this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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The problem that I see is that all of these alternatives still rely on YouTube at the end of the day.
And the cost of setting up a new video hosting site that's free to consume content from is ridiculous.
Something that is federated like PeerTube would solve that specific issue, I believe. Many sites with their own user able to interact with each other. The biggest problem there is that there exists no good app to interact with PeerTube. You can use NewPipe or Greyjay, but you have to know the PeerTube instances first, no what's popular in the fediverse tab.
Grayjay is great IMO. It combines video from a variety of sources, such as YouTube, Odyssee, Rumble, PeerTube, Twitch, etc. I disable most of those, but I do have some channels on multiple platforms. Also, there's a feature to recognize the same content across services for the same creator, so users can choose the service they want the content from.
It's Android only, so hopefully they add more platforms eventually. One annoying thing is that it's not really open source, it's just "source available," but that's way better than the propriety platforms they're providing an alternative to. That said, there are a few things I don't like about it:
And some things I love about it:
I mainly use Grayjay, and I did pay because I believe that if I use a product and you ask for payment, I will pay. The only thing that I have found lacking is the lack of a good autoplay feature. I don't use autoplay most of the time, but it makes driving easier, as well as finding new content/creators. Rotate is weird, I have a few bugs there as well.
However, I still think the point stands that it is difficult to find content creators because there are a thousand instances and no real way to parse the creators in a reasonable way, in order to find new content. You can find instances, but that is the long way. There needs to be a way to parse what is on the peertube part of the fediverse easily before it is going to be remotely appealing/usable to anyone outside our very niche, very nerdy circle.
On mastodon, for example, I can search for a hashtag and it will search the entirety of those servers federated with my home server for that hashtag. Do that with peertube, and its the best option for users, IMHO. Monetization will have to get worked out to attract creators.
Grayjay, though, great app with some room to improve. Already better than NewPipe in some ways.
My new phone doesn't seem to have the rotate issue, so the biggest annoyance for me now is the lack of channel playlists (i.e. go to a YouTube channel and see their curated playlists). I don't need that to pay though, so I'll probably go pay soon.
And yeah, it's a great app. I still need NewPipe though.
Peertube is great. And while the lack of an app is a problem, the lack of having a way to make money out if your videos is a bigger one for creators.
For now, they have to rely on Patreon or an equivalent.
That is a good point, I appreciate the response. I wonder if there is a way to attract advertisers responsibly, or if advertising is really the best way to monetize content. I'm not in that world so I don't know the best solution in that regard, but a monolithic entity certainly isn't.
You can watch PeerTube videos on NewPipe.