Bit of a simple question: Some people on lemmy are still posting stuff from youtube, xitter and the like.
Have you gone full fediverse yet or how far are you?
- traded reddit for lemmy/kbin
- xitter for mastodon
- discord for matrix
- youtube for peertube
Obviously I also mean other alternatives. Which ones do you use and why?
Disclaimer: this question is me asking genuinely but also trying to make it fun by arbitrary ranking/escalating it. Not trying to say one is better than the others.
I dumped Twitter in the first wave after Elon took over and found a new home on Mastodon. Deleted my Reddit accounts during the API crisis (I still visit but no longer contribute) and spend some time on Lemmy (haven’t yet found the community to be as engaging). Sadly there isn’t a viable alternative for YouTube yet.
And, honestly, I feel like there will never be an alternative to YouTube.
Hosting video costs a lot of money, it’s not something anyone can do
Even if you magically host video, the real challenge is discoverability.
It’s a bit like how easy it is to replace google maps, but the secret sauce is google places.
I can see how you would think that but peertube is very good bar the discoverability atm. Hosting your own content is easy and cheap. Just the search engine needs to be better. And you need to be able to search all federated servers.
My example is minecraft. I make videos but if I search minecraft on peertube some random stuff gets pushed for a reason I cant understand.
And the almost hidden gotcha of sharing your IP.
You can use a VPS or cloudflare in that case
You‘re talking about the peer2peer video sharing. Thats an entire different can of worms in my book. Not sure about that either. But youtube and the whole megacorp situation is an abomination that needs to go, no matter the past advances they made. One reason they act anti competitively is because being innovative is hard and risky and they‘d rather get rich securely.
Yeah the scale of infrastructure needed for video hosting at a scale needed for creators to move over is nutso. The creators won’t move without the audience, the audience won’t move without the creators. Only way it could work is if another “megacorp” decided to take on YouTube and incentivised creators to move.
Pretty much only Apple and Microsoft have the funds to pull that off.
Still, there is place for competition, people just need to stop expecting these services to be completely free of charge. When Google ‘fees’ (data collection and ads) will stop being hidden or easily avoidable other companies will be able to provide similar services for a fair price.
Yup, I’m paying for Nebula which is creator-owned. It doesn’t do everything YouTube does, but it’s a cool direction for the medium to go into - at least to try.
Also stopped using Insta after the fuckers randomly blocked me and demanded access to my ID to release. I’m not giving them my passport just so I can doomscroll.
- Lemmy 95%. I use Reddit for tech troubleshooting help sometimes but that’s basically it, and I removed my account.
- Never used Twitter. I have a Mastodon account but rarely use it. It’s just not a content format that I’m very interested in.
- Sadly I use Discord still. Matrix is fine, but nearly all my friends use Discord for gaming and related stuff, so I can’t get rid of it without losing basically all my gaming friends and servers.
- Still use YT all the time, but only through apps like NewPipe, FreeTube, and GrayJay. I haven’t signed into YT for well over a year now.
Slowly but surely I’m getting rid of the corpo’s grip on my life.
Congrats! I appreciate every soul we can rip from the corpo claws. 3. There are matrix bridges that can puppet your account. Pretty cool. Though I need to figure out how to use them. Found out this week. 4. Check out peertube. Especially sepiasearch.org. It’s not perfect and you need to accept that they dont have an algorithm so you need to sort by newest or be very specific in your search terms. Trying to get them to add sort by likes, watch numbers or comment numbers. Lets see how that goes.
I’ve heard of bridges but never tried them, I’ll look into them more.
Peertube is pretty cool, just doesn’t have all the creators I watch currently. I do still watch some content on there though.
Awesome idea! They‘re great.
Peertube is great but it needs time.
YouTube is still there. Through invidious, but still…
I hate yt for a while now and avoid it. The grimaces they make in the teasers and the sensationalism displayed in the recommendations deter me. It seems to be tailored for infants and insanely stupid people. It feels like a constant stream of insults: “We assume you’re a caveman. Why don’t you watch this person with wide open mouth and eyes do something utterly ridiculous and useless to promote a product? … or maybe some manipulative conspiracy theories dressed up as educational entertainment that are intended to make you hate and blame the proper minorities?” No ty yt. Stop beeing creepy.
Never felt the need for microblogging when Reddit existed, and chats are a mess and I will never understand the appeal unless I spent 24 hours there. So now it’s Lemmy all the way… except for YouTube, of course, because that one is simply too hard to avoid, although I do mostly use Piped mirrors.
I sadly agree on youtube. I love watching gameranx to fall asleep to. Trying to get into peertube though. Still very early, no app, search is bad imo but the idea is great.
Came to lemmy with the first exodus of redditors.
Do have mastodon but never use it just like I used to have Twitter and never use it. I might just not understand how people use those services as after I set them up they are just a cluttered feeling version of my rss feeds.
Pixelfed is neat but I haven’t used Instagram since it first came out so I don’t know how they compare.
I’ve never liked, subscribed or commented that I know of to a YouTube video but I have learned to fix lots of things. Have not tried peertube.
More people should use pixelfed.
I agree. More people should use fedi apps in general. But same as corpo media employs people for marketing. The fediverse needs open source marketing so to speak. We cant assume it will work on its own.
I was solely Reddit before the API debacle, now I’m solely Lemmy. There’s not a lot of content here, but here I am.
