what is the alternative to youtube?
Hi! sorry for the random topic 😅
Youtube keeps getting more and more annoying. Is there a good other platform where to migrate? If people were to migrate, where would they go?
the thing I liked about youtube is the massive amount of content, and knowing that if I upload a video, it's really easy to watch by others. I like the ability to follow channels too.
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I thought that said PeeTube for a second and thought, "Wow, did they pivot."
I mean Lemmy is the poop part of the Fediverse, would make sense for there to be also a pee part
Dude......please lmao
Also have had some solid results with https://odysee.com/.
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.
If a creator is on YouTube and nebula I'll always watch on nebula because they themselves say they make so much more per view. Plus, no sponsors. So same video but they cut that part of the video. Legal eagle's videos end with extra final thoughts and a thank you for watching on nebula instead of a sponsor segment.
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:
https://youtu.be/Alqt6RCEWdM
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.
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 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.
How is any of that possible? Can you explain?
I am not sure but possibly the HTML5 features such as the video tag are sufficient to let the browser offer basic media playback capabilities without requiring JS.
I need to check out invidious, been trying to put some stuff on peertube ...
It's just a YouTube front end and they've been having difficulty showing videos as of late.
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.
Isn't that exactly how peertube works? https://framatube.org/w/kkGMgK9ZtnKfYAgnEtQxbv
Haven't read up on PeerTube, but I imagine that you would still need to keep a copy of the video stored somewhere centrally if you don't want it going away when no one is watching it anymore, so even if p2p can help reduce bandwidth costs, you still have storage costs.
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.
You can use newpipe app
Thanks for the recommendation, I didn't knew about freetube
Unfortunately, freetube development has gone stale and i keep getting random errors every now and then. I started using piped recently, but all their instances are now rate limited... so hopefully someone will pick up freetube development again (or release a similar client for desktop, perhaps based on the pipeextractor)
Aw I didn't realize that. It still works fine on my end. I get warning notifications in my windows VM, but everything still works. On Linux everything runs smoothly no errors. I think newpipe on Android is my most preferred implementation of a third party YouTube viewer so I'd love a desktop version of that.
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.
Never heard of it, but I’ll definitely check it out
Odysee was acquired by Google in 2015, so it's unfortunately another corporate-run greed machine. PeerTube is decentralized though.
This is totally untrue, why spread these lies?
Source? I can't find anything to back this up
The company That Odysee used to own Odysee.com because the company Nimbuz had a product of that name, an android app for video and image backups. That product was acquired by Google.
Odysee, which now owns Odysee.com is the video platform being talked about here, and I see nothing online about it being related to the old Odysee in anything other than name.
Odysee was never acquired by google to my knowledge, but I could be wrong. Odysee used to be LBRY but rebranded a year or two ago.
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.
What’s 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:
sadly does not help smaller creators or starting creators. Want you to think if you paid 1-3$ per creator you watched. you would be less likely to watch as many. sadly adds/commercials work.
PeerTube or Odysee.
Curious what do they need a blockchain for?
Seems like the main purpose is so users always control & own their own content, sell access/ownership/etc.? This is a full and pretty detailed explanation on the LBRY protocol if you want to really dig in: https://lbry.com/what
I came here to say this, big youtubers like Veritasium publish to Odysee too
@ryannathans thank you for this! I didn't know about Odysee until now https://odysee.com/@veritasium:f/what-everyone-gets-wrong-about-energy:b
Overall I find the UI much nicer than youtube too. Like the video doesn't stop playing as I navigate around the site. Very fresh. Plus you'd have no idea the back end is decentralized and on the blockchain
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.
Vanced only works occasionally.
Revanced or Revanced extended is the new thing. It's really great, no more shorts, no ads, no in-video ads (thanks sponsorblock). Shit's fire
I find it a pain in the arse having to do all the patches again every time YouTube changes something.
Revanced is pretty glitchy as well. Anything that uses an old APK of YouTube as its base will have issues.
I have had zero issues with it so far going on four months now. I am interested in being prepared though, what issues have you had?
Some days it works. Other days only shorts work. Then there are days when pretty much nothing works
haven't had any problems with it so far, works perfectly every day. What os are you using it on?
Some days it works. Other days only shorts work. Then there are days when pretty much nothing works
haven't had any problems with it so far, works perfectly every day. What os are you using it on?
Some days it works. Other days only shorts work. Then there are days when pretty much nothing works
haven't had any problems with it so far, works perfectly every day. What os are you using it on?
Some days it works. Other days only shorts work. Then there are days when pretty much nothing works
I haven't had any problems with it so far, works perfectly every day. What os are you using it on?
