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Comment by Bashmeplz | Hacker News Reader

There have been attempts to fight the Youtube/Google platform, Patreon in a way is fighting against the Youtube ad revenue as a channels main source of income, so channels can survive on their own. Linus tech tips is creating their own video platform called Float-plane aiming to also do the same.

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A music educator/vloger Adam Neely has been promoting two more platforms: Skillshare (https://www.skillshare.com/) and Nebula (https://watchnebula.com/), they seem like a good idea for educational and creative content but nowhere near YT omnipresence. A bunch of popular youtubers are present there though.

I've seen another channel do this too, Corridor Digital. They're creating their own video platform, though it seems to be more so to get away from the traditional Hollywood model, but I guess that also has the benefit of not being beholden to the whims of YouTube.

I wonder what the internet would look like if everyone did something like this rather than having all their content hosted on a central platform. What would the internet look like if video hosting platforms were as popular and as easy to set up / maintain as a blog platform like WordPress?

Won't this approach eventually lead to what happened with blogging?

10-15 years ago we all had our own wordpress/static/ghost blogs hosted on our own domains, and then Blogger, Medium and Substack entered the space with the added benefits of discoverability and a very significant chunk of the self-hosted blogs moved to those platforms.

I feel that with YouTube we just skipped that initial self-hosted step and immediately went to the centralized platforms (Google Video, Vimeo and eventually YouTube)

There used to be self-hosted video content on the web as well. It’s just that it isn’t very memorable due to the technical limitations of the time before YouTube and other platforms took it over.

Even today, self-hosting video is very far from trivial, and requires a lot of bandwidth and traffic if you aren't just sharing your videos with a couple of friends, that's not something I'd want to do on a small VPS.

This idea is intriguing: what if it's the other way around?

I mean, before the Internet, how many people used to read vs watch TV? Video was meant to win. If video demands centralization for technical reasons, centralization wins too.

In the same way, blogs can't compete with video for ads.

i have a problem with floatplane. its in canada and therefore isnt as strong with free speech protections. My bet is they would buckle more quicker than youtube would. Also, its not peer to peer.

>Also, its not peer to peer.

This is a benefit for most users, I'd imagine.

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