Depending on your configuration, your experience will differ greatly.
As mentioned in another comment I made, Freetube relies heavily on either directly connecting to YouTube’s API or proxying through an Invidious instance, perhaps try a different Invidious instance, but in my case Freetube + Invidious works 9 times out of 10 for me.
There are two ways of using Freetube, either with YouTube’s APi or with Invidious’s APi.
When using YouTube’s APi you won’t get the same ad-blocking and proxying benefits compared to Invidious’s API.
One bonus of using Invidious is that your traffic is combined with everyone else’s who use that same instance, for example if you use https://inv.nadeko.net/ your traffic will be masked along side everyone else’s who happens to use that same instance making it harder for big corporations to track you, in this case Google.
I think he just left to go work on fulu, no bad blood as far as i’m concerned. Anyways grayjay is pretty good, and when the new newpipe comes out that might be an even better choice maybe (but who knows when that’ll be?? Tell me).
Creating an infrastructure that could potentially ingest terrabytes of data per second, and then processing it into multiple resolutions, is a massive ask.
Especially for a new site that might not ever get picked up by users, much less creators.
I think the only people that have a hope in hell of having a success at starting a youtube competitor are the owners of the big porn sites, since they are in a similar, if much smaller than youtube business with regards to infrastructure demands and processing needs. . So they have the institutional knowledge and infrastructural inertia to get started easier than anyone else on the planet. assuming they want to do a SFW video site, which they may not want to do, and it’d probably be burdened forever with right wing outrage due to any tenuous, distant connection to the porn sites (even if its just porn money or porn owners)
Creating an infrastructure that could potentially ingest terrabytes of data per second, and then processing it into multiple resolutions, is a massive ask.
Yeah, but that’s a bad approach.
A website that just hosts links, a torrent to video script, and a like-button that’s a magnetic link is all you need to set up a youtube competitor. The creators can host their own videos, and their fans can help them. Sure there’s a lot of quality of life stuff that integrating a torrent client and browser would help with like automatically using file selection to host only the resolutions you watch up to or automatically deleting videos after a certain time unless you’ve extra likes them, but the underlying system is functional. For steaming, do whatever peertube is doing.
Yes, every time the topic comes up, this same idea comes up of making individuals bear the financial burden of hosting and bandwidth, without an ounce of understanding how that will never, ever, create a viable youtube alternative.
And once those problems come up, someone will have the great idea of gathering people into collectives to lower the prices and increase bargaining power.
Then after that someone will have the idea of reducing costs by moving their individual videos into the same rack, so the costs of hardware, storage, maintenance go down and stability and uptime goes up.
and before long you arrive back at a youtube like platform, and you’ve just become the equivalent of techbro reinventing the concept of a train for the 380th time.
I mean, I’m not in networking so maybe you’re right and I’m totally out of touch with the basics. Downloads don’t even need to be instant. People scroll and save videos to watch later all the time. Maybe I’m ignorant, but it seems like the technology (torrent networks) already exists and this just requires slapping a pretty interface on top of it.
Honestly, it sounds more like a marketing problem than a networking problem.
Oh yeah, definitely. Spending 30 minutes to download a video over a torrent before you can watch it is tooooootally similar to youtube. Practically indistinguishable!
I mean, you could just switch to porn exclusively.
Hey, maybe that was the plan all along! I just wanted to understand how to fix my car or watch cat videos and now I’m watching a video where some lady is stuffing herself full of, well, everything.
I think I know who you are talking about, I recall seeing something about her making more money posting on pornhub than youtube because of greater advertising sharing or something.
You make it sound nefarious, but its most likely just an ability to be more generous with the revenue sharing compared to something thats 300x its size.
It’s a fairly common phrase. Language can change and have regional differences. This isn’t Quebec defending their weird version of French as the only “correct” way to speak.
support your local public broadcasting stations, people.
And do you know which documentaries they don’t have? The ones that are uploaded by their creators only to YouTube.
I watch plenty of Arte and I pay the fee but documentaries about video game speedruns etc. simply aren’t on Arte (or PBS or Nebula). I watch those where they are: YouTube.
