"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
You can diversify your income without culling your primary source of income. Asking people to uproot their livelihood and fire their employees isn't that... Great.
Anybody receiving income from a site they do not control should diversify. Ideally they should have their own site and use uncontrolled sites to funnel people to that site. That way a platform ban does not kill all income.
But distributing content only on your own site would also kill all income
I agree 100%.
The idea is to use the other platforms to attempt to get people to use your site first (funnel) in order to cut out the middleman.
This post is peak Lemmy. Someone who made a video years ago and posted it to YouTube isn't going to randomly start self hosting that video on some platform nobody they know in person has ever heard about. I doubt even professional content creators have that amount of time and energy.
I get that this is a fairly tech savvy crowd, but seriously?
Also, it's overtly stupid advice to "move" anywhere. You can re-upload the same thing in multiple places if you want to, there isn't only one copy, lol.
Bottom line is, creators will stay/go where the audience is. There is no place that is even close to 1% of the size of YouTube, for that type of content.
The most frustrating this is that I wasn't going to, but now I might, just out of spite.
Don't have to self-host, there are plenty of public instances one could sign up for, I picked peertube.wtf, but you have MakerTube if you're an art or craft-focused creator, for example, or even CuddlyTube among other public instances.
Self-hosting is ideal if you have the spare hardware, but you can still post to public instances if you don't.
Self-hosting is ideal if you have the spare hardware, but you can still post to public instances if you don’t.
Posting where there is actually an audience is most ideal.
Obviously thats true to a extent but its not like content never drives an audience. If audiences never moved we'd all still be on MySpace and Digg.
Facebook targeted an exclusive desirable user base before opening to everyone. Facebook also made key content decisions to bring in users while Myspace languished.
Reddit staff posted a lot of content to make their site seem more alive. Even then, it took a poorly received Digg update to get people to move.
You just spelled out the solution. Youtube is already making decisions people dont like; so if creators were to create content exclusive to an up and coming platform, then some of [thr audience] would switch and it would cascade over time. There is no instantaneous solution to these things. Just little decisions that lead us where we want to go.
we already have systems like patreon and buymeacoffee to self regulate monetization
Exclusive content is generally only issued behind a pay wall, which doesn't seem to be the intent of PeerTube.
Assuming that audience isn't bots ala Twitter or Facebook, or what the audience on YT will probably eventually turn into.
I disagree about using Odysee, it's has far-right videos on there. Much prefer people to use PeerTube where the well-known instances at least won't allow those sort of video in the first place.
Also the crypto angle.
Odysee's better for generating traction because it has a larger userbase than PeerTube, but shouldn't be your go-to, is what I was trying to insinuate.
Also, you can at least block the right-wing stuff on there and your decision will be respected, Google doesn't respect the 'don't show me any of this' command at all on YT, and will still show you stuff you told it not to show you anyways, by contrast.
Basically, Odysee's good for generating buzz and trying to get your name out there without using Google to do it, but PeerTube's better in terms of having control over your content and presence.
I agree with you. I think many baskets is better than guessing that you're exclusively picking the right basket. The key question is how you (and from here on I am referring to "you, as a creator" not "you, personally") are allocating your effort across the many baskets. Even acknowledging that there are many baskets and options is a necessary starting point. If you are treating the options with lower population and lower views as second class citizens and just throwing your content up there too without any additional thought or attention that's fair, given where they are right now, and at least it's a step in the right direction, but you need to start thinking about the next step too. If you look at Peertube and see a waste of your time that has no future, you're entitled to your opinion but I'd respectfully disagree. I think it pretty clearly is the future or at least a step towards it. If you think we'll simply never escape Youtube, then by all means bend the knee to them and don't waste your time anywhere else.
But remember that Youtube was new and disruptive once too and people said it could never succeed at what it was trying to do. And now that it's succeeded, we think it could never fail, it's too big to fail. Things don't succeed until they do. Things don't fail until they do. It doesn't happen overnight, it happens gradually but if you realize things are shifting early, and spend your effort wisely in the places where your efforts will become most valuable, you'll be ahead of the curve and in a really good position to maximize the benefit. Or by the time you realize it's happening, you're already falling behind and you'll be scrambling to make the transition. And if you're completely wrong and the alternative just quietly dies as they sometimes do, your effort is wasted but you're otherwise not really any worse off than you already are.
Is any alternative video platform worth investing your time and effort in? Not based on what any of them are today, no. But based on what they will be? I think so. You have to think so too, if you want them to succeed. Will they succeed? Can Youtube ever fail? Only time, and you, each and every humble individual content creator, will decide.
Be the change you want to see in the world, don't wait for it for it to happen to you.
Every platform has far right videos. YouTube, peertube, viemo, rumble, bitchute.
