With Reddit shutting down its API setting a precedent in the corporate tech world (and Reddit was a major outlier in that a ton of their users are technical minded and support third party clients, YouTube does not have that kind of userbase and will not get backlash for it), Twitter doing whatever the fuck they’re doing, and Google already hellbent on destroying ad blockers, the days of Newpipe, Invidious, and Freetube are numbered. Wouldn’t be surprised if they implement Netflix level DRM tomorrow that makes alt clients impossible. I say savour your alt clients while you can guys, you won’t be able to soon.
Readily available content for everybody is the whole reason YouTube got so big.
So either the world would riot because YT is so popular, or the world would accept its fate, because YT is so popular.
Which one is it going to be? You decide
But then again, the overwhelming majority of people don’t even know that there’s other ways to watch YT
The problem is that hosting videos at scale is hard and expensive.
We can migrate from Twitter to Mastodon or Reddit to Lemmy, but what PeerTube instance is going to be able to serve videos for content creators like LTT or MKBHD?
I have hosted a PeerTube instance and surprisingly the storage is not a problem because it is very cheap these days.
About the bandwidth, if you enable PeerTube’s p2p tech (WebTorrent) you can have a fair number of users streaming at the same time (but it’s not great for privacy).
I have proposed a network of PeerTube instances to a group of youtubers each with tens to hundreds of thousands subscribers and the benefits/costs ratio looked pretty good to them. It didn’t work for other reasons.
Notice that youtubers earn basically nothing from YouTube except those with millions of subscribers. They are on YouTube just for visibility but if enough creators move at the same time they can also move a good percentage of the userbase in my opinion.
I’d never expect channels this big to do it, because yeah, that’s a whole lot of server load
The vast majority of their userbase already puts up with it, so I doubt they will see any significant backlash. Even if all the FLOSS creators leave, they’re still a tiny minority because it’s “”“influencer”“” channels like the Pauls and content farms like Bright Side that are the real cash cows on the platform.
Also, a huge part of their userbase is children. Probably more than any other mainstream social media platform. They won’t even understand the concept of DRM or corporate bullshittery and will only use the YouTube app or browser anyway. Kids are also less likely to be bothered by ads, might not even understand what the purpose of an ad is, in fact they will just see them as more content which is why advertising to kids is so unreasonably effective.
This is why it is so super important to educate kids on media and tech literacy. They need to understand that YouTube is not the only source of videos, that you can not only buy your stuff on Amazon, and that Google is not the only place to search. They need to know that nothing is free, and that they are being monitored. And that there are choices.
I was super mad with our kid’s school, because they only allowed the kids to have Microsoft office. It’s not about the tools - they’ll change by the time they graduate - but about the results.
Oh yeah, right after sending it I realized that my hopes with this comment are exclusive to our little FOSS bubble
I guess I’m going to start looking for content I like on Peertube. Barely anyone I watch is on alternative platforms, with the exception of HardwareUnboxed on Odysee, so we’ll see what I can find.
I wish you the best of luck! I’m on a similar journey to replace YouTube.
Doesn’t PeerTube even allow to sync a YT account in order to automatically publish new videos?
Maybe a few creators here and there might be inclined to do that.