There has been a lot of work done to create decentralized freedom-respecting services in recent years. (Lemmy is obviously one of these). That being said video hosting seems to be one of the hardest things to replace with a decentralized solution since video files are so large and therefore expensive to host. The only serious attempt at a decentralized youtube replacement I’ve heard of is LBRY, but I have a general skepticism about blockchain-based businesses, and the available technical information released by the company behind LBRY does not alleviate those concerns. I don’t really have any solutions to this issue, I currently just use youtube with sandboxing, but this is obviously not a great situation. Curious about everyone else’s thoughts.

  • @federateduser
    link
    84 years ago

    You may already know this, but there’s a decentralized proxy service for watching youtube videos called invidious. Find a reliable instance from instances.invidio.us and enjoy a cleaner youtube experience without all the tracking stuff. It even works without javascript and doesn’t show frequent recaptcha pages while on tor.
    Go to the preferences page and make sure the proxy video option is enabled. This will make sure you never connects to google for video streams. Note that enabling proxy may slow down your network, so choose a reliable instance.

    Peertube is my recommended alternative for leaving youtube behind. Use sepiasearch.org for searching videos on peertube vidiverse.