864
YouTube Quietly Erased More Than 700 Videos Documenting Israeli Human Rights Violations
(theintercept.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
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Is there another alternative to YouTube? One that isn't a right wing hellscape?
Peer tube?
Problem with PeerTube is the content is pretty scattered and there's frankly just not that much normal content. There's relatively a lot for like Linux stuff, but other than that there's not a ton. Also, there's no way to compensate people, so hard to attract content creators (this is both a plus and a negative tbh).
Other problem is that, like pretty much all fediverse stuff, it's possible to wind up on an instance with a bunch of Nazi content federated to it. Of course, since YouTube has Nazi content, this isn't really much different.
But for documentation of significantly newsworthy footage, it seems like the place to upload. Which might spread awareness of the site itself.
For content that needs censorship, I’m stumped on a suitable solution.
Wouldn't just a peertube instance dedicated to a particular purpose (say for academic purposes or just for documentary archives) be sufficient, with allowances for the content within to be downloaded/cloned if need be, but the root instance having a dedicated admin(s) with rules on quality control and making sure appropriate content is updated? (Not in terms of political spectrum, but making sure uploaded content is not fabricated and relevant to the instance's purpose)
Think of this like a Wikimedia-esque entity but just for a single peertube/Odyseey group (that would allow distributed cloning ala piratebay/annas archive)
I agree with what I can understand, but I don’t have much expertise in the tech specifics. I’m still working on configuring my Linux desktop, just got a little obsessive about keyboard shortcuts and eMacs orgmode and very busy with working outside of tech.
YouTube is one of the platforms that started at just the right time. People only know about it because it popped off in about 2005/6 . The creators didn't get paid, at least I don't think they did, it was just a lot of fun. Correct me if I'm wrong, maybe the first content creators did get paid.
Video content creation wasn't a thing that far back.
YouTube was (in my experience) the first site at all where you could click a video and not wait 3 years for it to load, plus having a UI around it.
Most people's Internet speeds weren't even close to being fast enough to consistently load them fast enough to want to watch more than a few in a session. Decent waits and buffers throughout still made it painful. Just less painful than it was before.
Most other videos back then were scattered around on separate sites, and related to the content on the site, and they usually had to download completely before even starting to play. (Kinda like pirating a movie these days)
So given that most people couldn't use other sites and tolerate it for long, YouTube created a market that didn't exist before, and there wasn't a content creation machine in place ready to go.
That kinda took off as more and more people got broadband connections and started being able to watch almost as soon as they clicked a link.
I don't have hard dates for this, just an impression from memory of the era.
So the "creators" were just random people filming slightly less random things. There weren't well known channels, or filters for different genes or topics. You could choose from "dude filming an animal do something funny" or "something unlikely to be caught on camera being caught on camera".
And most of it was shot on terrible cameras (since digital cameras were still going from "looks like objects filmed through 4 layers of plastic" to "really tiny footage of decent quality", there wasn't much that existed to draw a lot of people other than a feeling of hoping to stumble on the newest really cool clip.
But, since capitalism exists to make everything worse, the market got its act together shortly after. But not immediately. It took a whole new kind of infrastructure to get it moving.
People needed better digital cameras (unless you thought transferring from analog tapes was a fun weekend), better Internet, and the site itself has to start figuring out how to run things to make a better experience.
Google buying it was both a great infusion of capital to help it as well as being a cancer injection that would poison it.
I like the concept of peertube, but it's not gonna take off in its current state. I don't think anything takes off without capitalism happening to it these days. If something takes off, it's probably fruit of a poisonous tree. Can't have any good new popular technology without it being tampered with by billionaires
i mean, albinoblacksheep, newgrounds, and ebaums world were things before and around the time of youtube; iirc the main thing youtube had was a clean design and a decent video player that handled buffering without stuttering. it made it easier for people to just upload a video and share it. ebaumsworld kind of had that i think, but the site layout was a mess and i'm pretty sure i remember them basically just stealing the content of other sites like albinoblacksheep
That's kinda what I'm getting at. The waiting involved in watching one would kill me when they were popular. I was starting college in 04, and we upgraded to broadband shortly before I started, so I didn't really go to them much at all before that. Watching a tiny gif was actual torture on dial up, video wasn't even attempted unless it sounded REALLY cool.
Not really. More like pirating a movie in 2012. These days, there are excellent-quality pirate streaming services, there's the ability to stream videos over bittorrent (if there are enough seeds), and probably other options I'm not thinking of that make pirated video more accessible than ever.
Do they prioritize the data at the beginning now? I haven't done it in years but last time I did it just downloaded little pieces of the files until it has them all assembled, meaning that playback would be impossible if you try until it's finished.
I remember my bittorrent client having an option to do that even back in like 2010, though I never used it to actually stream, because my Internet wasn't good enough.
I remember the buttons existing for it, but maybe it was just super and acceptable seeds.
