I’m just not sure about this, and a slight bit ambivalent at this juncture. Along with questions.

Why crypto and not Euros in the states, or dollars in Germany? how to calculate mining fees, if any, and which cryptos? I personally prefer Stellar XLM and a couple of others, but dislike Bitcoin and Ethereum, for the most part.

and these payments, are they coming directly from my wallet (keys), or some account hosted by someone else in their wallet, having to play the memo and exchange rate game?

if I can tap my phone or scan a QR code to make a debit/credit payment, there’s no reason why I can’t do the same with my Lobs.tr wallet.

I don’t really see the benefit of empowering most credit card firms when I can manage my own keys, pay and receive payment almost instantly directly to/from others, all without a middleman or anchor/exchange of any sort that will certainly want to charge me per transaction for the privilege of letting them earn interest on my money in their fake wallets.

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.

I have a friend and she has a WriteFreely instance where she publishes to her um, I’m not sure if it’s a Pleroma or Mastodon instance. But anyway, she’s also got a WordPress site that is federated.

Well WordPress comes with it’s own set of complications due to bloat and performance issues. GTMetrix has disenchanted many a would-be websmith who used some tool like Elementor to create a pretty site that just barely creaks along resulting in SERPs on page 7 of the search engines.

But in Wordpress’ defense, if you federate your site and publish, people can respond from Pleroma and Mastodon and it will show up in your comments. That’s not the case with write freely, although people can comment and those posts/toots/replies will show up on the respective Fediverse instance where the published article appeared under the account of.

There are a couple of ‘sort of’ kewl, but kludgey solutions for Jamstacks like Hugo and Jekyll that I’ve played with a bit, but this requires a couple of things. First, you need to have a Fediverse account on an instance to add a comment to the blog article, and second, it’s a little janky, since it’s not your instance that you’re commenting at so it’s a remote post requiring you to login and do a remote post. And it doesn’t return you automatically to the original blog site.

One person I know used their own account and fed comments from their blog site through that single role account - still not elegant.

but Things are deifinitely improving by leaps and bounds every single day. Hey, just look at Lemmy, for example :) This is really fricken’ kewl :)

And it feels almost just like Hacker News or Reddit too, so no learning curve for new initiates!