I know. It's why I said "Well-known instances" when talking about PeerTube as those instances tend to haves rules against it and take it very seriously.
unless you’re doing videos purely as a hobby, moving to PeerTube is just not doable. not when the most viewed videos on the platform (from people who also post to YouTube on parallel) are in the couple thousands, if that.
there’s no ad revenue on PeerTube, and with its puny audience, there’s no sponsorship or donation money either.
imo the best option, even if you’re a hobbyist, is to upload to both platforms and use that to funnel people to PeerTube (even if that means less revenue), or to use another platform like Nebula.
moving entirely to PeerTube is not doable for the vast majority of youtubers, unfortunately.
Good suggestion, funnelling is a good idea. Could work well if there was more content on PeerTube than YouTube. Pretty much what Dropout does with their content now that I think about it.
They don't even funnel in just their audience - their funnel also converts them to paying subscribers. They seem to be growing healthily, so I'd try it if I were a video creator on YouTube.
There's an add-on for Firefox to search the video you are about to see in YT in PeerTube. If it finds it, the page loads and you see it in PT.
If you want people to actually watch your videos, you have to put them on YouTube. That's where audiences are. PeerTube is a ghost town, and I honestly doubt it could ever reach the point of becoming a serious competitor to YouTube.
And if you're a creator who relies on YouTube to make a living, PeerTube will never, ever, ever be viable for that.
And hope AI don't cannibalize your viewers anyways, which it probably will with the way it's being pushed over there, including by Google themselves.
Meanwhile PeerTube and even Odysee doesn't have the problem of AI cannibalizing viewership.
Also, YT's ad revenue system is effectively an MLM, or at least adjacent to one; the only way you'll make it in the algorithm is by getting a huge downline, or in this case getting a ton of subscribers under you who will then spread your stuff around, and the MLM comparison comes from making a whole bunch of slop to get people sucked in; MLMs typically sell wares of low quality at best to wares that are outright dangerous at worst to give off an air of legitimacy when they're really just a pyramid scheme. YT's algorithm operates similarly.
Meanwhile crowdfunding and even creator-driven premium platforms like Nebula pay out more than YT's ad revenue system will.
Odysee is not decent in any way, unless you're comfortable hanging out in a Nazi bar
Not in defense of LBRY/Odysee but it's difficult for any unmoderated platform to be not overrun by nazis these days.
LBRY started with a decent premise but their monetization idea was based on cryptocurrency, so it was doomed from the beginning.
On distributed/federated platforms the best we can do is to de-federate from such instances.
I disagree with the applicability of that metaphor to infrastructure entirely. It's not a community you're participating in, it's a tool. Abandoning that tool to the worst of us to prove you're not one of them is self defeating.
I love it, the people who moved away from reddit to something nobody used always have such a hard time with the idea of using peertube. I get it, not everyone can host one for various reasons, so what then? let's just give up I guess and let Google win? Every time I see a peertube post the comments are flooded with people that just wanna be negative and say there is no solution. If you really can't in any possible way host or use someone else's peertube then that's not your fault. But stop complaining about YouTube if you won't even entertain the true self hostable alternatives.
The issue is that video creation is a lot more labor intensive and YouTube does two things for creators that PeerTube doesn't. First, the algorithm builds an audience. Cutting out YouTube or another video social media site is going to make audience creation a lot harder. Second, ad revenue from social media sites are greater than zero. It may not be a lot of money, but it is something.
On the flip side, there is nothing inherent to PeerTube or similar platforms which will filter AI slop.
I’ve heard good things about Floatplane as well. Mainly from DankPods
Or even Nebula if you work in the education/DIY or documentary niches; assuming you can get a big enough audience, you could theoretically sell premium content on Nebula to fund your free content on PeerTube or Odysee.
I won't be surprised if there was an art/entertainment or commentary niche equivalent for Nebula somewhere, unless Floatplane is that equivalent.
Nebula is awesome and is one of many paths that lead away from Youtube. I like and recommend any and every path that leads away from Youtube. The more paths away from Youtube there are, and the more that get taken, the better. Every creator should explore as many of these paths as they can.
YouTube lets absolutely anyone upload a video, even if it will only get tens of views from their immediate friends, meaning someone can start making videos and grow organically.
I don't think Floatplane lets just anyone upload.
Totally true, but existing creators need a way to do subscriptions and raise money to fund the channels, which Floatplane provides.
Right tool for the job and all that.
Oh definitely, it serves a valid role. It's not a direct replacement for YouTube though.
I get it and I agree with everything said in the first 5 minutes but I don't think I can watch 25 minutes of it.
If you're self-hosting your own video, what is the purpose of peertube? Is it sort of a link aggregator? Why not just give people your own urls?
The purpose is to have it so that no one can take your stuff down on a whim since you own and control the infrastructure you're posting on assuming you're using a physical server in your own place and not a VPS.