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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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Why don’t you just use freetube? Also, check out grayjay.
This is a solved problem via torrents. Content creators just actually need to create torrents for their videos, and post the magnet links (here, or elsewhere).
That was the idea behind oddysee
Yea but torrents are sketch. Everyone knows that’s how you get malware
Not really, torrents are static data, so people can and do figure out when torrents contain malware, and remove them. Also as long as the content is in a secure container, you’re fine.
Video.exe
What’s up with odysee if I may ask? I thought it was a good competitor.
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It’s alt-right crapola isn’t it?
I thought that too.
Not a true alternative, but I love Freetube. Just for the fact that I don’t have to have an account tied to it with no ads and sponsor ads is nice.
Lately there’s been connection issues but usually gets resolved with 2-3 days.
Even works on my raspberry pi.
I’ve been disappointed by every peertube instance so far. Not going to stop looking. Fortunately the alt front ends I use for YouTube are still working.
idk I use my own Peertube instance to upload shit. But you will never get a decent alternative to Youtube. Storage and Transcoding are VERY EXPENSIVE
It might seem really funny but TikTok is so far YouTube’s most formidable competitor so far.
That’s a good point, now that they’ve increased video length
Tilvids isn’t bad
In the meantime you could just keep using third party front ends like Invidious and Piped
What makes peertube unusable for you? I’d like to improve my instance.
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Are you disappointed when there aren’t 360p, 480p, and 720p options available?
I have broadband, so I get annoyed if my video is set to something lower than 1080p. For that reason (and storage space) I disabled those lower resolutions, but I want to know how other users feel.
Every DVD I convert (stuff I own) is converted to 480. I watch on a 60" TV from about 8’ away.
I can see no difference between 480 and 1080 - resolution is far less important than things like data rate, frame rate, and a few other things that I honestly don’t fully grasp yet.
I just watched Pirates of the Caribbean, at 480, this weekend. Looked perfect.
You’re essentially making it so people with bad connections can’t use your instance
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I didn’t consider mobile data. Thanks!
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Genuine question, what does anyone else think of Nebula? It’s very high quality but it doesn’t have random videos that you would turn off your mind and just watch.
It is a different concept compared to YT. It is more oriented towards professional content creators, not like the original idea of YT that „YOU“ tube (share) something random.
Also there are examples where Nebula stops collaborating with creators due to weird guidelines, so basically indirect censoring. Checkout out the YT channel „Second Thought“. And I mean if YT still allows that content but Nebula doesn’t…
I forgot about Second Thought. I googled about being him kicked out from Nebula and many people accuse him of having become a full on tankie.
I don’t really want to get invested in the drama but I’m not surprised. Last time I watched Second Thought, he had been more radicalised but I didn’t expect him to become a tankie.
Not privacy friendly in the least
I don’t like the fact that it isn’t open source, it isn’t decentralised, it runs for profit like every other corporation, the money from the subscriptions don’t go exclusively to the creators (or considering there are running costs for the platform, the only money deducted from the creators being these running costs), but instead 50/50.
If a decentralised video platform is too hard to achieve, then I’d want nothing less than a open source, non-profit company, being open about their running costs and how much from the subscriptions they require to cover them, for me to give them my money.
I like it. The workers made a quality competitor by taking ownership of their own means of production and dissemination. I Also really liked that they explicitly allow video downloads.
A non profit company isn’t a company
Open sourced and decentralized is what we should be striving for, but Nebula honestly seems to be a perfect bridge to get people away from YouTube.
The difficulty with decentralizing video is primarily hosting. Video is kinda big, and no one wants to wait even a few minutes to queue up what you want to watch. So streaming it has to be. Streaming, even when the bitrate is adjusted dynamically to your connection with the host server, still requires a significant amount of bandwidth.
Nebula covers all the costs of the infrastructure and development and what have you off the subscriptions. Then they can also afford to pay the creators more per view compared to the YouTube ad split. My understanding of YouTube is that for the first ten or so years it didn’t really make any money. At least not the billions in profit it does now. Hopefully Nebula can continue to leapfrog that hurdle.
They did make a video explaining, from their perspective of course, how they managed to build a nine figure YouTube competitor in a few years time. Probably to be taken with a grain of salt, but it seems like they’re doing things right as far as paying the creators and using their side of the split to make the service better goes.
