this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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Google has become an awful company. I'm in the process of degoogling but it's not easy given all the monopolies they have created
My one holdover is YouTube. There's just no good replacement for it.
Use piped or invidious instead perhaps.
Alternately, disenshittify YouTube using addons like DeArrow, Sponsor Block and uBlock origin.
I already use those things. My main way of watching YT is with Tubular.
The problem is that there is one, centralized hosting provider with an all-powerful, non-customizable (by the user) recommendation algorithm. That algorithm, like it or not, dictates the type of content that is made on the platform. If there is content that Google doesn't like, they can (and have) very easilly shadowban the content, meaning only people who specifically search for it will see it, if not remove it altogether.
I don't see YT being replaced in that sense any time soon. Federated text and image content is really still in infancy, and video hosting at the size of YT is a tremendously more complex feat, requiring, at the absolute minimum: a metric crapton of bandwidth and storage.
For me, I just use invidious and similar for the foreseeable future, or peertube when there are things on it.
At the very least, not being signed in to YT and having only a local watch history and subscriptions (=not on a YT or Google account) does starve the algorithm a bit.
I think the best bet at federated video hosting is with something like IPFS or even bittorrent. If every client is also a host, that would greatly reduce the bandwidth needed for any one server.
It might starve the algorithm, but I still get good recommendations on Tubular for the most part, and I haven't used a YT account ever since the first NewPipe alpha released.
I'm hoping storage will become cheap enough that something like PeerTube will be able to grow as much as Lemmy and Mastodon have over the past few years.
Is piped or invidious working for you?
The popular servers are down. Google put some kind of limit on them. I'm going to guess bandwidth limit.
I search “invidious instances” and pick some from the list - one of them will work.
Use them at no benefit to them. Obviously, don't buy yt premium.
I use Grayjay. Get it from the grayjay website and sideload it instead of through the apk store. Updates come quicker. It gives you commercial free YouTube, pretty much all the premium features, and let's you download vids.
I already use Tubular, and I have been using NewPipe (or the fork Tubular) since the very first alpha.
Grayjay doesn't work well for me since I'm subscribed to over 1000 creators and they force rate limiting over 200, which makes it completely unusable for my usecase.
Wow. 1000? I subscribe to like 10. Lol
My grayjay hasn't worked for a couple of weeks now, "block attempt detected" warning and then the video starts over.
I had a similar issue, but I google searched and found a setting I had to redo or change and it's worked fine since then. Afraid I don't remember what I had done. It was like a month ago and late, but it's been problem free for me.
I like Nebula so far, but most of the videos are also on YouTube. I signed up for a promo through a channel (I can provide some if you like), so I got it for essentially $2.50/month.
I also sub to a few channels on Odyssee, and a couple on Rumble. If you're good at searching for stuff, PeerTube can also work, but I personally haven't found anything I really like there.
Only about half of the channels I follow are on YouTube, so if I really needed to ditch it, I could.
I follow over 1000 creators on YouTube, many of them niche creators who don't often upload content. There are a very small percentage who are on another platform.
The main app that I use (Tubular) also supports PeerTube, but PeerTube has a big issue when it comes to both content discovery and delivery. YouTube hosts not only the "full" quality video, but they also host many different versions of the same video at varying resolutions/bitrates. This is unfeasable for basically anyone but a big tech company. YouTube also has a very effective (albeit very flawed) recommendation algorithm that smaller platforms struggle to compete against.
I personally find the recommendation algorithm to be quite useless, since it seems to consistently recommend popular "engaging" videos, whereas my watch history is usually a bit more niche. Maybe it's better for some people, but I've found myself getting better recs from places like Reddit/lemmy, YT comments, etc than the recommendation algorithm. It was so useless that I ended up turning off my viewing history, and I seem to now have better recommendations than before.
