I thought odysee is a better alternative for youtube and offers much more privacy. But it’s not. So disappointed.
Feeling hard to quit youtube because of other platforms doesn’t have much better or quality contents expecially no instance of peertube is truly usable. 🤥
They’re not designed with privacy in mind, but I think one of the best things for video is supporting smaller more independent platforms. Things like Nebula, which is made up of a curated selection of high quality YouTubers who upload their YouTube videos sans advertising, as well as some small amount of unique bonus content. Nebula is owned by its creators, as an added bonus.
Or Dropout, made from the former CollegeHumor YouTube channel, it’s mostly sketch and improv comedy, as well as some D&D play videos.
Neither are privacy focused explicitly, but because of their direct relationship to their customers and lack of interest in advertising, they’re not incentivised to be bad for privacy like the bigger free platforms are.
Dropout has some really funny stuff, but they don’t have regional pricing where I live, so they cost about as much as Netflix and just a little less than Disney+
I’ll totally subscribe if they offer a better price in third would countries.
PeerTube is a nice idea but almost all instance owners don’t enable much federation, if any.
I had to create my own and set it to auto-federate with others.
And still there’s a large lack of interesting content or stability or usable clients.
Also the sorting is completely out of whack. If I click on “trending” videos, the top ones are usually several months old.
There also a whole lot of non-English content with no way to filter it.
I administrate a PeerTube instance (peertube.wtf) and everything is just much more complicated compared to a Lemmy instance.
One reason I don’t “auto-federate” is because there’s a ton of pirated and questionable content. So much content is in a foreign language and so many instances are inactive and therefore filled with spam.
That’s why I add instances manually to federate with. This way, the quality of the content is also much higher.
What’s wrong with pirated content?
For hosters, legality has to be considered.
there’s a ton of pirated and questionable content
It’s easier and more productive to just remove bad instances as they’re added than it is to scower all the different instances and pick and choose which ones to federate with.
Yes ! I found some useful and meaningful videos only on tilvids.com in my perspective.
A platform like YouTube can’t be copied, especially by privacy respecting companies or the community. It’s way too expensive to run.
idk I use my own Peertube instance to upload shit. But you will never get a decent alternative to Youtube. Storage and Transcoding are VERY EXPENSIVE
Genuine question, what does anyone else think of Nebula? It’s very high quality but it doesn’t have random videos that you would turn off your mind and just watch.
I don’t like the fact that it isn’t open source, it isn’t decentralised, it runs for profit like every other corporation, the money from the subscriptions don’t go exclusively to the creators (or considering there are running costs for the platform, the only money deducted from the creators being these running costs), but instead 50/50.
If a decentralised video platform is too hard to achieve, then I’d want nothing less than a open source, non-profit company, being open about their running costs and how much from the subscriptions they require to cover them, for me to give them my money.
Nebula is more complex since creators own stake in the company. It is very much creator-operated, and to the best of my knowledge, the way it’s structured and monetized allows many of the creators to do projects that are otherwise impossible.
Open sourced and decentralized is what we should be striving for, but Nebula honestly seems to be a perfect bridge to get people away from YouTube.
The difficulty with decentralizing video is primarily hosting. Video is kinda big, and no one wants to wait even a few minutes to queue up what you want to watch. So streaming it has to be. Streaming, even when the bitrate is adjusted dynamically to your connection with the host server, still requires a significant amount of bandwidth.
Nebula covers all the costs of the infrastructure and development and what have you off the subscriptions. Then they can also afford to pay the creators more per view compared to the YouTube ad split. My understanding of YouTube is that for the first ten or so years it didn’t really make any money. At least not the billions in profit it does now. Hopefully Nebula can continue to leapfrog that hurdle.
They did make a video explaining, from their perspective of course, how they managed to build a nine figure YouTube competitor in a few years time. Probably to be taken with a grain of salt, but it seems like they’re doing things right as far as paying the creators and using their side of the split to make the service better goes.
Either way, it’s not something to purposefully avoid paying for out of the desire for it to be open sourced. Jumping from YouTube straight to a solution like what you’re describing isn’t a one step transition. We’d need Nebula or something like it to scrape away YouTube’s creator base until there’s enough people using an alternative platform to change the tides.
Even Peertube themselves says they aren’t in it to replace YouTube. It’s just another stepping stone.
YouTube is not making Billions in net income. It is very expensive to host video
I understand it’s expensive to facilitate streaming, though between the 15 billion from Premium subscribers to the 30 billion in ad revenue, it’s not hard to imagine they make a few billion after costs. I’m not trying to say it’s half of Alphabet’s income or anything.
Unfortunately, it’s not something anyone outside of the executive suite can say with a single degree of certainty since Alphabet doesn’t make it known one way or the other.