Either way, it’s not something to purposefully avoid paying for out of the desire for it to be open sourced. Jumping from YouTube straight to a solution like what you’re describing isn’t a one step transition. We’d need Nebula or something like it to scrape away YouTube’s creator base until there’s enough people using an alternative platform to change the tides.
Even Peertube themselves says they aren’t in it to replace YouTube. It’s just another stepping stone.
I understand this, but the problem is that every popular platform starts off not making money and showing a good face. The problem is that there is nothing telling me it won’t make Reddit’s turn when it decided to go public. That’s how corporations work, and the promise of the owners will never be enough when it comes to being fair to the creators and subscribers. It’s true that it’s unquestionably better than a YouTube monopoly, but I personally will only support individual creators until a platform that is truly non-profit emerges - I just don’t see how Nebula is a step in the right direction, it follows the same old model. I understand the problems of decentralisation and that’s why I was talking about a non profit - just like the Proton Foundation is.
Ultimately, people do have to be trusted. Even the best non profit in the land can find itself a board of directors that decide to convert the organisation to a for profit model, then in turn go public.
As far as supporting individual creators, Nebula was created by a group of YouTube creators. They got it off the ground by keeping the opportunity cost as low as they could, and by enticing people with the 50:50 split profit from the subscriptions.
What’s more than this though, is that everyone making content on Nebula has an ownership stake. This is discussed in this video at 11:00, but the highlight is this: if the platform is ever sold, the creators get half the money from the sale.
Non profit is one thing, but the platform being employee owned I think provides greater motivation to grow.
No I certainly do not think that people with money and power should be trusted. That’s why I want it to be non-profit, the day this changes by its board of directors like you say, this hypothetical company loses my subscription and goes to the same list as Nebula. I don’t get how this is a counterargument.
I don’t see how the owners being a group of youtube creators is an argument. I don’t care about just any creators, I care about the creators I like and respect. A 50:50 split is of course better than yt, but it’s not just the running costs. Why wouldn’t I subscribe to the creators I like through ko-fi for example, where they take 95-100% of the money?
Creators having a stake in a company is of course good but it’s just not what I look for.
That could indeed be the case, I can’t know for sure, but supposing it motivates creators and encourages more creators and audience to join, it for one takes away from Google which is always a good thing but when it’s not open source and when the owners are profiting off of a big percentage of my money for doing nothing, I cannot get behind it. I’d rather support individual creators, it’s simply closer to my ideal scenario.
I believe your point was that non profits are superior. My counter was simply that, yes, they are superior to a public company, however they are not infallible to fact that people run them, and people are corruptable.
Forgive me but I’m not sure what to say about the second bit there. Nebula being created and owned by people that needed something like it in the first place is not ideal? Or not because of the people specifically, but because of its closed sourced design and profit sharing ratio? Maybe I’m misunderstanding you.
At the end of the day, I would prefer each creator host their own content on their own site, with it being sort of subscribable through an RSS feed or similar so people can use whatever front end they want. Like how podcasts work. Have a feed for sponsorships available for free, and a paid feed with no sponsorships and maybe bonus content.
I’d not heard of Ko-fi, but it looks interesting. On the face of it, it’s pretty close to what I described above without the creatives themselves having to fuss about with the technical details of hosting all their content. I’ll look into it more another day, thanks.
My point in the first bit is that a non-profit is legally binding, at least in paper, to direct the maximum amount of subscription money to the creators. That could be the subject of corruption by people obviously, but it’s an important guarantee that it won’t happen. If it happens it’s a scandal. If Nebula amasses profits it’s not a scandal, it’s an expected behaviour by a private company. Do you see the difference? In the first case there is a legal safety valve, a guarantee.
And if anything changes like I’ve said I cancel my subscription and support it only for as long as it is truly non profit. So the hypothetical scenario you mentioned before is outside the topic. I am talking about a non profit, when they decide to change this, it’s a different company and a different discussion.
Oh and another important thing that I forgot to mention here is that, as I don’t care about any creators, I don’t want my subscription money to be shared proportionately to the size of the creators in the platform. I don’t care about the big ones, I only care about mine, so that’s a really important detail I don’t like about it as well.
