Ask HN: Censorship Resistant YouTube?
Wondering what others here are checking out as YouTube alternatives. Is 2022 the year self-hosting makes a comeback?
Largely, what you're looking for depends on your definition of censorship-resistant. Do you want "any" kind of video on your platform of choice? Or is it more of a "I have a problem with what specifically YouTube censors?" I think that's an important distinction as to what platforms you would find acceptable. If it's the former, you'll probably need to self-host (as any website that's owned by another person/group could theoretically start censoring at any time). If it's the latter, you can just sign up for whatever PeerTube instance you want [2].
I can see how this is important, but am not sure where I'm at on it. Do I support videos of murders on such a platform, as a simple example? That's a tough one...but my sense is the platform I'm advocating for would indeed allow any kind of content. It's just too hard to trim out objectionable content without catching plenty of other content with it.
PeerTube seems roughly the same as YouTube in terms of censorship. There's still an "organization" that can choose to censor content. I guess you could create your own PeerTube instance as another option.
Are there any good tools for managing self-hosting? i.e. some kind of self-hosted YouTube, complete with play controls, thumbnails, upload interface?
I'd also point out that PeerTube instances aren't run by the organization that "owns" the software. They're run by people like yourself that want to own and operate their own video hosting platform. Any censorship on those instances is up to the person running that instance.
>There's still an "organization" that can choose to censor content.
This is true of anything you don't self host. Any time you post a video to a platform that someone else owns, it could be subject to censorship at any time.
>some kind of self-hosted YouTube, complete with play controls, thumbnails, upload interface?
That's what PeerTube is. You can self-host an instance and allow other users to upload videos. You can go look at some other instances to see what the interface looks like.
While I imagine I could set this up, I want easy to use, censorship resistant video hosting for others.
Well there's the rub. If this was just for you then yes you could get a $1/mo VM, maybe RamNode but there are cheaper ones and just write a script that generates static pages.
If you want a platform that others can upload videos to then you are going to need a web application, probably PHP that has a database backend or at least a SQLite DB to map the videos files to the URL's. That could easily put you into the $20 to $40 per month VM. Then you would need something like PeerTube [1] or related software.
[0]: https://odysee.com [1]: https://lbry.io
Even hosting a tiny bit of video slurps up bandwidth pretty quick. I'm a severe advocate of self hosting, but its just not viable for any video content, gotta farm it out.
"Like Substack" is he kidding? As soon as Substack gets big enough they will no doubt prune creators just like YouTube does.
... while I have to agree with you; is permanence really part of the spec? Is that a realistic ask? what's a time horizon to expect a webhost to be viable?
I'd say 5-10yr is as long as one has any business planning for. History seems to show that. Its better to assume you'll have to solve the "where do i host stuff" problem perennially. The more controversial your content or marginal the host, the more frequently you have to switch.
The long term optimal solution seems to be an open source, decentralized platform where things are labeled/filtered, but not removed.