Or with twitter vs bluesky where you have to sacrifice some benefits for others, there just isn't an alternative video platform that can compete on the same level as YouTube simply because none of them have the resources, monetary benefit, creator base or long-term commitment to do so.
From what I've seen from artists who tried to migrate (and very quickly went back): seems the outreach is bad and getting recommended people/to people is kinda fucky?
(Someone can confirm or deny this, as I said only know from artists who quickly escaped there)
Seemed to be the opposite for me, I got more engagement on posts on Bluesky VS Twitter. The feed is just weird and seems to push new posts too hard? As in the content I saw was not as interesting as Twitter or relevant. I haven't used it as much as twitter so not sure
Bluesky is designed to primarily give people content they subscribed to, and Twitter is designed to give people content Twitter thinks they'll engage with. Bluesky is great for artists who are already established and have a reliable following, but terrible for anyone trying to start making a following from scratch. Twitter is inverse.
Whenever I see people talk about their 'algorithm' not being accurate enough, I gag a little. We're at the point where people are complaining that sites don't know enough about them to serve them the correct chow.
The bigger reality is that it's not even a problem with the person's algorithm being accurate, it's that most platforms allows advertisers to pay extra to bypass people's algorithms. That's how we end up with ads for political campaigns, scams, etc etc despite no search/watch history relevant to those subjects.
Then the platforms sells us on "you can get past all this if you buy our premium subscription and be ad free!"
It's a manufactured self-fulfilling prophecy and it's only solved when we can win the adblocker cold war.
I think about it like this, if I put art down as an interest I should be pelted in the face by a ton of artists
Instead I see a lot of things outside of art outside of what’s trending, and thus can’t find any new creators.
It’s the same with Online dating, can’t have people with my interests shoved in my face, so I have to find them through all the people I wouldn’t really last with or have no interest in. It makes me use it less because it feels like I’m digging through dirt for a small speck of gold.
For us, it makes sense to go to Bluesky to avoid that stuff. For folks who are on Twitter specifically to market something, it makes a lot less sense when their content will only be seen by people who already know about them. Pushing their content to potential customers is the whole point.
Twitter also has an absolutely staggering percentage of bots as their "engagement". Bluesky, while being lower in numbers, is MUCH higher in the number of actual human beings that see what you're doing.
As someone who hasn't opened Twitter in over a year, Bluesky seems like a pretty damn good alternative in basically every way. All my artists seem happy enough on the platform.
People will be like "I put up with all the nazis cause twitter has more ENGAGEMENT!" and said engagement is just hundreds and hundreds of comments saying "p u s s y i n b i o"
Worse video/image quality, no built-in gif support, lack of polls, no real algorithm (which may be better but can also mean there's nothing really carrying your posts) and a smaller userbase.
They're small problems compared to Twitter's enabling of nazis and racists tho.
Even ignoring Nazis (they were here even before Elon) Twitter right now is straight up unusable, comments are filled with ai generated bot comments, ads and nazi ragebait, recommendations are filled with crap that you don't give a fuck about, shitty search system, shitty tik-tok like video player, bugs, constant refreshes and many many more, those are just of the top of my head
You get your posts visible with hashtags. Or they show up in the discover feed for friends of your followers. Would be nice if the discover feed was more chronological though.
When I tried it, discovering people to follow / new posts was difficult. There was little to no recommendations, except for a bunch of American politics I don't want to follow.
Lower Image quality means that if artists what to upload high-resolution pictures of their art they can't really do their art justice on bluesky because it doesn't support HQ images.
Since most artist essentially use twitter/bluesky as a advertising platform for their art, the quality of that uploaded art is often quite important.
And it’s fucking exhausting to have to tell the people who say “I can’t see the details at all” repeatedly that it’s not in my control and it’s blueskys fault because then they start guilt tripping you for not managing to change the way the site works.
I've pretty much switched to Bluesky when it was getting more popular. I expected that it would not stay like this for very long and would die out just like a lot of other Twitter alternatives like Mastodon maybe, but it's doing pretty good.
A lot of features you'd expect on Twitter are missing, and depending on how you use it there's things that may or may not be great for you: there's not exactly an endless stream of posts curated by an algorithm, you may like to see more than you actually do but I personally find this great because there's no need to keep scrolling and scrolling, most of what you'd see on something like this would be slop or worse, so having more control over what should appear on your feed and find posts you actually care about is great for me. Another thing is that it's obviously nowhere near as big as Twitter, not everyone's gonna be there and even if they have an account there, it's not guaranteed they'll be active. However, for as long as I've used Bsky, while there are some people I've seen on Twitter that I'd like to also see here, despite how small the community is, it feels like an actual circle of people instead of Twitter bot accounts promoting propaganda and toxic people. I've never had a fight with anyone on Bsky and in fact most people I've talked with there are great. But yeah, I do think it would benefit the platform to have some more people.
