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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
i approve.
Not privacy friendly in the least
A platform like YouTube can't be copied, especially by privacy respecting companies or the community. It's way too expensive to run.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Tilvids isn't bad
In the meantime you could just keep using third party front ends like Invidious and Piped
Can’t help you content wise, but I run a private instance of Invidious which strips out ads and UX annoyances. I also use FreeTube as a front end which can also detect and remove sponsored content.
Still hitting their servers. So not doing much privacy wise, but it’s better than nothing.
Still hitting their servers. So not doing much privacy wise
I wouldn't underestimate how much they are getting, technically but also legally, from a logged-in account using their interface. So using another interface and without having an account can already help a lot. They don't want "just" the data to improve a profile, they also need some way to server back the ads to, otherwise it costs them but doesn't bring money back. I imagine in such cases, especially in jurisdictions where ghost profiles are illegal, this does a lot already.
Its trivial to run Invidious through a VPN via Gluetun if you use Docker.
When I'm on Invidious, all my requests come from one of Proton's IP addresses, amongst everyone else using YouTube on that Proton server. I'm not logged into YouTube and Google cannot load their ads, trackers and other spyware in my browser.
All they have to go on is the Proton IP, searches, and watched videos
I suppose we could just replace YouTube with Lemmy communities on the front end and your service of choice (PeerTube/NextCloud, etc.) on the back end. This would at least federate the privacy issues — no one org would get to capture all the user data.
Ublock origin + sponsor block on desktop, ReVanced on Android and SmartTube on Android TV, no ads.
Probably not the best for focus on privacy but you can avoid ads
Or even better piped
Because at youtube scale, they can afford (kinda) to put local cache servers all over the globe and have every video rendered at all quality settings at the same time.
As well as being able to move between the quality settings more or less imperceptibly if the bandwidth changes. Similar to Netflix and Prime.
This was a big story with Netflix and ISPs about 15 years ago. If I can find a link, I'll post it.
Try a different instance
The answer is simple, they are not the right way so YouTube doesn't offer them a real way to fetch content. So it adds a first layer of latency for the alternatives as FreeTube and NewPipe (I actually don't know so much about GrayJay). And after adding a bit of latency, you increase this by going trough a server for Piped, LibreTube and Individious.
I've been disappointed by every peertube instance so far. Not going to stop looking. Fortunately the alt front ends I use for YouTube are still working.
I would love if someone could answer this with quick examples. What exactly are people watching on YouTube that can't be replaced elsewhere? If I'm needing informational content I will generally seek it out in textual format, as it's painful to sit through a video on that sort of thing. And if it's entertainment, there are many other options.
edit: Genuine appreciation to those who responded. It's great to get alternative perspectives.
I recently watched a 10-hour video essay on Harry Potter. I can only find stuff like that on YouTube.
When I'm doing a long shift at work I like to put one of those really long videos on while I'm working, makes my shift fly by and I don't have to worry about what's coming on next.
Criticizing what someone gets enjoyment from to make an argument isn't a stance that'll hold up. Undoubtedly you have something in your life that you find enjoyable which others don't.
Beauty isn't the only thing in the eye of the beholder.
Text is often not very appealing if it is very long and requires lots of further reading. Video is much more entertaining
Not to say that I don't read as well. Video and text aren't really comparable
Video platform is the next thing to be federated.
I don't like YouTube moderation and the host should be federated, the way it is now YouTube owns the public data.
Very unlikely to happen, it's way too expensive or demanding to run at a significant scale and it would probably end up with a single monolithic instance
Yeah I guess torrents would be the closest thing to federated video, but seeing the download speed of most torrents that I find even ones with many seeds, it is often balls slow
You are wrong, you can have big instance and still federated. If the site is corrupted, the users can leave right away.
How do you want to federate Petabytes or even Exabytes of content? And your second sentence leads to a monolithic instance.
federated Exabytes of content
Unless you have special affection to YouTube moderation, this has to be done even if you want to believe it is hard, but that being hard is completely untrue.
Federated =/= unstructured p2p network
A host can be a big instance in fediverse, the others can host another instance, can visit the big instance if it has the bandwidth, but not necessarily host the data (which is the case for unstructured p2p network, where everyone does the same task). As long as it is free software, both the host and user skip the hassle of adopting different interfaces.
What's up with odysee if I may ask? I thought it was a good competitor.
I thought odysee is a better alternative for youtube and offers much more privacy. But it’s not.
What do you not like specifically? For me it's the lack of support for subtitles that is the deal breaker
It is a centralized pool of Nazis
Using words like "Nazi" kinda devalues anything else you're trying to say
They literally consider themselves Nazis. They want to kill all Jews.
You're pretty right, it's not as good an experience as it could be
After account creation no way to delete it
You should be able to delete it through LBRY: https://lbry.com/faq/how-to-remove-account (but the process is still manual, which sucks
(btw, what's the deal with the long nose emoji? lol)
Download a channel's entire video list with yt-dlp and create offline YouTube?
Or automate it with ytdl-sub, see my comment here.
Why?
Couldn't you just use something like Libretube with your favorite piped instance?
There are some QoL perks when you watch downloaded youtube videos through a selfhosted media server (e.g. jellyfin). Video watch progress is saved, and you can watch on all your devices (desktop, mobile, tv).
Sometimes I'll watch something on my mobile while preparing food, and then I'll switch to the TV when I'm done cooking, mid-video. This works seamless with that set up.
Alternatives constantly break, like NewPipe. There's something really nice about using offline media with no chance of connection buffering issues.
Grayjay is pretty good, but isn't exactly an alternative to YouTube since it just pulls from YouTube and strips the junk.
Grayjay is to videos what Lemmy is to news, an aggregator, not a generator.
I suppose you're right but I'm not sure how effective that would be since the they'd have to convince the creators off however many platforms their pulling from and direct them either to Grayjay (which as far as I know doesn't have hosting infrastructure) or to some other service like Peertube I suppose.
I think that transition would be difficult.
Thanks for clarifying, I misunderstood the question.
The content on YouTube is golden and likely cannot be replaced, created elsewhere.
Hence, stripping the junk is what makes it palatable for me.
Cheers
Absolutely. The content mountain YouTube is sitting on is their most valuable asset. In my view, Nebula is doing a fine job of beginning any potential transition away from the black hole of YouTube.
I think eventually the way to cripple YouTube would be for creators to, after years I imagine, transition to Nebula or similar, and then remove the videos from YouTube. Leave one up directing people to the new hosting site, but ultimately I do feel the old videos need to be pulled from YouTube, not just new content.
One thing's for certain though, all the garbage YouTube tries to push alongside the videos are overbearing and only serve to drive engagement. Nothing they do is to benefit the viewers, let alone the creators.
It might seem really funny but TikTok is so far YouTube's most formidable competitor so far.
That's a good point, now that they've increased video length
thanks for using Leebra!
go to feed...
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.
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