In the second part is the not ideal part is the fact that there are owners that are not all creators. There is a 50% of the money that is directed to the creators and another 50% that goes to the people that own Nebula. That’s profit I don’t want to give to them. I think I was pretty clear. Yes 50% of the profit goes to the creators and 50% of the company will be sold to them if they ever decide to do so, but the other 50% is profit for the owners. The owners have profit for doing nothing, for being the owners, that’s bad and really far away from what I could get behind.
I’m not talking about ideal scenarios here, I’m talking about something that has been done already and it’s perfectly within legal and technical capabilities. A simple non-profit that is transparent about their earnings and their code.
I think we’ve overanalyzed it though.
YouTube is not making Billions in net income. It is very expensive to host video
I understand it’s expensive to facilitate streaming, though between the 15 billion from Premium subscribers to the 30 billion in ad revenue, it’s not hard to imagine they make a few billion after costs. I’m not trying to say it’s half of Alphabet’s income or anything.
Unfortunately, it’s not something anyone outside of the executive suite can say with a single degree of certainty since Alphabet doesn’t make it known one way or the other.
They spend a ton on overhead costs. They are barely making a profit
Not to be rude, but unless you’re an Alphabet executive, what do you know. Same as me - not much.
My guess is they aren’t losing money on YouTube these days, but feel free to look at the 2023 10-K and let me know if you find something in there that no one else has.
You are right, costs are not listed.
Nebula is more complex since creators own stake in the company. It is very much creator-operated, and to the best of my knowledge, the way it’s structured and monetized allows many of the creators to do projects that are otherwise impossible.
I’m loving Grayjay!
Grayjay is pretty good, but isn’t exactly an alternative to YouTube since it just pulls from YouTube and strips the junk.
Grayjay is to videos what Lemmy is to news, an aggregator, not a generator.
Thanks for clarifying, I misunderstood the question.
The content on YouTube is golden and likely cannot be replaced, created elsewhere.
Hence, stripping the junk is what makes it palatable for me.
Cheers
Absolutely. The content mountain YouTube is sitting on is their most valuable asset. In my view, Nebula is doing a fine job of beginning any potential transition away from the black hole of YouTube.
I think eventually the way to cripple YouTube would be for creators to, after years I imagine, transition to Nebula or similar, and then remove the videos from YouTube. Leave one up directing people to the new hosting site, but ultimately I do feel the old videos need to be pulled from YouTube, not just new content.
One thing’s for certain though, all the garbage YouTube tries to push alongside the videos are overbearing and only serve to drive engagement. Nothing they do is to benefit the viewers, let alone the creators.
Except if people used grayjay en masse, they have the power to advertise a brand new platform
I suppose you’re right but I’m not sure how effective that would be since the they’d have to convince the creators off however many platforms their pulling from and direct them either to Grayjay (which as far as I know doesn’t have hosting infrastructure) or to some other service like Peertube I suppose.
I think that transition would be difficult.
Nebula is your best option for now
Or even better piped
Piped and other different frontends are not really Youtube alternatives. It’s just alternate ways to watch Youtube. They are still priceless
What do you not like specifically? For me it’s the lack of support for subtitles that is the deal breaker
It is a centralized pool of Nazis
Using words like “Nazi” kinda devalues anything else you’re trying to say
They literally consider themselves Nazis. They want to kill all Jews.
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You’re pretty right, it’s not as good an experience as it could be
You should be able to delete it through LBRY: https://lbry.com/faq/how-to-remove-account (but the process is still manual, which sucks
(btw, what’s the deal with the long nose emoji? lol)
Today there’s no good alternative to YouTube, you can only change the front end… Today you cannot challenge YouTube, just because it needs to host PBs of datas, financially you can’t just afford it.
Multiple porn tube sites seem to manage it.
We need decentralized tech. If a company comes along that figures out how to significantly lower hosting cost YouTube is screwed
The only option will be to use all the users to seed the videos to others, but for this the app need a lot of users
I suspect that’s fraught with copyright challenges, though it does seem like a fantastic approach on the face of it.
No company can afford to host video for people who aren’t willing to see ads, give up personal info or pay for the service. Where would they get their hosting costs from?
If it were decentralized in a way that is utilizing the bandwidth of its users, that is one possible solution I think
It sounds like a good idea but my experience with Peertube has been really bad. Bandwith is a very serious problem, even for small instances. They need to impose severe restrictions on user registration and upload limits and even then I feel like it’s hard to break even.