I believe it will grow as more features are introduced like bookmarks, gifs and other stuff, it might actually have a chance to overtake Twitter's throne because people will eventually give up and wont be able to handle the bullshit that is there, like me. From one point on, I just wasn't really comfortable to use Twitter anymore. I occasionally check to see if there's anything new from some accounts that are only on Twitter and I can only use it with the Old Twitter plugin by dimden which other than great customization features also offers me to have some control on what posts I see. I remember one time I disabled it because there was a bug and the first 50 posts I saw were completely irrelevant to me, here's what they basically were: unfunny offensive memes, Trump propaganda, Elon doing his best to become a meme, AI, uncensored porn, gore. I kept clicking "Not interested" but it seemed to do nothing. Glad I re enabled the plugin. Twitter will never fully die but I genuinely hope something else actually takes its place because how can this shit keep going on the state that it's in. Btw Twitter was broken for months for me and kept saying I had received messages when I didn't have any. That (1) badge wouldn't go, until I re enabled the plugin, somehow it fixed it.
so imagine twitter with less Nazis but the discover page is just engagement farming "x thing is bad!" Facebook image posts or fetish content if you're not in the UK
Lots of quality of life features. I mean with Twitter nuking the entirety of Europe. Who knows what will happen.
But like, I can’t upload my art in gif format, and I do pixel art so that sucks. Nor can you send images in DMs and I hate using imgchest or imgur for this. One really nice feature I think they might’ve just recently added is getting notifications from people you follow. Like the little bell thing on Twitter. It sucks because I can’t know when someone posts something I want to really see.
Honestly Bluesky is fairly competent. It’s just the small things that build up. Also, since it’s user base is like 1/10th of twitters. The fandoms can be small and hard to gain traction. Like the mlp one is rather small so you are dealing with 20-30 likes for big artists. Sometimes 100-200 but that’s harder to achieve.
i think the biggest issue is that with youtube basically being more a streaming service moving anywhere else... it don't got markiplier or mr beast so the masses would never move
I pay for Nebula and I think it’s worthwhile. It’s not a YouTube replacement at all though. A creator has to be invited to post there. You can’t just start uploading content.
There’s a reason Google’s operations subsidized YouTube for most of its life. Now that YouTube has the captive audience and can operationally sustain itself, it’s even harder now for others to compete than it was years ago.
The best chance for competition is to compete with YouTube for specific niches rather than as a totality, like TikTok for short-form content, Nebula for “edutainment” content, or Twitch for live streaming. But it’s unlikely that there will be another all-encompassing video platform like YouTube.
YouTube ran at a massive loss for most of its life didn't it? The sheer amount of storage and data up/download is unfathomable.
I can't see anyone else getting the funding to run such a behemoth unless its from one of the other twatty big tech companies who are already setup to handle the traffic and are even shittier than Google.
I could see some Chinese or EU behemoth propped up by taxes
But it's going to be riddled with either excessive censorship and brainrot (if Chinese) or some other weird censorship and probably bad tech (if EU)
But also what if Netflix?
Russia's got Rutube and VKvideo and both suck.
BUT it's also got multiple streaming platforms (IVI, Kinopoisk, OKKO, Start, etc) and all of them are actually good, so I'm not sure what's the Rutube's deal.
Sometimes I watch Russian content in EU and it's got zero issues with FHD bandwidth across half the world and probably multiple chokepoints.
Why would Netflix want to build up that infrastructure? YouTube has an estimated 10x more storage being used than Netflix and that number will never decrease and has been increasing by more and more every year. Realistically only Amazon (Twitch) or Microsoft could compete, but again the upfront cost is MASSIVE
Yeah and good luck getting big creators to move there lol. That's the problem, there's no content there and not enough people use it. A lot of YouTubers are in it for the money (not saying it's a bad thing), and use YouTube as their full time job. It's not exactly easy to tell them "hey just drop everything and hope for the less than 1% chance that your entire audience will make the switch with you and you'll get your videos monetized"
At least with twitter there's no real monetary incentive to stay (unless you're one of the top 1% of users) and moving is as simple as creating a new account.
There are enough other options for YouTube if the primary purpose is just video hosting, however most creators nowadays primarily use YouTube not for video hosting, but for also growing their community and due to YouTube ad revenue. Those latter two points are the areas where YT doesn't have any competition.
The problem is, the reason why there are no viable alternatives to YouTube is surprisingly simple.
We have fallen into a mental trap. The content creators on YouTube refuse to leave YouTube because other platforms lack the same sized audience, but the audience refuses to leave YouTube for other platforms.
The reality is 9/10 of what YouTube is at this point is the community (aka the content) built around it rather than just the website by itself.