Or turn on adblockers and support the people you watch directly (donate, patreon, merch, etc). It takes like $2/yr to replace the ad revenue that you would’ve generated for them (something like that).
Or use the alt platforms that creators create themselves when possible.
You can’t escape youtube right now (as in there is no real alternative if you stop using it all together), but you can turn on adblockers (ublock), use 3rd party clients and give something directly to creators you watch a lot.
Well, you made a wrong claim that I merely corrected. Watch whatever wherever you want. Doesn’t change the fact that the documentary creators I follow for the vast majority only upload to YouTube and those that also upload to Nebula offer a worse experience there.
Lets put it another way: it really is not the youtube that was interesting 20 years ago, and you gotta think that yes, most of it is mindless shit. Or “content” which is just as bad.
Sure I could dig around and waste time trying to find gold in the sea of crap but why bother.
And yes, the algorithms do work against you, that is well documented, no matter what you click on.
I tried watching some yt in librewolf made me do 5 captchas an i had to switch vpn location so fuck google
Doesn’t yt-dlp still work? Could go that route, then just delete the video if you don’t want it afterwards
I have degoogled but YT is the only thing I’m stuck with. The monopoly is too much to overcome.
Use a VPN in Albania. No signin, no ads, its great
Freetube + Invidious
For me freetube usually only works about 30% of the time.
Depending on your configuration, your experience will differ greatly.
As mentioned in another comment I made, Freetube relies heavily on either directly connecting to YouTube’s API or proxying through an Invidious instance, perhaps try a different Invidious instance, but in my case Freetube + Invidious works 9 times out of 10 for me.
Do you have any instances you can suggest?
I can really only recommend what the Invidious developers recommend, unfortunately some instance admins have chosen to disable their public APi to prevent abuse or (in my scenario) have restricted their instance to certain geolocations.
If you have a Canadian IP I don’t mind letting people leech off of my instance, shoot me a DM and I’ll give you my domain.
I use Freetube, what does Invidious do?
There are two ways of using Freetube, either with YouTube’s APi or with Invidious’s APi.
When using YouTube’s APi you won’t get the same ad-blocking and proxying benefits compared to Invidious’s API.
One bonus of using Invidious is that your traffic is combined with everyone else’s who use that same instance, for example if you use https://inv.nadeko.net/ your traffic will be masked along side everyone else’s who happens to use that same instance making it harder for big corporations to track you, in this case Google.
If you’re on mobile, check out the Greyjay app. It’s promoted (sponsored?) by Louise Rossman
Is that only on android?
Ya, there’s no way Apple would allow it in their app store
Apparently there was some fallout with futo and him
Not sure at all about the details, but yeah he definitely backed them. Not sure if he still does though
I think he just left to go work on fulu, no bad blood as far as i’m concerned. Anyways grayjay is pretty good, and when the new newpipe comes out that might be an even better choice maybe (but who knows when that’ll be?? Tell me).
I keep both newpipe and grayjay on my devices for when the other breaks
Tend to favor grayjay though because for whatever reason it usually works better for me
Creating an infrastructure that could potentially ingest terrabytes of data per second, and then processing it into multiple resolutions, is a massive ask.
Especially for a new site that might not ever get picked up by users, much less creators.
I think the only people that have a hope in hell of having a success at starting a youtube competitor are the owners of the big porn sites, since they are in a similar, if much smaller than youtube business with regards to infrastructure demands and processing needs. . So they have the institutional knowledge and infrastructural inertia to get started easier than anyone else on the planet. assuming they want to do a SFW video site, which they may not want to do, and it’d probably be burdened forever with right wing outrage due to any tenuous, distant connection to the porn sites (even if its just porn money or porn owners)
Yeah, but that’s a bad approach.
A website that just hosts links, a torrent to video script, and a like-button that’s a magnetic link is all you need to set up a youtube competitor. The creators can host their own videos, and their fans can help them. Sure there’s a lot of quality of life stuff that integrating a torrent client and browser would help with like automatically using file selection to host only the resolutions you watch up to or automatically deleting videos after a certain time unless you’ve extra likes them, but the underlying system is functional. For steaming, do whatever peertube is doing.