They spend a ton on overhead costs. They are barely making a profit
Not to be rude, but unless you’re an Alphabet executive, what do you know. Same as me - not much.
My guess is they aren’t losing money on YouTube these days, but feel free to look at the 2023 10-K and let me know if you find something in there that no one else has.
You are right, costs are not listed.
I understand this, but the problem is that every popular platform starts off not making money and showing a good face. The problem is that there is nothing telling me it won’t make Reddit’s turn when it decided to go public. That’s how corporations work, and the promise of the owners will never be enough when it comes to being fair to the creators and subscribers. It’s true that it’s unquestionably better than a YouTube monopoly, but I personally will only support individual creators until a platform that is truly non-profit emerges - I just don’t see how Nebula is a step in the right direction, it follows the same old model. I understand the problems of decentralisation and that’s why I was talking about a non profit - just like the Proton Foundation is.
Ultimately, people do have to be trusted. Even the best non profit in the land can find itself a board of directors that decide to convert the organisation to a for profit model, then in turn go public.
As far as supporting individual creators, Nebula was created by a group of YouTube creators. They got it off the ground by keeping the opportunity cost as low as they could, and by enticing people with the 50:50 split profit from the subscriptions.
What’s more than this though, is that everyone making content on Nebula has an ownership stake. This is discussed in this video at 11:00, but the highlight is this: if the platform is ever sold, the creators get half the money from the sale.
Non profit is one thing, but the platform being employee owned I think provides greater motivation to grow.
No I certainly do not think that people with money and power should be trusted. That’s why I want it to be non-profit, the day this changes by its board of directors like you say, this hypothetical company loses my subscription and goes to the same list as Nebula. I don’t get how this is a counterargument.
I don’t see how the owners being a group of youtube creators is an argument. I don’t care about just any creators, I care about the creators I like and respect. A 50:50 split is of course better than yt, but it’s not just the running costs. Why wouldn’t I subscribe to the creators I like through ko-fi for example, where they take 95-100% of the money?
Creators having a stake in a company is of course good but it’s just not what I look for.
That could indeed be the case, I can’t know for sure, but supposing it motivates creators and encourages more creators and audience to join, it for one takes away from Google which is always a good thing but when it’s not open source and when the owners are profiting off of a big percentage of my money for doing nothing, I cannot get behind it. I’d rather support individual creators, it’s simply closer to my ideal scenario.
I believe your point was that non profits are superior. My counter was simply that, yes, they are superior to a public company, however they are not infallible to fact that people run them, and people are corruptable.
Forgive me but I’m not sure what to say about the second bit there. Nebula being created and owned by people that needed something like it in the first place is not ideal? Or not because of the people specifically, but because of its closed sourced design and profit sharing ratio? Maybe I’m misunderstanding you.
At the end of the day, I would prefer each creator host their own content on their own site, with it being sort of subscribable through an RSS feed or similar so people can use whatever front end they want. Like how podcasts work. Have a feed for sponsorships available for free, and a paid feed with no sponsorships and maybe bonus content.
I’d not heard of Ko-fi, but it looks interesting. On the face of it, it’s pretty close to what I described above without the creatives themselves having to fuss about with the technical details of hosting all their content. I’ll look into it more another day, thanks.
My point in the first bit is that a non-profit is legally binding, at least in paper, to direct the maximum amount of subscription money to the creators. That could be the subject of corruption by people obviously, but it’s an important guarantee that it won’t happen. If it happens it’s a scandal. If Nebula amasses profits it’s not a scandal, it’s an expected behaviour by a private company. Do you see the difference? In the first case there is a legal safety valve, a guarantee.
And if anything changes like I’ve said I cancel my subscription and support it only for as long as it is truly non profit. So the hypothetical scenario you mentioned before is outside the topic. I am talking about a non profit, when they decide to change this, it’s a different company and a different discussion.
Oh and another important thing that I forgot to mention here is that, as I don’t care about any creators, I don’t want my subscription money to be shared proportionately to the size of the creators in the platform. I don’t care about the big ones, I only care about mine, so that’s a really important detail I don’t like about it as well.
In the second part is the not ideal part is the fact that there are owners that are not all creators. There is a 50% of the money that is directed to the creators and another 50% that goes to the people that own Nebula. That’s profit I don’t want to give to them. I think I was pretty clear. Yes 50% of the profit goes to the creators and 50% of the company will be sold to them if they ever decide to do so, but the other 50% is profit for the owners. The owners have profit for doing nothing, for being the owners, that’s bad and really far away from what I could get behind.
I’m not talking about ideal scenarios here, I’m talking about something that has been done already and it’s perfectly within legal and technical capabilities. A simple non-profit that is transparent about their earnings and their code.
I think we’ve overanalyzed it though.
I like it. The workers made a quality competitor by taking ownership of their own means of production and dissemination. I Also really liked that they explicitly allow video downloads.
