this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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WHY DONT WE HAVE A MAINSTREAM ALTERNATIVE YET
People get proccupied with emulating YT, which is indeed cost prohibitive. But that response assumes one is emulating all of it. What about only pursuing sections of it to cater to particular audiences? Serving 100% of YT's video might be too much even for Amazon (for example) but what about 1%?
Why couldn't Amazon host Booktube? And the manga/anime enthusiasts and other varietes of weebs to go along with them? They already own ebook retail. A VOD service to chip off some of YT's viewership would be a more productive investment than The Rings of Power...
A YT competitor needs a bit of scale, sure, but not as much as YT itself. A fraction will do.
I believe the main cost is in hosting all the videos. A lot of them are probably junk that were never meant to see the light of day. I certainly use it as an extra backup for many of my videos with no context and random UUID titles.
For everything else, a potential solution is to have everyone come in with their own videos hosted elsewhere and the platform just integrated with a bunch of APIs for fetching and serving those videos. For small time creators, the cost should be fairly low to none since a lot of platforms allow you to store a small number of files for free.
By operating youtube at a loss for many years Google acted anticompetitively to kill competition or stop competition arising. Now that they've achieved that they can do what they like. Don't feel bad using ad blockers against this anti-capitalist company.
Final stage of enshittification, now they are allowing more right wing propaganda than normal on the channel
And suppression of comments, for all sorts of reasons. Words and phrases will constantly flag AI autoremoval.
FYI, this is currently happening with Uber.
I am in no way defending YouTube here, but how did it act anticompetitively?
I never felt bad abt that for a second. Like the thought never crossed my kind XD FUCK YOUTUBE!
Hosting and storage costs, few can afford to be an alternative to an absolutely gigantic video storage platform that costs obscene money to maintain.
I am causing a netloss to googs. I don’t pay for Google plus or whatever, and j don’t view their fucking ads. Win win if you ask me.
It was fun to thumb my nose at Google while it lasted I guess, maybe if they were less amoral then I'd be less belligerent toward them.
@ChaoticEntropy @atlien51
you found your way to lemmy but you don't know about https://peertube.tv/ ;)
Sure, a service that manages an infinitely smaller amount of content and complexity. It is a situational tool, hardly a YouTube killer... the banner presented on the homepage professes that it's expensive to run and please donate.
@ChaoticEntropy
https://fediverse.party/en/peertube/ << before you complain understand the technology behind. Everyone can basically provide a instance and it's decentral. As more people participate / as more instances are provide as better for all and as cheaper. If you really want to step away from services like youtube and want to have it sustainable (aka not depending on business) than it's your best choice. If you just want someone else to have the saying and replace one company with another good luck.
I'm complaining, I'm stating.
It's a very difficult business model to make profitable without an already massive userbase. In fact, I think YT was actually losing money for Google for a while after they bought it. I could be misremembering though.
Yes but not everything needs to make a profit, just not make a loss. Also it could be community supported with donations and stuff:)
OK, so a bittorrent tracker site with a video player built in with comments underneath and you can get perks from content creators for seeding. Then of course some kind of voting system and etc. Then a creator can just get a seed box to start hosting their own videos.
We do, but you probably don't like it (TikTok).
You’re right :)
I meant idk something like Oddysse (but a website with actual moderation)
Do you know of PeerTube? It's not mainstream at all either, but it seems more known to me.
It's also in the fediverse, and isn't accused of the same moderation issues (though idk if PeerTube is really better than Odyssee at moderation, I suppose it's just a difference in policy).
Edit: I read a bit about it, and I can see I was wrong about Odyssee being less known than PeerTube. It's strange, I never heard of it, but anyway. Odyssee also includes some crypto bullshit, so yeah...