I still watch YouTube but I block all their ads.
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2025
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Privacy
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I'm not coming at this from a privacy perspective but I have gone through the alternatives to see what (if any) I can practically use because I want to extricate American tech from my life.
There are three categories (ignoring a tonne for obvious reasons):
- Region Specific:
- Bilibili (China)
- Niconico (Japan)
- etc.
- Alt-tech:
- Odysee (US/Decentralized)
- Peertube (France/Decentralized)
- Rumble (Canada but close Trump affiliation)
- Bit Chute (UK)
- Standard:
- Nebula (US)
- Daily Motion (France)
- TikTok (China)
I use Nebula, have briefly tried Tiktok, Peertube, Daily Motion, Niconico, and Bilibili. Perhaps I should consider the alt-tech platforms too but there's nobody on them and their reputations have been damaged by the far-right flocking to them when banned from YouTube for quite justifiable reasons. All platforms seem to have the issue that basically nobody of note uploads to more than one platform.
Well, would it work if we get a few 1$ a month VPS and run mediacms on them ? each one could probably house a couple hundred videos and they have about the capacity to serve, maybe 100 users on gigabit internet with 4TB a month traffic allowance. That's still a lot of serving video for not a lot of money.
very much on the fringe
When mainstream is mostly consumerist attention grabbing bullshit, is it genuinely a problem?
Nebula is pretty great.
So. Some unfortunate news here. There was never a time to be on YouTube in the first place.
Every day is the right time to switch away...
BET live streaming still has 3+ minute commercial breaks, so i'm waiting for youtube to do the equivalent.
What does a different front end do for you? Serious question.
I'm not sure whether you're asking why to use a frontend vs YouTube rawdog or conflating Odysee/Peertube with a YouTube frontend. I thought they were frontends as well for a long time.
If you're asking why to use a frontend proxy for YouTube, there could be a few reasons. The obvious being privacy concerns, but other people prefer the less cluttered interface, no ads, no YouTube premium or sign in with google popups, no manipulative algorithm.
So my familiarity with front ends is extremely limited. I'm familiar with for instance someone writes a program that links to a database, but the database is still the database. So I figured the algorithm was still the algorithm since the videos reside on YouTube's servers. I thought all you would be changing was the appearance, but it sounds like a lot of the annoyances go away. Especially ads. I don't really watch the ads because for a long time I used ad blockers and when they failed, I succumbed to the extortion and paid for premium. Yes I know uBlock seems to have come out on top and when the subscription ends I'll probably go back to that. I don't really have a problem with the interface, but I don't really care for a lot of the other stuff so thanks for the intel.
Now if only I could get some of my favorite YouTubers to stop making their own commercials during the content.
I was thinking about trying Nebula, but it kind of looks like there's not that much content there. Thoughts?
YouTube with a custom app seems to be the best way to actually watch your own chosen subscriptions, rather than bent force fed by the Google algorithm.
I've heard folks talk about how to get this from regular YouTube, but it's wild to me that that put up with having to go to all the trouble with the official app.
Peertube. Then, you can use a peertube search engine like Sepia search to search across many peertube instances, replicating the youtube user interface. Sepia search has a long way to go but if peertube grows it will get there. Searching technology is already a solved problem.
getting apps into appstores would make a big difference but if someone follows a particular person or if its free on youtube they are going to go there. I watch colbert on youtube.
Probably over a decade ago.
Peertube is the future. It only needs more people, just like everything else federated.
Anyone trying to say a federated option is not the solution is a useful idiot and should be written off accordingly.
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