Hi everyone, I’ve been following the de-google-ify internet campaign of framasoft for several years now and have replace a lot of GAFAM services doing so but the only service I’m truly struggling with replacing is youtube.
I could never find anything with enough interesting content and I always find myself going back to youtube.
What about you?
- did you stop using youtube?
- where do you go instead?
- do you just spend less time watching videos?
I prefer decentralized solutions but any FLOSS alternative is a good start.
I rarely if ever use youtube. The only experience I have with youtube is content made for the sake of profit and not for the sake of actual content. i.e. tutorial videos are split into multiple parts for more ad-revenue and it’s difficult to find the information you need as you can’t just ctrl+f the keyword you’re looking for, so if you scroll through the video because it’s 5+ minutes long to try and find it, you’ll end up spending 10 minutes just trying to find the damn thing by trying to avoid all the meaningless fluff.
If I want information or entertainment, I much prefer to get it from articles or forums. Sadly, youtube is massively profitable and more and more people are making fluff videos rather than writing a concise article. I really don’t know why anyone would need or want youtube/videos other than the aforementioned migration issue.
Even though there’s certainly a whole lot of “bad” or “junk” content, there’s also many really good creators, mostly in the essay/informative/science area. For me, there’s simply no better alternative from a content standpoint; YouTube is, unfortunately, unparalleled… If you want, I can list some channels I find worthwhile, for you to check out, in case you’re interested.
PeerTube has potential but needs to work more on onboarding, content discovery and curation. LBRY/Odysee/D.Tube are way too centralized and tied to cryptocurrencies which makes me uncomfortable.
people create content for youtube because they make money off youtube. from what pretty much everyone claims, their algorithms and content discovery/curation is unfair and mainly highlights content that will make both google and the user more click revenue (by giving space to already popular users). peertube etc. do not reward content creators and thus do not see as many willing to produce content, as well as having less viewers in general, creating a catch-22. the world today is sadly all about monetizing your hobbies and exposition to monetize yourself.
Being a big fan of the fediverse PeerTube was my first choice but I could never find an instance with enough apealing content or any discovery service that could help me find good content scattered on all existing instances.
Well there certainly is some junk (a lot?) on youtube but I find a lot of content I like watching there, some deeply technical and intelligent stuff and some pure enteraining silly stuff, I don’t mind as much as I enjoy it.
which is fine, and if the creator didn’t care about monetizing their content, they could put it up on alternative services. sadly, they won’t.