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.
You could make a service that is objectively better than YouTube in every single way but unless creators are getting paid >90% of them won’t use it. There’s a reason TikTok creators always try and grow their YouTube following and its because it pays significantly better.
I agree with you for the majority of “content creators”. But I think there’s a sizable number of people who aren’t interested in making videos for a profit and I imagine there’s a fair overlap with people in this community and the fediverse at large.
If I were to create videos I would make them on either peertube or Odysee. I wasn’t really aware of either platform other than vague whispers of them until recently, and I find it difficult to gauge the community sentiment on which of these platforms would be suitable for finding interesting content as well as posting it, hence this post.
Yeah, YouTube’s value is not so much the content creators but that its the go to place for the average person to upload something.
So if you need a tutorial on something like fixing something at home or finding an item in a game someone who hasnt uploaded since then can be the one who provided value.
And that’s the part that’s difficult to replace. Youtube is like a wikipedia video resource.
Personally I feel that YouTube’s data centers need to be a public resource. Nationalize them, pay out Google appropriately for their value, and then turn it into public property. YouTube can remain just the way they are and will undoubtedly retain market share because they’re recognizable and everyone already has a YT account, but other people can spin up their own video front-end services to compete, while drawing from the same leviathan-sized backend data store which would now be publically owned.
There is just too much general knowledge available through YouTube for me to say it’s a good idea to let it all rot behind a corporate firewall. I would love to force YouTube to shut down to then in turn force the availability of third party options. But if we shut it down without a plan to recover their server data then we’ve just lost a massive international educational platform. Just think of how many people you know personally who learned to fix their car or write code via YouTube University, then expand that to encompass the entire internet-connected world.
I don’t think there’s a chance in hell this would ever happen, because Google would never open its datacenter to become a public resource no matter how many infinites of dollars you paid them to do so, and the American government (where Google is based) would never legally force them to do so. But I really don’t see any other viable path forward to dethrone YouTube and de-monopolize the video sharing industry.