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.
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Peertube needs a quick and easy way for people to donate:
- tip button (fixed amount with one click)
- donation button (customisable amount)
- subscription option:
- fixed amount per subbed channel
- fixed amount split across subbed channels
- customised amount per subbed channel
- dynamic amount based on viewing time
- mix of all the above
No ads needed.
Production quality will drop, sure. But how youtube spent years in the beginning was from just people wanting to help, people wanting to share stuff, and people wanting some attention, and there's still massive amounts of those people making videos. A lot more than the people just after hoping to get paid. Then, of course, even most of the people getting paid would do just fine. They'd just operate like Gamers Nexus and actually speak their ads and sell some merchandise. "This video is brought to you by ....."
Platform paying you or not, there's still a lot of money to be made if you get popular.
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Content creators won't follow because there isn't any monetary incentive to do so
Look up Nebula
Does nebula work for small YouTubers? I imagine it would be extremely hard for a small youtuber to get accepted into a platform like that.
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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.
Unfortunately, video is the most intensive content to host and serve. That's why these front ends exist, to leverage Google's storage and bandwidth
Why don't public libraries host things for the people for free as a public service?
I'm not sure what they accept, but archive.org will host many things.
I found many many old movies video files on archive.org. If you like old movies, it's a treasure trove.
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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.
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Today most Invidious instances are experiencing very harsh ip address rate limiting, it is becoming very very hard to watch yt videos through
AFAIK this is not what's happening this time. YouTube slowly rolled out a change over the past 3 days that requires some sort of app verification for the android yt app. This is affecting Invidious since it emulates the yt android client to fetch video streams. This affects invidious instances hosted privately as well.
The maintainers are aware of this, and are working on ways to solve it. Tools like yt-dlp/newpipe still work because they have working implementations to fetch data by emulating web/iOS/etc clients.
I think it would be cool if invidious had a way of hosting content on its own. You could EEE YouTube
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.
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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.
To hide ones IP of course
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Somewhat related... I have aliased yt-dlp with "yt-dlp -4" because my IPv4 address is behind CGNAT which they can't rate limit without disrupting legit users. When running with IPv6 I always get rate limited or even blocked
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
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
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I hop between invidious, piped and Freetube regularly. Had some instances when both piped and invidious don't work at all.
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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
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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
on android you could try libretube, and there has been a discussion about altneratives to youtube, there is Odysee which is open source and has a some kind of crypto/blockchain thing attached to it. I don't really understand it all.
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