We all hate google and youtube, but overall as a community we’re all simultaneously lukewarm and non-committal about pushing towards using an alternative. I admittedly cling to invidious frontends for dear life.
It seems like whenever somebody asks for an alternative to youtube, they’re offered Odysee and Peertube, but inevitably many others chime in about the shortcomings of both of those platforms.
Can we as a community come to a consensus as to which of these platforms should be pushed forward?
I don’t even think it needs to be a binary choice. Obviously youtube cannot be immediately replaced for it’s archival of educational and tutorial videos, but we can at least push newcomers towards using invidious frontends for those instances.
Maybe Odysee is better for some type of content over Peertube. Let’s discuss which platform works best for what and try to be more active about sharing and promoting them not just to viewers but potential creators as well.
If you go to share a youtube link, try to see if that video exists on an alternate platform first and share that link instead. I think that’s a good first step towards getting away from youtube in the privacy community.
But youtube alternatives are still very much on the fringe and I’m hoping this post will at least inspire some discussion about changing that.
We need to split clients from providers.
Invidious and freetube could diversify to accept multiple alternative sources besides youtube content.
If the content exists on multiple platforms the user could set a preference and orded or backup providers.
As creators make a switch to smaller platforms the users who use these clients are unaffected. It works similar to our fediverse, a community can just change instance and everyone can still access it the same.
Creators could test migration by posting to multiple providers themselves. Those reliant on YouTube money specifically could premiere on youtube and after some time reupload elsewhere.
Those that dont rely on youtube money can do the reverse where the later youtube upload serves more as an ad to their alternative main channel.
Doesn’t Grayjay from Futo do this?
I’ve not used it yet, but to my understanding this is exactly what it does, or very damn close to it.
This is actually a brilliant idea.
Grayjay is built on this idea
That immediately came to mind. But is there a way to have it reroute to a different platform if the video is on an alternative platform? I follow a few youtubers in grayjay that I only recently discovered mirror on peer tube. Grayjay didn’t give any hints.
I have no idea, to be honest