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.

  • rarsamx@lemmy.ca
    141·
    8 hours ago

    Nothing can compare yet to YouTube.

    The main reason is: YouTube is not only a distribution channel. It is also its own promotion channel tied to a search engine which magnifies that promotion.

    You open YouTube and it offers similar videos tho what you’ve been watching. You search for something and there is probably a video (or many( matching what you are searching.

    Other platforms are currently only distribution channels. You upload the video and promote it through other channels. Whether your own website or posts somewhere else.

    Si, if you are a content producer and want to share, the current fediverse solutions are great, however it will need critical mass to attract content consumers.

    And without content consumers, it will be hard to attract content providers who want a broad distribution and exposure.

    So, let’s start moving out own content to the fediverse and use other channels to promote them. Let’s create a snowball effect. We could even post to several and see where the content consumers gravitate to.