So YouTube has a lot of problems, there’s no denying that. Frivolous and selective (not to mention automated) copyright enforcement, bureaucratic termination appeal system, COPPA idiocy, the whole clusterfuck that is monetization, etc?
In contrast, Odysee is this open-source video platform that fixes many of these problems. It took of, like, I dunno, a year ago? Thing is, it’s still very inactive and dead. A lot of YouTubers have pined for a massive exodus from YouTube, which might sound familiar for many of us Lemmings here. Yet, the majority of them can’t seem to let it go, since YouTube/Google pretty much exercises a monopoly on the online video sharing industry.
What worries me is that Reddit alternatives, such as Lemmy, Mastodon, or kbin, could see a similar fate to YouTube alternatives like Odysee or removedute. I’d love to see people quit Reddit en masse and hopefully find a “safe harbor” some place like here, but I’m hearing about realistic concerns regarding even the viability of this site’s databases, so I feel like the actual outcome will be more of a small dent than a massive crater.
Which is exactly what Huffman wants and he knows it.
Ugh, I hate this awful corporate creativity-stifling timeline.
What a great conversation! So many interesting points being brought up!
For anyone interested, I run a PeerTube instance called TILvids (which stands for “Today I Learned Vids”) over at https://www.tilvids.com The mission of our instance is to find great edutainment content to provide to our community.
Every problem that has been outlined here is legit, and something we’ve encountered. Hosting can be hard. Finding content creators willing to share content is hard. Moderating is hard. Funding is hard. They are all problems to be figured out. The good news is, TILvids has been around for three years now, and continues to slowly grow each year. We have almost 4,000 registered users and over 2300 videos posted! We have some absolutely amazing contributors as well, such as The Linux Experiment!
Long-term, I’m hoping to really lean-in to the community aspect of what we’re doing. I have no aspirations to ever turn TILvids into a public corporation, but instead plan to incorporate as a non-profit and create a board represented by creators, moderators, and other voices in the community, to help drive the direction of TILvids. At the moment, we’re completely community-funded, but at some point I’d also like to see some level of broad corporate sponsorship (similar to PBS in the United States, as opposed to ads like YouTube), and use that revenue to offset costs for running and maintaining the site, and then pass on the rest to the creators making content, because as a creator myself, I know how much work it is!
So that’s TILvids in a nutshell. You can learn more by watching our “What is TILvids?” video, and if you wouldn’t mind passing it along to spread the word, that would be fantastic, as that is how we grow. Thanks for the awesome discussion here!
(note: I’m not SUPER active on Lemmy, I spend most of my time communicating over on Mastodon, but I’ll try to keep this thread open in a tab, in case you have any questions!)
https://tilvids.com/w/e58xxgfeYXM2R3wouecxEm