YouTube alternative
YouTube, that small website that became a giant of the web streaming hours and hours of video contents.
Google paid $1.65B to buy YouTube in 2006, one year after it was created. People working at Google saw the huge potential the website had and that’s the reason why it was so expensive to buy.
The first video uploaded to the platform was this one :
Since that one a lot of videos have been uploaded. YouTube announced that ~300 hours of video are uploaded every minute, so that’s 18,000 hours uploaded per hour. Almost everybody did an upload to their platform at least once.
YouTube doing its job, it removes from time to time videos including racism, violence, child sexual exploitation and other scams. And that’s a good thing.
But YouTube removed also channels that are legit. Since 2019, they changed their Terms of service and now can remove any channel that is not commercially viable meaning : “you don’t get enough views so get out of my platform”.
Here the change :
Terminations by YouTube for service changes. YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or parts of the service if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the service to you is no longer commercially viable.
That’s bad… But it’s not the only thing. YouTube knows exactly how to target you with ads that you’ll be happy or incline to watch. How? Every time you watch a video, you have this annoying ad at the start. Depending on if you skipped it quickly or not, an algorithm can determine what kind of content you prefer and will trigger only the ones that matches your previous behaviours.
Of course, you can use https://invidio.us/ to get rid of those ads but you’re still using a centralized platform that could shut down at any moment or change again their terms of service making some of your videos banned.
A better alternative exist…
PeerTube
Started in 2015 by Chocobozzz, development of PeerTube is now supported by Framasoft. The goal is to provide an opensource decentralized version of YouTube, Dailymotion or Vimeo.
The technology behind uses ActivityPub and WebTorrent and the main goal is to reduce load on each server running an instance using P2P also known as peer-to-peer.
As Mastodon or Pixelfed, you can create a user on a specific instance or self-host your own if you have the skills.
I discovered this morning a PeerTube search engine allowing you to search for a specific video amongst all the instances, just check it at https://peertube-index.net/.
I couldn’t find a GitHub or any statement about the copyright of that crawler but I hope they will make it opensource.
For all the video makers, I really encourage you to use and spread the word about that alternative to GAFAM.
Photo credit : Dan-Christian Paduret