There is Nebula, but it requires a subscription. However, all of the creators on it are part owners, so you know they get a better deal than whatever YouTube is giving them. Well worth the $50 a year to me.

I don't think it's realistic to expect a free to use alternative to YouTube to exist. The project itself was never profitable, and now that they're really struggling to give people ads they're introducing these anti adblock measures. It simply costs too much in resources to store and send out high quality video content for free.

Being realistic here, there's no worthwhile competitor to youtube at this point in time. You have some stuff like odysee, LBRY, peertube etc. However, the amount of content on them is basically nothing compared to youtube and there's little incentive for creators to move there due to how difficult it would be to monetise your content in those places.

My best pick would be invidious which is a private & ad-free yt frontend that uses it's own API and doesn't need JS. I already use it all the time. It's good.

As @mizu@lemmy.world said, the software PeerTube exists. However, due to the extreme costs of video hosting, a general purpose PeerTube instance does not exist. It would cost alot for video storage and more importantly moderators to ensure content is not illegal.

Maybe if we all paid @ruud@lemmy.world like $20/month we could get PeerTube.world

Lots of good suggestions already, but if you have to stick to YouTube, you could always use a third party client. FreeTube for desktop and Newpipe for Android. They function great. You don't need an account and can organize and export your history and subscriptions, it's a much better way to interact with YouTube than the official methods. Newpip even allows for background playing.

There are none.

Odysee is probably the biggest one, with a lot of creators having their youtube synced with it. Peertube is also an option, but I've never used it.

I'm sure I'll get roasted for this, but just get YouTube Premium. As much content as people tend to consume on YT, I don't know why it's the only platform people seem so against paying for. YTP views are worth more to content creators. There's no ads. And you can get YT music with it too. Honestly, it's just a massive amount of content and nothing even comes close. I know the joke is "who would pay for YT Premium", but, at least in my house, it gets like 10x the use of Netflix and Hulu.

https://odysee.com/ is blockchain-based, built on LBRY. It appears to have similar features for discovery, interaction, etc. as YouTube. Still testing it out personally to see how it actually performs though!

One thing to keep in mind beyond hosting cost is the uploader making money. YouTubes partner or paid channel things work (there are complaints) it's a LOT harder to replace those freeas add revenue pays them

PeerTube or Odysee.

Might want to check out YouTube Vanced, It's a super easy to install app that accesses YouTube but blocks all ads and everything annoying and you can control everything and play with your screen off and all that. So just do that until youtube becomes unusable and then we'll go to the alternative once when we have to.

I know at least one creator that started posting to Utreon, both public and for paid tiers. I haven't went after them yet, but if Utreon would create something like Twitch Prime and pay creators for views, plus a bunch od other creators I follow would start posting there, I'd be happy to drop youtube for most dedicated (not-random-scroll-consumption) content. In favour of Utreon.

Freetube if you want a standalone desktop app that stores all your subscriptions. Invidious instances in the browser. Newpipe on Android. All of these no ads and need no login. 😊

I use Odyssey most of the time, they make it very simple for creators to mirror their YouTube content so I like to support the ones who have.

You could try using an open-source client for YouTube. Like Freetube for pc, windows, and mac or Newport for Android. That's what I'm doing. Both of these don't use its API generally and you don't make an account on them. You can still access the content while having an app that works to get rid of ads entirely and without all the bloatware.

Odyssee is the closest thing but I still mostly use YouTube with adblock

Revanced