Yep I think there is too much content to realistically keep around in a true decentralized fashion when you’re limiting the storage to only the ones who consume your content in the first place.
Storage is another issue. Will you store / seed random YT videos on your PC? You need to make sure you have enough copies so things are available and that there is adequate bandwidth so you do not wait multiple minutes for video to start.
Reliable video sharing sites with tons of content like YT / Vimeo makes sense only being centralized and they must have some kind of monetization like ads or subscriptions.
If I had the answer then I would be rich
I would love if someone could answer this with quick examples. What exactly are people watching on YouTube that can’t be replaced elsewhere? If I’m needing informational content I will generally seek it out in textual format, as it’s painful to sit through a video on that sort of thing. And if it’s entertainment, there are many other options.
edit: Genuine appreciation to those who responded. It’s great to get alternative perspectives.
Text is often not very appealing if it is very long and requires lots of further reading. Video is much more entertaining
Not to say that I don’t read as well. Video and text aren’t really comparable
My last few channels I watched: Techmoan, Man carrying thing, Berm Peak, Legal Eagle, Linux Tech Tips, Road Guy Rob, Steve Lehto
I watch on my TV with the smarttube app
My wife also watches similar entertainment channels around arts and crafts our kid watches Blippi and I also use YouTube for music.
I recently watched a 10-hour video essay on Harry Potter. I can only find stuff like that on YouTube.
That’s overkill. Shaun’s video on Harry Potter is less than two hours long and tells you all you need to know.
OK…but why would you do that!? Your life surely would be no worse without that. I get being a fan and all that, I grew up with HP,. I’ve read the books several times and seen the movies several times. HP was a huge part of my upbringing and I bought the books at release. But I just don’t get watching a 10h video essay on it, much less while supporting YT.
Criticizing what someone gets enjoyment from to make an argument isn’t a stance that’ll hold up. Undoubtedly you have something in your life that you find enjoyable which others don’t.
Beauty isn’t the only thing in the eye of the beholder.
If you actually read my comment, you’d see I’m not criticising anything HP related at all. I’m stating I don’t understand it (this is not criticising), especially when it supports YT, but that’s also it. The only thing I’m criticising is supporting YT, not that they watch HP video essays.
I did read your comment a few times, looking for a different tone, to see a meaning perhaps I misunderstood, but I can’t find it.
For what it’s worth, Harry Potter isn’t relevant to any of this besides being used as the example. They could have said Star Wars, pottery, landscaping, or astrology. Their point was moreso, ‘I watch long form content that isn’t found anywhere but on YouTube, and Harry Potter is an example of this content.’
You go on to mention the content in every line of your initial comment, and mentioned the platform only once. They enjoy a thing, you don’t understand how they can enjoy that thing.
Whether intentional or not, I can’t see what you’ve written as anything but a critique.
For posterity, your comment:
My interpretation, if you care to see it:
Your first line comes off as yelling at the person for their choice of content.
The second line, by my reading, is saying their entertainment adds no value to their life.
The next two attempt to couch the first two by conflating your patronage of the same source material to an in depth analysis of it.
Then the first half of your conclusion line specifically states you don’t understand how they reap enjoyment of watching their chosen content, only to be reinforced by your use of “much less”, which means the first bit of the sentence is what you are primarily focused on.
When I’m doing a long shift at work I like to put one of those really long videos on while I’m working, makes my shift fly by and I don’t have to worry about what’s coming on next.
If you’re not watching it anyway, why choose a medium with video at all? Seems like the easiest thing to ditch YT with that kind of usage where the audio is actually what you’re needing.
I binge video while working. Can’t explain why, it just helps. I find audiobooks and podcasts require a bit more concentration which distracts me from working. Some times I put music on but it doesn’t help as much as video.
Because I want to.
I just wrote a rather long comment to that person and now I’ve realized they are being purposefully obtuse.
You playing the content on YouTube is entirely justified. Lots of people put the news on a television instead of a radio while doing things around the house, because occasionally something visual is referenced or something is said that seems interesting enough to look over at the screen.
Besides, it’s not like the person that went through the effort of putting together a ten hour long essay is going to publish just the audio as a podcast or something.
That person’s an egg head, you enjoy your essays.
Hahah yeah thats why I didn’t bite hard, I dont get it when people are angry that you enjoy something they dont.
Well yeah, but then you also actively choose to support YTs monopoly.