Some days it works. Other days only shorts work. Then there are days when pretty much nothing works
haven't had any problems with it so far, works perfectly every day. What os are you using it on?
Some days it works. Other days only shorts work. Then there are days when pretty much nothing works
haven't had any problems with it so far, works perfectly every day. What os are you using it on?
Odyssee is the closest thing but I still mostly use YouTube with adblock
Did you hear they're trying to crack down on that?
Yeah if it happens to me, I'll probably just sign up to YouTube premium in Turkey or something 😂
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. 😊
Those aren't alternatives to Youtube; they still rely on Youtube to host the videos.
True. Fair point. Just suggestions to make YouTube more bearable for the OP.
I don't know if skytube is still working on android, but it was nicer than newpipe in terms of giving me the videos I expect to see.
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.
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.
How do they work if they don’t use the YouTube API?
Or for web-based clients there's Piped and Invidious.
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.
I'm sure I'll get roasted for this, but just get YouTube Premium. As much content as people tend to consume on YT, I don't know why it's the only platform people seem so against paying for. YTP views are worth more to content creators. There's no ads. And you can get YT music with it too. Honestly, it's just a massive amount of content and nothing even comes close. I know the joke is "who would pay for YT Premium", but, at least in my house, it gets like 10x the use of Netflix and Hulu.
The only problem with this is that more and more channels are adding native ads to their vids, and YT Premium doesn't bypass those ads
That's on the creators tho, not the platform I feel like it's not an argument against paying for the platform, at least not when there are plenty of videos that don't do baked in sponsor ads.
Edit: if you exclusively watch content with baked in ads, I can see it from a purely consumer end point of view.
Yeah but those ads are skippable whereas YouTube ads aren't. I support YouTube creators having some control over their own income by adding native ads and not be yanked around by random YouTube policies.
I tend to watch hour-long shows with in-depth analyses from viewpoints that isn't mainstream, or in different languages from different countries, more than 5 hours per day, and YouTube premium is worth it to me.
Fair point on creators having more control - some are just more obnoxious than others. I'm also subscribed to YT premium FWIW.
Check Out SponsorBlock for chrome, Firefox, Safari...
SponsorBlock is brilliant. It's also integrated into the excellent SmartTube app for Android and Android TV, which also hides the normal ads, even if you don't have premium
Oh yeah I was referring to YouTube on TV. Gotta try smarttube next, last I checked it didn't exist then
This is false, and I would argue that YTP generates significantly less revenue for content creators than even a dollar donation would over hundreds of videos.
YTP, when I had it, was still serving ads AND using trackers, which is not something I want to pay Google for.
For context, I have a YT channel with 3+ million views and tens of thousands of subscribers. YTP generates 1% of YouTube revenue, while ads make up the 99% difference.
Most people will have a handful of content creators that they regularly watch. If you took the YTP amount and split it between those creators as donations, you've made them far more than YouTube ads or YTP ever could.
That's my advice, as a content creator.
The vast majority of content my wife and I consume are on YouTube and Twitch so we get a ton of value out of YouTube Premium. I’m the only one I know irl who pays for YouTube Premium, but I also don’t subscribe to any streaming platforms except Spotify. I have Netflix free through T-Mobile but rarely use it.
As someone who was hesitant about YouTube Premium at first, I would recommend it, although I do wish they had a cheaper ad-free-only option (I don’t use YouTube music since I have Spotify). My motivation that put me over the edge was getting sick of seeing ads on my smart tv, since you can’t use an ad blocker on those.
The cheaper option is to sign up for premium from another country.
If you connect via VPN to Romania you can get YouTube premium for less than $5 a month. It used to work with other countries (India, Argentina and Turkey were popular options) but now Romania is the only one I can find that works, because you don't need a local credit card
I find it too expnsive 😭 maybe Im just poor hahaj
If you can't afford it, you can't afford it. Streaming services aren't cheap. That being said, if you get a majority of your daily entertainment from something, like a lot of people seem to with YT, then I think it's worth the money. Like, it's easy to think of YT and Google as these evil corporations, and they totally are, but at the same time, hosting video at the scale that YT does isn't a charity, you know?
totally!
Revanced
invidious or odysse i guess? I usually just don't use the main site/app, and If I do I usually make sure to patch the shit out of it or get extensions that get rid of the popups and bloated shit youtube has. revanced is a good way to find new stuff and get recommended stuff and freetube on PC is a good way to keep subscriptions without needing an account, especially because it allows exporting and importing in different formats. newpipe x sponsorblock on the phone is a great way to keep a proper playlist functionality.
It's not federated, but I kinda like Utreon.
Rumble is available but the ads are obnoxiously political.
I feel like floatplane is the only alternative that is a realistic business model though it's ever different than YouTube