Most stuff has so few seeds that I got anyway I was lucky to get the whole file anyway. Plus I was trying to get a collection of movies to keep, not just watch on demand.
So maybe I want the target audience for the feature. Plus if it had a lot of secrets it just made me more paranoid that there were undercover ones looking at it.
Which isn't really bring the pale, especially since back then I didn't even hardly know what encryption was, much less anything like Tor or VPNs.
I actually got a letter from the ISP one time, and it wasn't even for a good movie.
I remember video hosting sites before YouTube. The only one that I can remember now is stupid videos. Stupid videos was like watching a compilation of people falling down. YouTube was unique in that people created videos specifically for YouTube
I don't really remember how slow things were because slow was just normal to me. I think the slowness was more to do with dial up or slow DSL speeds. We had to be patient back then.
It gets fuzzy because show means different things when you're mixing pay and present speeds, as it's a relative term. Everything was slow back them by today's standards When I first started torrents I was on a 1.5Mb connection, which felt screaming fast at the time, but now it feels crippling because everything has board to take advantage of the extra speed for more ads and tracking data. Plus now videos mostly default to 1080p now, but back then 4:3 was the typical ratio on most computer monitors, and HD wasn't even born yet. Widescreen was still a baby.
I had visited some of the video sites back then, but I was more preoccupied with school and online gaming to give it a whole lot of thought for what was mostly people tripping on stuff and machinima type stuff.
Not an exact alternative, but a lot of Youtube creators are on Nebula. It does require a subscription, but every creator is part owner of the service so your money goes directly to them.
That work at such a scale, with "popular" content creator being able to actually share their content, for free? No, not really. There are small scale initiatives, but you likely won't find much of the mainstream people on them. And, depending on what you use, you won't find much at all, because searching for content is a mess unless you are directly pointed to it from somewhere else.
There is a big issue with making up an alternative to youtube, at anything approaching the scale of youtube: it represents a lot of content, streamed from servers under strict time constraints, to many dozen/hundreds/thousands of people. With a centralized infrastructure that requires a lot of servers, spread over many places and many different networks. And these cost money. Using peer to peer at such a scale isn't that great either, although with more popularity it could improve.
Existing large providers such as youtube can handle this because they have such a vast CDN available, which allows sending one copy of a video into a region once, then spreading it across multiple diffusers, who then have a reasonable load on them.
Nebula is the only thing remotely comparable.
I'm loving it. But its not a "search what you want and you'll find it" like YouTube is. You can't search for a video to DIY your bathroom tile.
That alternative simply doesn't exist.
If you treat it like podcasts i.e. follow creators you like (just about all of them are also YouTubers) theres some excellent content there. And the creators are all stakeholders so no daddy capitalist screwing with algorithms.
PeerTube is the open source federated one. But discovery is next to impossible on it.
Yeah Nebula is for sure the best with the volume and variety of content they have. But there are also many creators/groups creating their own independent platforms. The NZ-based videogame sketch creators Viva la Dirt League have Viva+, the ancient tech podcast/vodcast company This Week in Tech has Club TWiT, and probably most successfully the former CollegeHumor is now focusing on improv comedy as Dropout, among others.
I assume many of these are probably white labelled Patreon (or similar) services, or possibly a front-end site with white-labelled Vimeo for serving videos, rather than building their own infrastructure from scratch. But as far as the viewer is concerned those technical details don't matter.
That was my first thought. Some variation of https://peertube.tv/
I moved to NewPipe - no ads, and you can import your yt playlists and subscriptions so you don’t have to start from scratch. Plus it plays in the background and if the phone screen is off
Anything that allows distributed hosting without any central accountability will inevitably have right-wing content uploaded - we have this problem in the fediverse as well. I think the best solution is to create an instance within these platforms that can stick within a certain niche to build trustworthyness (ie: an instance solely dedicated to news footage/documentaries).
isn't right wing censorship worse than right wing propaganda?
There's nuance for sure (guess I should have worded the root comment better), but I'm referring to activities involving fake/generated content, conspiracy theories, or things like dismissing science or verified historical events.
I think fediverse shows that the model works. Fringe ideas stay fringe because you can't amplify it with bots.
As others have said, Nebula is pretty great. Much more limited in content, since creators are invite-only, and they curate for high quality creators. But it's growing quite quickly and has a wide variety of content from leftist cultural video essays, to music analysis, to urbanism, film criticism, science, original films, game shows, and more.
There are a couple of centrist creators on there that I personally avoid, but most creators are centre-left to leftist, and I don't think there's anyone I would explicitly describe as right-wing.
It's subscription only, but extremely affordable at $36/year or $6/month if you sign up through a creator's invite code, and I think they promised grandfathered pricing if they raise the price in the future. You can see their library without an account at https://nebula.tv/explore/videos. Or ask any more questions you might have at !nebula@lemmy.world.