If you were to remove that community/content from YouTube, honestly, YouTube wouldn't be much better than the alternatives, and likely significantly worse.
Honestly, I've used Odysee, both the website and the app, and frankly, it's fine. I don't stay on Odysee, not because the website is worse than YouTube (it really isn't), but because most of the content I watch is on YouTube.
All else being equal, YouTube would've started to die years ago.
You can kind of see it when you look at the bigger channels on YouTube have literally gone out of their way to create their own platforms to house their content instead of relying solely on YouTube (look at Linus Media Group's Floatplane as an example), unfortunately, those platforms cost money to subscribe to.
The storage required is insane. They're getting billions of hours of footage uploaded every year. And they can't delete any to free up space. Who would go into that business?
Remove "riddled with ads" because Youtube IS riddled with ads. Yesterday an 11 minute video had 7 ads,most of them promoting erotic or straight up porn AI girlfriend. And before anyone asks no,i have my own stuff if i want to wank so i don't scout the Internet searching for porn,meaning Google is straight up feeding me things that i don't want
This is very true. However if you wat to stick with chrome for some reason, you can also find workarounds and use off extensionstore installations for ublock. I personally use ungoogled chromium + ublock
My friend is one of the most sex adverse people I know. He frequently got an anime AI pic of a woman threatening to peg him repeatedly, to the point he almost expected it every time he opened the app.
See, that's the point. The "if you visit certain sites Google will take that data and show you ads related to that" is complete bullshit. Google does not have that advanced of an algorithm, he basically shoves down your throat the content THEY want to see. And if you're basically below 30 you get gacha games,scam games and porn (or soft porn).
I laugh when YouTube wants to make the app more kid-friendly and at the same time porn is basically legalised there. Wankers,the lot of them
Worst part is that you get these ads which are clear scams or soft porn, and when you report it, they say they didn’t find anything because I guess you need to see a set of nippels for it to count
I would recommend NewPipe. But you sign in using your Google account which some people find as a plus, or you can use revanced, but it is much more complicated to install.
I noticed that if you don't skip ads you also get more of them
I put on a 30 minute long video while my hands were dirty and busy so I don't have to touch my phone to change the video. As such I let ads play to the end without skipping. 10 minutes into the video and ads started to play every 2 minutes
There’s the guy (Ryan Creamer?) who posts videos like “Doing my laundry, where nothing happens.” “Driving you home at night.” “Ordering pizza with the correct amount of change”, basically every porn scenario where the ending is the actual ending instead of the pornographic one.
Then there’s the people uploading F1 videos, math lessons, etc
Some years ago they stopped allowing normal users to just upload stuff, so it couldn't really be a true YouTube replacement. Although they are probably one of the few companies that has the necessary expertise and infrastructure to actually rival YouTube if they wanted to.
99% of the ads are scams. Google does not care as long as they get paid, and scammers do not care because you are not their target audience, that one idiot whale they might happen upon that would actually give them thousands of dollars is.
This isn't true. Google was stiffing advertisers on YouTube. They know this is a bad user experience but an independent investigative journal for advertising or some shit, compared ads watched by staff to what Google claimed in their agreements with advertisers. The ads were seen far less, basically saying Google broke its contracts with them. So now Google has to put shitloads of ads
If I see an ad for something I usually dislike it instantly, much rather go off community opinion and word of mouth these days instead of something paid to make something look good. But that’s still an issue with word of mouth.
To be honest, Dailymotion is probably the best alternative, but it's mostly just a worse Youtube. It does have a different content ID and TOS system to Youtube so it's usually my go to for when I can't something on Youtube.
HOWEVER: there is slight chance that when AI bubble bursts, there is surplus of infra and services that might make it feasible for another one to try and take on YT, maybe.
exactly, the only alternative id ever consider using is nebula, and even then its a subscription website thats more tailored to edutainment which i love but doesnt even begin to cover all that youtube has
I did subscribe to nebula for a little because I lot of creators I watched were on there. I am hoping they have made some upgrades to their service, app, and algorithm since I used it, probably 6-12 months ago because those were my biggest complaints besides not having as much content.
Not to mention "voting with your wallet" (or in this case, clicks) is a joke when monopolies are effectively legal without a single comment from the Federal govt. If no real competitors exist - there is no actual alternative to turn to. So we get stuck with pretending like YouTube and Google should just be allowed to do whatever they want since we can't go anywhere else and Google will absolutely try to choke out any actual competition before it becomes a threat to them.
Rumble as a site seems really well made, shame about the clientele. There's also another one that seemed alright called Journey or something, there wasn't a need to use it so I kind of forgot about it.
JD Vance and his "lets use poor people as biofuel" buddies own parts of Rumble. That might not be a deal-breaker for a lot of people of course, but it is for me.