A non profit company isn’t a company
It is a different concept compared to YT. It is more oriented towards professional content creators, not like the original idea of YT that „YOU“ tube (share) something random.
Also there are examples where Nebula stops collaborating with creators due to weird guidelines, so basically indirect censoring. Checkout out the YT channel „Second Thought“. And I mean if YT still allows that content but Nebula doesn’t…
I forgot about Second Thought. I googled about being him kicked out from Nebula and many people accuse him of having become a full on tankie.
I don’t really want to get invested in the drama but I’m not surprised. Last time I watched Second Thought, he had been more radicalised but I didn’t expect him to become a tankie.
Not privacy friendly in the least
You can use YouTube with another Frontend. See it as YouTube only hosts the videos.
Personally I have a problem leaving YouTube due to I need to be logged in to get their recommended videos based on my profile.I don’t think anybody else can do that.
Invidious will show you related videos to the one you’re watching but not the suggested tab of YouTube. I see it as a good thing though, I really don’t need another black box algorithm controlling me.
Yes, but I see it as a way of discovering other channels to subscribe to. You can also see it as ads. It is for me entertainment. Instead of searching for game x to watch, I can just see some videos that is apparently popular within this game.
I understand that some people don’t want it. You do want you want.
Yeah, thats what keeps me coming back to youtube tbh. I know it’s tracking me but for some reason youtube is the one place I like the personalised recommendations. I just use youtube for background noise while eating meals so i like to go to the homepage and quickly find a video that looks interesting because it’s recommended to me.
I we one has to have a balance between privacy and joy. I mean, how much you win vs lose on it. However, I would still like to have the same functionality elsewhere if I could.
Today there’s no good alternative to YouTube, you can only change the front end… Today you cannot challenge YouTube, just because it needs to host PBs of datas, financially you can’t just afford it.
We need decentralized tech. If a company comes along that figures out how to significantly lower hosting cost YouTube is screwed
No company can afford to host video for people who aren’t willing to see ads, give up personal info or pay for the service. Where would they get their hosting costs from?
No company can afford to host
If it were decentralized in a way that is utilizing the bandwidth of its users, that is one possible solution I think
It sounds like a good idea but my experience with Peertube has been really bad. Bandwith is a very serious problem, even for small instances. They need to impose severe restrictions on user registration and upload limits and even then I feel like it’s hard to break even.
Yep I think there is too much content to realistically keep around in a true decentralized fashion when you’re limiting the storage to only the ones who consume your content in the first place.
Storage is another issue. Will you store / seed random YT videos on your PC? You need to make sure you have enough copies so things are available and that there is adequate bandwidth so you do not wait multiple minutes for video to start.
Reliable video sharing sites with tons of content like YT / Vimeo makes sense only being centralized and they must have some kind of monetization like ads or subscriptions.
If I had the answer then I would be rich
The only option will be to use all the users to seed the videos to others, but for this the app need a lot of users
I suspect that’s fraught with copyright challenges, though it does seem like a fantastic approach on the face of it.
Multiple porn tube sites seem to manage it.
Tubular. It’s a NewPipe fork. They can play PeerTube too.
NewPipe can do peertube as well
Wow, it’s awesome. But, What about the contents ?
Now we can watch PeerTube in the same app, start saying it in live stream chat, superchats, comments, external sites. That’s how we change culture. Google is psyoping us, marketing. We need to psyop them right back.
Yeah I’ve gone 100% audio only through podcasts, broadcasts, and audiobooks. Video just is not ready for decentralization.
Yeah I’ve gone 100% audio only through podcasts, broadcasts, and audiobooks.
Based solution
Video is already decentralized via torrents, people just actually need to use them.
Not a true alternative, but I love Freetube. Just for the fact that I don’t have to have an account tied to it with no ads and sponsor ads is nice.
Lately there’s been connection issues but usually gets resolved with 2-3 days.
Even works on my raspberry pi.
You don’t have to quit YouTube. I would guess that the overwhelming majority of subscribers here still use it in one form or another.
Grayjay with youtube restricted for just searching and being able to view links. Nebula and Patreon for actually supporting creators I care about while avoiding youtube (most of the time for the patreon people).
This is a solved problem via torrents. Content creators just actually need to create torrents for their videos, and post the magnet links (here, or elsewhere).
That was the idea behind oddysee
Yea but torrents are sketch. Everyone knows that’s how you get malware
Video.exe
Not really, torrents are static data, so people can and do figure out when torrents contain malware, and remove them. Also as long as the content is in a secure container, you’re fine.
Tilvids isn’t bad
In the meantime you could just keep using third party front ends like Invidious and Piped
Nebula is your best option for now
Or even better piped
Piped and other different frontends are not really Youtube alternatives. It’s just alternate ways to watch Youtube. They are still priceless
