There has been a lot of work done to create decentralized freedom-respecting services in recent years. (Lemmy is obviously one of these). That being said video hosting seems to be one of the hardest things to replace with a decentralized solution since video files are so large and therefore expensive to host. The only serious attempt at a decentralized youtube replacement I’ve heard of is LBRY, but I have a general skepticism about blockchain-based businesses, and the available technical information released by the company behind LBRY does not alleviate those concerns. I don’t really have any solutions to this issue, I currently just use youtube with sandboxing, but this is obviously not a great situation. Curious about everyone else’s thoughts.

  • @[email protected]
    2•4 years ago

    You may already know this, but there’s a decentralized proxy service for watching youtube videos called invidious. Find a reliable instance from instances.invidio.us and enjoy a cleaner youtube experience without all the tracking stuff. It even works without javascript and doesn’t show frequent recaptcha pages while on tor.
    Go to the preferences page and make sure the proxy video option is enabled. This will make sure you never connects to google for video streams. Note that enabling proxy may slow down your network, so choose a reliable instance.

    Peertube is my recommended alternative for leaving youtube behind. Use sepiasearch.org for searching videos on peertube vidiverse.

  • @[email protected]
    1•3 years ago

    Id say Peertube but only if you cut out all the political BS, both right AND left. It permeates the major instances from what I’ve seen, or at least all the big ones federate with those posters still.

    Another note is to use the new HEVC / H.265 codec if you’re wanting smaller files that are very easily adopted by modern tech. I can cut gigabytes off of my files between an H264 and a 265 render at the same quality presets.

    • @tallship
      1•3 years ago

      There are several alternatives and also tools to enable the linking and viewing of YouTube videos without the privacy issues of doing so directly. Invidious is one such tool for doing the latter.

      As far as platforms go, there is indeed https://LBRY.TV and there’s also https://d.Tube which is built on Steem, now owned by Tron in the midst of a minor controversy that caused a hard fork to Hive. lol. Yah, it’s comical.

      Others include PeerTube, of course: https://joinpeertube.org/en/#getting-started

      I have a lot of affinity for this platform, and of course, data is cheap nowadays, which is another YouTube killer, and there’s a lot of public benefit non-profit sponsored instances that are freely streaming and encouraging people to upload content for streaming. There’s also many shoestring operations that can barely afford their VPSes, so my recommendation would be to avoid those low end instances and stick with the better funded ones with a more vibrant community. The lower end instances tend to favor some sort of political bent as well.

      For some reason, people tend to neglect https://Vimeo.com which is an excellent provider, if you don’t mind monolithic silos in the corporate culture, yet so far that haven’t adopted the insidious cancel culture that is destroying the other silos like Google and Twitter. Personally, I’m all for bad people painting themselves into a corner with the cancel culture button - it just makes them that much more insignificant.

      For gamers, and not just gamers, there’s https://dlive.com and https://twitch.tv but these resources focus primarily on live streams, something that v3 of PeerTube has just rolled out. Not so great for VoD content though.

      https://Veems.TV is nearing release and is currently in private beta. It’s FOSS, and you can easily roll this out and manage it with k8s.

      Another quality silo is https://www.removedute.com and it’s full of a wide array of varying content, along with some serious extremists on the far left and far right, propagandists, conspiracy theorists and general vitriolics that feel good about spreading hate in both directions. And that’s a good thing, coz there needs to be a place for bozos like that who tend to cancel each other out, although that doesn’t even matter if you just want a platform to host your videos, so other sites like https://www.metacafe.com and French company Vivendi runs https://www.dailymotion.com in partnership with the BBC, Vice, and others.

      People tend to forget that Flickr is a huge and viable video sharing platform as well: https://www.flickr.com/search/?text=video&media=videos and it’s refreshingly NOT yet another YouTube look alike site.

      For music, I personally like https://funkwhale.audio (Fediverse) and https://www.tribeofnoise.com (now owns https://freemusicarchive.org), but that’s strictly audio, in the Fediverse PeerTube can accommodate those who prefer music videos, but https://www.vevo.com has been around for a long time and isn’t going anywhere.

      https://www.veoh.com is little known, but quite viable and you can upload videos of pretty much any length - that’s what you want to do right? put up a video and send your friends links to it?

      Utreon is another great creator space, like the big #2 DailyMotion, but it’s new, fresh, and relatively without universal awareness but with that familiar YouTube feel: https://utreon.com

      Many of the silo sites have been around just as long as YouTube, and MetaCafe is even older, while most of them will outlast the majority of PeerTube services as well, if longevity of your videos is an important consideration for you. On the other hand, if you’re looking to be a YouTube alternative yourself, PeerTube is without a doubt one of the easiest stable and capable platforms to deploy - even on a shoestring.

      And there’s also https://open-video.org if you’re looking for a more classic and categorically curated system that primarily archives material suitable for eductational institutions.

      I think the final notion I’d like to point out here is that PeerTube actually isn’t a YouTube alternative, or replacement - at least not on the same scale as Vimeo or DailyMotion or some of the others above. PeerTube does have a similar look and feel for those seeking a comfortable transition when someone is handed a link, but PeerTube’s real strength lies not in its facade as a YouTube alternative, but rather, its utility as a disruptor, and great democratizer for the general masses - you can’t stop FOSS, coz FOSS doesn’t care, You can’t censor what you aren’t lord over either, and anyone, as mentioned before, can quickly deploy a PeerTube server in a few minutes, populate it with hundreds of videos that no one can take down, and those videos can propagate across what will soon be thousands of Video streaming server platform istances that to varying degrees federate, share, and distribute visual media for the edification of the masses.

      Much to the chagrin of ALL of the silos.