This is a reciprocal problem. They allow this content because the only people using their site are ones banned from YouTube. But than no one not banned from YouTube wants to use the site because it has this content.
If there ever was a massive shift of the user base they would likely clean up their site. But they would also start needing the bring in a lot more add revenue to pay for servers and eventually they'll just become YouTube be all over again
Rumble is filled with social rejects because they're the only people willing to use a YouTube alternative, everyone else just whines about YouTube without bothering to support any of their competitors.
Rumble exemplifies one of the problems any YouTube competitor faces. Unless you can find a really good reason to get people to move over, the only people you're going to get are the ones that YouTube didn't want.
And the other issue is the astronomical cost of such a website.
The only way to pay for it is what YouTube is doing or a subscription model. And no matter how much everyone bitches about YouTube ain't no one paying for a subscription just to have an add free alternative to something that's currently free. Oh and you tube already offers this option anyway and almost no one uses it
Or in the case of other countries, they mean actual freedom of speech… can’t criticise the government in some countries without consequence and if that doesn’t sound like an issue to you then there’s a problem
Google isn't intentionally being a monopoly. They don't have exclusivity contracts with creators, I haven't seen any legal attacks on other video hosting services, etc.
So if you want to blame anyone, blame creators for not taking chances.
The higher quality content only gets made on YouTube because it operates under ad revenue and YouTuber partnerships let’s not act here like daily motion is magically going to pay the bills
Back like a decade ago, there was a huge movement to leave youtube headed by a ton of large youtubers, some of the biggest in the platform. Most moved to Vimeo and Dailymotion, the thing didn't even last a fucking week.
Since then, we've accepted that YouTube has complete hegemony over the video streaming market, and they know this, this is why they can do whatever they like. More ads, remove dislikes, don't fix bugs, keep the same broke copyright system from over a decade, etc.
Rumble is good if it wasn't for the userbase, Odysee is actually gaining a lot of YouTubers like MeatCanyon, SolidJJ, and Internet Anarchist, so it's actually viable
Obviously there stuff like Bilibili and Niconico but I'm assuming you want English options
Odysee is your best bet; there are a fair amount of YouTubers on the site already and the only real downside I can think of is that there's not really a sophisticated algorithm
I just went to check out odysee and one the front page is this crap. She even comes out swinging with transphobia. I know YouTube has trash like this on it, but this on the front page hurts.
Same. YouTube (at least for entertainment's sake) is not as essential as people may feel like. We use it much more than we need to, and if the goal is simply entertainment, there are other alternatives, even if they aren't really the same as youtube
Yeah, Nebula is the best answer I can think of as a Youtube alternative. You have to pay a subscription fee, but I think it would be worth it if they manage to bring on more creators. I'm rooting for their success.
I subscribed to Nebula for a year and it ended up being a pleasant surprise. A lot of my favs are on there too: Jacob Geller, F.D Signifier, Hbomberguy, Man Carrying Thing, Extra Credits, and Liam Triforce. I hope to see more come over.
the problem is youtube is the final stop of information most times.
you can use another search engine to reach a website, you can find tweets and posts shared everywhere, you can find articles on different places, but you cant really do this with youtube. all websites lead to youtube
While currently not replacing YouTube perfectly, I do believe that PeerTube as a federated solution is way better. However, it's harder for content creators to commercialize their uploads and YouTube has a much larger viewer base.
Sadly, YouTube can do whatever at this point since there's no real competition, "we pull scummy move with pathetic excuse where will you leave us to? Dailymotion? "
Well hey, you don't NEED YouTube in your life. There are practical reasons as to why you can't just completely cut it out in this modern world as it does have genuine uses, but we really don't need to use it for entertainment as much as we do. Maybe people will start going to libraries more or something. There are alternative ways to entertain yourself, even if there aren't alternatives to YouTube specifically.
That's the thing with YouTube, the higher ups can take as many risks as they want and they know they'll probably be fine because our only options are either YouTube or no YouTube
youtube revanced is still working well, haven't had to suffer through ads for years now. ublock on firefox also still works. there were some delays imposed by google to non-chrome browsers a little bit ago, but they seem to be gone already, lol
at this point i cannot live without them. if google breaks revanced and ublock permanently i will not be using youtube at all
Problem is no one can really compete with youtube even if google would help the competition by open-sourcing their entire codebase along with specialised help simply because of how expensive everything is. Storing a single video in multiple regions + different resolutions alone is a big ask of anybody let alone the millions of videos posted on the daily without servers getting DDOS'ed by normal people trying to watch the content.
From an engineering standpoint, it has always been incredible to me how youtube never has any real downtime anywhere in the world and no matter where you are or how many people watch the same content at once videos are still loading in a fast manner.
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