As much as I like the privacy frontends I think 'we' have to move to alternative platforms sooner than later and pull the bandaid vs. continuing to indirectly be dependent on google as the base platform.
Content creators won't follow because there isn't any monetary incentive to do so. I have been regularly checking out Peertube for 4 years now and it is mostly a backup option for those that one day YouTube might delete their channel.
I remember early YouTube where there wasn't a financial incentive to make content and they clearly did not suffer from a lack of content.
People weren't saying "Oh, well, you can't make money on YouTube so why would you" back then. They made content because they wanted to and because it was fun.
YouTube is just entrenched in the public consciousness much like television was when YouTube came around.
Production quality will drop, sure. But how youtube spent years in the beginning was from just people wanting to help, people wanting to share stuff, and people wanting some attention, and there's still massive amounts of those people making videos. A lot more than the people just after hoping to get paid. Then, of course, even most of the people getting paid would do just fine. They'd just operate like Gamers Nexus and actually speak their ads and sell some merchandise. "This video is brought to you by ....."
Platform paying you or not, there's still a lot of money to be made if you get popular.
Yeah I 100% understand and to a large extent agree with this. I think money should be involved , creators should get paid. I don’t think peertube has become “the answer” yet and there is some combination of market level event and technology/feature set that needs to be in place to create enough moment for people to move off YouTube. It will happen eventually ( I think ) but what exist today isn’t enough of a pull to overcome the momentum YouTube has but that doesn’t mean that “we” should give up.
The problem is the next place is a moving target. Enshitification is inevitable, the drive for money will eventually corrupt any good thing we make.
What we need is a platform owned by a public trust or a worker co-op made up of all the streamers. Hopefully roll out some micro direct payment system so you can give the content creators a bigger portion of the donations.
The problem I see with that is that the large streamers who make the platform will most likely hit enshitification in how they run it at some point. I could easily see them getting either power hungry or greedy and rigging the rules to set things in their favor over everyone else.
I feel like there needs to be a peered youtube client. As people watching youtube download the videos and later share it with other people who want to watch it. YT will have a much harder time differentiating and actually, it might even help them with bandwidth.
If this were done with IPFS, there would also automatically be backups of the videos, which maybe The Internet Archive (and other archivers) would be happy about.
i believe to some degree, that this is what that one youtube alternative did.
Although you could pretty easily implement this into youtube. Would be pretty cool if it was very minimal on the backend, such that people like me could also get involved. I archive yt manually, have TBs of it. Provided read access only to it and having it integrate into a global frontend would be pretty cool.
Today most Invidious instances are experiencing very harsh ip address rate limiting, it is becoming very very hard to watch yt videos through
AFAIK this is not what's happening this time. YouTube slowly rolled out a change over the past 3 days that requires some sort of app verification for the android yt app. This is affecting Invidious since it emulates the yt android client to fetch video streams. This affects invidious instances hosted privately as well.
The maintainers are aware of this, and are working on ways to solve it. Tools like yt-dlp/newpipe still work because they have working implementations to fetch data by emulating web/iOS/etc clients.
Nah, a private instance works fine. Public instances see a lot more traffic and if they use their public IP address for accesing YouTube it is trivial for YT to ban them. If you want to host a public instance, you should use a proxy or VPN for all the YT traffic so yo can easily change the IP address.
it will download the youtube page and remove trackers and telemetry. but google can still correlate traffic from ip to other identities of yours, I am not sure if by using invidious whereby you download the webpage from the instance and the video feed directly from youtube ( if you are not using proxy option in invidious) is more private than using Freetube and NewPipe which download both the feeds from youtube. only someone from google can tell if they track connexions to youtube "video servers".
Somewhat related... I have aliased yt-dlp with "yt-dlp -4" because my IPv4 address is behind CGNAT which they can't rate limit without disrupting legit users. When running with IPv6 I always get rate limited or even blocked
Microg seems to be the issue lately, updating and using the new package put out by revanced fixes it. Afaik microg is dead and not being updated since the vanced stuff, just took this long to become a problem
The only issues it gives me is having to back out of the video and go back in if I stop a video part way into it and screen off my phone, then want to go back to watching again, and that the turn phone to go full screen and turn back the other way to exit full screen responds too danged quickly.
on android you could try libretube, and there has been a discussion about altneratives to youtube, there is Odysee which is open source and has a some kind of crypto/blockchain thing attached to it. I don't really understand it all.
On settings point it to send YT links to Freetube.
I used Tab Wrangler to auto close tabs, so this will close tabs that are created after whatever time when pushing YT links, I have that set to a minute.
I am lazy and use KDEConnect, to my PC connected TV to send links. Like a remote.
Push links from any client, I use NewPipe. As it also has my channel subscriptions.
Enjoy, until Indivious is fixed. Could use other services but Freetube is pretty good and fast. Takes your own subscriptions too. Pipe like some others use JS, which I avoid and you have a lot of control over Freetube. This is easy to revert once everything his working.