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Comment by GaggiX | Hacker News Reader

Youtube is the real tough one to replace, BiliBili is probably the only one that comes close to it and it's Chinese.

In addition to the others elsethread, there's also Nebula; which goes for being creator-owned, not suppressive of minority content (which has seen it banned by LG as a consequence), and subscription model rather than advertisement model.

* https://nebula.tv/faq

Nebula might be an alternative to YouTube in general, depending on your use of YouTube, but for the purposes of this discussion, it's still American owned.

For the purposes of this discussion one of its creator-owners is Devin Stone, one of the people in the vanguard of publicizing and opposing what is happening in the U.S.A. right now.

* https://nebula.tv/legaleagle

Which is good for Devin, though the ownership of nebula is a little complicated and basically that amounts to a 1/7 share of voting power:

https://medium.com/@cameron-paul/who-actually-owns-nebula-95...

I think several of the other cofounders (e.g. Wendell, also the guy from real engineering) seem likely to be decent people too.

But also, for the purposes of this discussion, we're talking about the ability of a capricious US president to make access difficult, and a bunch of YouTubers and a documentary maker are not going to have the resources to stand up to the US federal government.

>banned by LG

LG? you mean the tv company?

Yes. They run their own OS and app store, Nebula had an app there, and this ban relates to that.

More on the story:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nebula/comments/180yuw0/the_lg_tv_c...

Yes, truth is, networks have no replacement. At the end of the day, social sites live and die by the circles of people that are there.

One way out of this would be if content creators would en masse upload to multiple sites. Even with preferential treatment for YouTube, this would enable consumers to follow their favorite creators outside of YouTube, and get the same content. Of course, this onus is now on the creators, and I imagine they have enough to manage as it is. So what they would need is a good incentive. But that is people, and as long as they have enough people on YouTube, there is no incentive to diversify. So we're back at the network effect.

Agree! But it's not impossible. I signed up for Bluesky in late 2023 and it was... like a tumbleweed tumbling across my screen. But now? It really feels like they've crossed some kind of threshold and it very much feels like Twitter back in the day™. I think they just crossed 30m users, maybe that is the magic number?

I'm happy for Bluesky's success. To me, it feels like that platforms began to figure out how to balance the hostile features vs the user retention. Major platforms were abusive left and right in the last couple of years, and people predicted their demise, as they always do, but nothing major happened, that is comparable to the MySpace or Digg or Slashdot demise back in the day. This is why I'm not holding my breath wrt/ YouTube as well. For better or worse, they do a damned good job with keeping the platform alive. I'm a premium subscriber even.

There's PeerTube (https://peertube.tv/) which is based on Free software (https://joinpeertube.org/).

I've just got a self hosted piped.video instance running this weekend. But sadly YouTube seems to be brutal nowadays with blocking these alternative interfaces and the experience was pretty bad. I'll watch how this develops and maybe also give Invidious a try.

https://framatube.org/

I love the idea of peertube, the technology works, but getting it to gain traction is impossible. There's this catch 22 of no view => no content => no view which is really hard to break. And where VC funded platform can buy content to kick start the process, this one doesn't have any mean of kick starting it.

Maybe we should raise money to pay popular creators to publish on these peertube instances.

Compare to YouTube it has almost no content, like what if I want to see a gameplay of Balatro.

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