General Discussion
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This is a community for general discussion where you can get your bearings in the fediverse. Discuss topics & ask questions that don't seem to fit in any other community, or don't have an active community yet.
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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.
Since hosting videos is expensive and many youtubers rely on youtube for income, I think paying to watch makes sense, especially if it's reasonably priced with a large cut going to the creators like with nebula. The main downside is that it's hard to imagine most people switching to a subscription based service, so creators will still have to rely on youtube for discoverability.
I really think this sort of youtuber coop + fediverse is the best long term solution.
Second this, as of right now Nebula is the only service I know which is even remotely comparable to Ytb's scale... unfortunately is behind a paywall and is mostly only for infotainment content. Peertube is getting there but not yet. And ofc we don't talk about the O site.
I keep seeing YouTuber mentioning it. I didn't know they were part owners.
Wendover Productions who is also a part owner has uploaded a great video about the topic recently:
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.
Absolutely this. As much as I'd love a free (and preferably FOSS) alternative to YouTube that's just as good, I don't see a realistic way for that to happen. Video is expensive.
I think it'll happen on some level eventually. Storage costs are only going to go down over the long term. Sure, higher resolution video is bigger, and they'll probably keep going even higher, but most people don't care past a certain point. It won't happen soon, but give it 10 or so years I could see it being more viable.
Possibly, and hopefully! And it is true that storage will only get cheaper, and theoretically bandwidth will be too. But for now, bandwidth is expensive and (fast) storage is also expensive, despite being much more affordable than it was not too many years ago.
I donβt think itβs realistic to expect a free to use alternative to YouTube to exist...It simply costs too much in resources to store and send out high quality video content for free.
I agree, and at the same time I think this raises the great question of, why did anyone think it was a good idea to put all of this on a single site to begin with? Ideally it sounds great, courtesy of its convenience and...I'm sure there's more but I'm blanking on other qualities that don't seem to lean on presumptions of benefits from a singular site's operations.
Realistically it was almost always going to be a better idea to distribute the load of high density media like this across different operators to ensure a variety of video production, better redundancy through no single point of failure, reduced operational costs as a lower volume of data has to be stored & processed, and so on. Of course, the problem remains by & large the network effect in terms of getting any large group of people to disperse or move anywhere else, because it's not like there haven't been alternatives attempted, nor alternative technologies to enable alternatives to exist.
However, there's also the problem of any alternatives or competitors framing themselves as an alternative or competitor to YouTube to begin with. That's a losing approach from the start, instead they need to frame themselves as themselves, not a different YouTube, but an independent video host with xyz unique features.
If you don't believe that could be a successful approach, then you're simply ignoring the brief popularity of Vine and the rapid success and continuing popularity of TikTok.
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 @[email protected] 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 @[email protected] like $20/month we could get PeerTube.world
It would be nice if peertube had an integrated subscription/payment method so you could support and subscribe to content you enjoy.
What we need is for PeerTube to use ActivityPub for the searching and listing, but something like Bittorrent to distribute the load of the content delivery.
I believe that's already built into PeerTube. The p2p (torrentlike) aspect that is.
You are literally describing PeerTube.
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.
Doesn't ReVanced still work?
I use it every day. Works pretty well if you patch with the recommended version, but it's not perfect. Still good enough to daily drive tho.
Yes! It's wonderful!
It also kills reddit adds in the official app. That said, I'm not sure how much I'll use it at this point... Still, I like having the option loaded up!
Yes it does.
Thanks for the recommendation, I didn't knew about freetube
There are none.
That's unfortunately the truth. Hosting any kind of competitive video platform requires millions of dollars to handle these huge quantities of data. We won't have a serious FLOSS YouTube replacement any time soon.
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.
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
Patreon, and better yet, Liberapay, already exist.
Whatβs Liberapay and how does it fair against Patreon?
I've never used it myself, but the TL;DR is that it's supposed to be basically like Patreon, except that:
- it is itself a non-profit organization that funds itself via donations to its own account instead of taking a cut of the payments to others,
- its software is Open Source, and
- it only allows donations to creators (i.e., creators aren't allowed to provide rewards in exchange for the payment -- apparently, this is at least in part to avoid having to charge VAT).
PeerTube or Odysee.
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!
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.
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. π
Odyssee is the closest thing but I still mostly use YouTube with adblock
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.
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.