Yes, every time the topic comes up, this same idea comes up of making individuals bear the financial burden of hosting and bandwidth, without an ounce of understanding how that will never, ever, create a viable youtube alternative.
And once those problems come up, someone will have the great idea of gathering people into collectives to lower the prices and increase bargaining power.
Then after that someone will have the idea of reducing costs by moving their individual videos into the same rack, so the costs of hardware, storage, maintenance go down and stability and uptime goes up.
and before long you arrive back at a youtube like platform, and you’ve just become the equivalent of techbro reinventing the concept of a train for the 380th time.
I mean, I’m not in networking so maybe you’re right and I’m totally out of touch with the basics. Downloads don’t even need to be instant. People scroll and save videos to watch later all the time. Maybe I’m ignorant, but it seems like the technology (torrent networks) already exists and this just requires slapping a pretty interface on top of it.
Honestly, it sounds more like a marketing problem than a networking problem.
Thats not a youtube alternative then. Its a torrent hub 🙄
Integrate all into one app, and it’s close enough functionally that it could compete, and that’s all you really need.
Oh yeah, definitely. Spending 30 minutes to download a video over a torrent before you can watch it is tooooootally similar to youtube. Practically indistinguishable!
I mean, you could just switch to porn exclusively.
Hey, maybe that was the plan all along! I just wanted to understand how to fix my car or watch cat videos and now I’m watching a video where some lady is stuffing herself full of, well, everything.
Big porn wins again dammit!
Wasn’t there some professor that started uploading actual educational non-porn lectures on pornhub a while back?
Afaik pornhub actually pays way more than YouTube. There are also lots of people uploading SFW content to the hub.
I think I know who you are talking about, I recall seeing something about her making more money posting on pornhub than youtube because of greater advertising sharing or something.
And yet we’re having shit get censored everywhere else because aDvErTiSeRs. Clearly something doesn’t add up here.
You make it sound nefarious, but its most likely just an ability to be more generous with the revenue sharing compared to something thats 300x its size.
Yeah but hosting your self isn’t that big a deal depending on your host. At least until you get into the millions of views.
We’re talking about youtube competition, self hosting isnt ever going to compete with youtube.
No, it’s not. It’s a massive request. When you punch out and leave the car lot, be sure to use regular English.
It’s a fairly common phrase. Language can change and have regional differences. This isn’t Quebec defending their weird version of French as the only “correct” way to speak.
That thar dude frum lemmy.ca, Imma laff ifn he done be Quebecois
What’s “regular English”? Only words you personally know? https://www.oed.com/dictionary/ask_n1?tab=meaning_and_use
I just quit watching it a few months ago. No big deal, it’s all crap and mindless shit anyways.
If you click on mindless shit, the algorithm serves you mindless shit. I get documentaries. 🤷
you know who else has documentaries?
PBS.
support your local public broadcasting stations, people.
And do you know which documentaries they don’t have? The ones that are uploaded by their creators only to YouTube.
I watch plenty of Arte and I pay the fee but documentaries about video game speedruns etc. simply aren’t on Arte (or PBS or Nebula). I watch those where they are: YouTube.
Or turn on adblockers and support the people you watch directly (donate, patreon, merch, etc). It takes like $2/yr to replace the ad revenue that you would’ve generated for them (something like that).
Or use the alt platforms that creators create themselves when possible.
You can’t escape youtube right now (as in there is no real alternative if you stop using it all together), but you can turn on adblockers (ublock), use 3rd party clients and give something directly to creators you watch a lot.
And you can support PBS in addition if you want.
I just avoid algorithms. If I want documentaries there are places for those.
Well, you made a wrong claim that I merely corrected. Watch whatever wherever you want. Doesn’t change the fact that the documentary creators I follow for the vast majority only upload to YouTube and those that also upload to Nebula offer a worse experience there.
Lets put it another way: it really is not the youtube that was interesting 20 years ago, and you gotta think that yes, most of it is mindless shit. Or “content” which is just as bad.
Sure I could dig around and waste time trying to find gold in the sea of crap but why bother.
And yes, the algorithms do work against you, that is well documented, no matter what you click on.
I tried using Konqueror once, but Cloudflare websites (like WineHQ) would verification loop me. Niche browsers are discriminated against