facial expression, it's my cue to look elsewhere.
Peertube needs a quick and easy way for people to donate:
No ads needed.
Content creators won't follow because there isn't any monetary incentive to do so
Look up Nebula
The problem is the next place is a moving target. Enshitification is inevitable, the drive for money will eventually corrupt any good thing we make.
What we need is a platform owned by a public trust or a worker co-op made up of all the streamers. Hopefully roll out some micro direct payment system so you can give the content creators a bigger portion of the donations.
The problem I see with that is that the large streamers who make the platform will most likely hit enshitification in how they run it at some point. I could easily see them getting either power hungry or greedy and rigging the rules to set things in their favor over everyone else.
I feel like there needs to be a peered youtube client. As people watching youtube download the videos and later share it with other people who want to watch it. YT will have a much harder time differentiating and actually, it might even help them with bandwidth.
If this were done with IPFS, there would also automatically be backups of the videos, which maybe The Internet Archive (and other archivers) would be happy about.
Interesting idea.
i believe to some degree, that this is what that one youtube alternative did.
Although you could pretty easily implement this into youtube. Would be pretty cool if it was very minimal on the backend, such that people like me could also get involved. I archive yt manually, have TBs of it. Provided read access only to it and having it integrate into a global frontend would be pretty cool.
I run Piped from my homelab, from our home IP. I wonder if they will limit our home too...
Nah, a private instance works fine. Public instances see a lot more traffic and if they use their public IP address for accesing YouTube it is trivial for YT to ban them. If you want to host a public instance, you should use a proxy or VPN for all the YT traffic so yo can easily change the IP address.
I'm having some issues with my private instance that is used solely by myself and not even exposed to the internet.
Is there any reason there isn't a desktop app for this so all traffic comes from my IP only?
Why does it have to be a web server infra?
Try Freetube.
it will download the youtube page and remove trackers and telemetry. but google can still correlate traffic from ip to other identities of yours, I am not sure if by using invidious whereby you download the webpage from the instance and the video feed directly from youtube ( if you are not using proxy option in invidious) is more private than using Freetube and NewPipe which download both the feeds from youtube. only someone from google can tell if they track connexions to youtube "video servers".
Are you nuts, of course they do! Even at least for security measures, like f.e. breaches.
Seeing issues with Revanced too.
I had this issue yesterday. I upgraded to the latest version of revanced extended and microG. And revanced has been behaving today.
Just tried updating microg, no joy. I also see they removed support for the old Vanced MicroG
I had to delete Vanced microG for revanced to work.
Oh, I never had that problem. Deleted Vanced MicroG and updated Revanced MicroG anyway.
Microg seems to be the issue lately, updating and using the new package put out by revanced fixes it. Afaik microg is dead and not being updated since the vanced stuff, just took this long to become a problem
I hop between invidious, piped and Freetube regularly. Had some instances when both piped and invidious don't work at all.
YouTube itself altered something on their end making it so that invidious does not work.
Here is the post about it from their official mastodon page
still going hard on the yt-dlp stuff it into any existing media player backend and call it a day, crowd.
Highly recommend. Works well.
Finding piped instances that are close and working is becoming harder
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
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