So at least for me, the platform itself isn't particularly valuable to me, I care more about the creators themselves. I use Grayjay on my phone, which is nice because if a creator posts on multiple platforms, I can downrank YT so I'll pull from those alternative platforms instead of YT. If I watch on YT itself, it's usually because I'm looking for something specific, like music or information about a topic. The value of YT seems to largely be the sheer amount of content, not the actual features of the platform, so smaller platforms should be trying to get YT creators to also post on their platform. That way it's easier to transition from YT to their platform, which is how I decided to sign up for Nebula (a handful of my favorite creators were on it, and I found a few new ones through their platform).
The recommendation algorithm (also using a third party app) recommends me tons of niche content. It's how I found most of the creators that I follow.
Good on you because the goal of getting off of google is definitely good but...these names sound like things that a writer would come up with as fictional social media platforms on a comedy show.
Yeah, the names kind of suck, but so does YouTube. Nebula has a much better name IMO.
Nebula is awesome.
Fair. I just learned about and like PeerTube so far (activitypub federated video hosting), but it's has even more infantile adoption than Lemmy does. I don't know that anyone I follow on youtube posts there, and if they do I don't know how to find them.
What about Rumble or Odysee?
Of course it's the lemm.ee user that suggest the fashyist of all streaming sites.
Can we please defederate them now?
Rumble is trash and should be avoided. It’s just right wing jerkoffs
It's not so bad and you can follow some normal people or channels - there is whole spectrum of channels and the video upload is not bad and you can listen to videos in background but they don't have any mobile app.
I looked up odysee as well, another right wing dumpster.
Rumble CEO was in the news for something recently. I’m feeling avoid-y of it at any rate because of the Qanuts and “Libertarians” on it.
Ironically, Odysee doesn't have enough censorship for me. Like any fledgling community, the main inhabitants of any alternatives are people who aren't welcomed on mainstream social media. And I don't mean the modern "every person right of me is a Nazi". I mean a lot videos have comments calling for killing all Jews, one of the top education videos on the front page is by an occultist about how the wrong witchcraft caused 9/11, another is how the vaccines are going to start killing babies, etc.
Technically, it's fine, but who wants to post good videos or interact in a community of crazies?
This is actually pretty funny. I am glad I am staying away from Odysee.
In general, I am rather skeptical of "free speech absolutism" and what have you, comes off a little parochial to me.
Yeah it’s almost always a front for batshit right-wing nutjobbery.
Not in Retroshare or Freenet or I2P. They do have such people, of course.
My free speech absolutism would be in separating community moderation from actual physical instances.
Say, a P2P system where you subscribe to a community (somehow identified) and the "deleted" comments and "banned" users are that because of there being a "delete" record signed by that community.
With distributed storage, but storage a user contributes being used only by communities they subscribe to, so not like Freenet with every user probably storing one or two blocks of CP files.
EDIT: That would allow everyone to verify moderators' honesty and fairness, which would be beneficial to moderators themselves, but at the same time in practice you'd have easy moderation.
There is nice tutorial here - simple steps how to get rid of the Google on Android Phone: https://www.jumagazin.cz/How-to-protect-your-self-on-Internet-part-II_468.html
It is good. The problem I’m having is they still gobble tons of data from any Android device that hasn’t been rooted and locked down.
For example the Google Play store, the main source of apps for everyone, grabs what when and how of everything one touches in there, and they squirrel it away with all your other juicy information to craft the better advertising weapon.
Yes, F-droid, apkmirror, others. But the point is it's not enough to just limit interactions with official Google apps, the platform itself has to be locked down via a custom rom (which is its own, different set of challenges).
The real sane option would be nationalization of google under some international body, not breaking it up, or leaving it, and just waiting the market just centralizing itself around some other company that will repeat what google has become and done.
How about some kind of federated alternative instead? But maybe with a better pricing model than what Lemmy does, where instances have 1% of their users tossing in a few bucks, and many smaller instances have the operators paying for most of it out of their own pocket. This would take a lot more bandwidth, storage, and CPU/GPU than a Lemmy instance would.