I tried Mastodon after the Twitter buyout. It has all the downsides of Twitter (short posts, people constantly axe grinding, reply guys) without the upsides (content creators that I want to interact with, humour accounts). I dropped Mastodon after a couple of months.
That’s also my problem with Mastodon. Want to use it over Twitter, it’s a good form of broadcasting for updates to my interests/followed organizations/products/etc. But nobody’s there… 🤷♂️
- Yep
- Wasn’t on Twitter really (I’ve had various accounts over the years but they never stuck), couldn’t see the point of it. Got two active Mastodon accounts though and I’m all over it like a rash.
- Nah Discord is still perfectly fine for the way I use it
- Uploading my stuff to both. But PT really need to acknowledge the major discovery problems before it can get anywhere, and at the moment they don’t even seem to accept that their instance search tool (ie the first thing most people will need) is broken, so I don’t have high hopes.
- there are puppeting bridges for matrix->discord. Just saying :)
- I just raised that issue a couple moments ago in their gitlab. Might even start working on it if I can understand it. Let’s see. Because I see the potential and want it to succeed.
Never really used Twitter (beyond some retweets to enter giveaways), so no use for Mastodon.
I do have Matrix, but not much happening there for me. Discord is where the people are.
Use Piped (well, LibreTube) instead of going to Youtube directly - it still has the content.
Makes sense. I‘m also using youtube at times since my favorite creators are there but I‘m slowly easing off, always searching on peertube first. :)
You can bridge discord to matrix. That would unify your communications without cutting you off.
- Use both
- No use both
- Discord all the way
- Youtube premium
I don’t think at the moment fediverse have enough content and facilities for me.
Fair enough. I am too unhappy with large corps to go that route but I can see how the fediverse would not suit everyone.
I don’t use anything else, except NewPipe for YouTube. Sometimes I use a Revanced YouTube app without an account, I periodically delete its data and start over again, but no Facebook, xitter, etc. Only true exception is WhatsApp.
Only true exception is WhatsApp.
Die heretic!!!
Honestly it’s hard when IM platforms are so fragmented to get the people around you to move over. I never had to convince friends to move to Lemmy to use it.
I think you’re kidding so don’t take this all as a criticism.
Very relatable. Whatsapp is very baked into our lives here as well. There is a solution though. Matrix has bridges for most of the IMs out there. You only use matrix and can chat with most others like discord, whatsapp, signal, telegram etc.
Is it hard to setup? Because it sounds too good to be easy. It doesn’t matter a lot to me, on the contrary, I’m interested in a a setup that centralizes all of my IM apps, and I’m willing to invest efforts to make it happen.
Great attitude! :)
It’s not hard if you selfhosted something before. I just decided to make a video about this since so many people ask how to do it.
You will need a computer that runs 24/7 though. You could technically run it at home but port forwarding is a security risk so you should be pretty advanced to do that.
I‘d rather you rent a small vps at serverhunter.com for 5-10 bucks a month. Please be aware that you need backups. Otherwise you will be sad.
Will try to edit my post when the vid is done.
Simply put, I prefer the freedom of access to more information.
Longer explanation.
- Still have a reddit around to access the “NSFW” labelled posts (all are not porn) and quarantined subreddits (like r/Russia).
- Have Discord and WhatsApp so I do not get cut off society. Yes, cutting yourself off is a speedrun to becoming deranged and conspiratorial, as it prevents challenging your mindset against society and prevents keeping a basic level of tab on current trends.
- YouTube is used through NewPipe, Invidious and ytdlp.
- Have an Amazon account for the rare occasion to buy stuff otherwise hard to get IRL.
No Google, no Apple, no Facebook/Instagram, no Snapchat, no Huawei/Samsung/OEM accounts, none of the other services. I practice what I preach as a serious privacy advocate, and keep things practical.
- 65-75%. I go in Reddit only when I seek for information that cannot be found conveniently otherwise.
- 0%. I don’t have an account in neither. Sometimes I click a link that takes me to Twitter.
- 0%. Visited Matrix’s website but I haven’t though much more about it.
- 0% so far. Haven’t thought much about it yet.
Perfectly reasonable. You really don’t need to know anything about matrix except its the better version of discord, whatsapp, telegram, imessage, fb-messenger, signal, etc. It also can have puppeting for the other services. So you use matrix and can talk to your whatsapp friends if you like. The best clients I’ve used so far are element.io and fluffychat. Check them out if you want.
Peertube is a great thing and has some decent content. You need to be very particular with your search terms on sepiasearch.com though since the discoverability lacks still.
Yeah I just tried to look for one video but found nothing 😅
better version of discord, whatsapp, telegram, imessage, fb-messenger, signal, etc.
How would I set it up?
I’d love to use matrix more but unfortunately it’s really hard to convince other people to use it.
Then just bridge it. Feel free to hit me up too. @haui:matrix.giftedmc.com
Why is matrix better than discord?
On Discord you are forced to use single proprietary app from single provider (that btw is really close with China’s Tencent) and to use their infrastructure. Basically using Discord is trapping yourself and friends into the will of giant company because chat systems are hard to switch.
With Matrix you can choose between many apps, but most importantly you can can choose a server or even create your own.
Thank you for elaborating. Additionally, matrix does not serve you ads, sell your data or has your chats stored somewhere without you able to access it. You can selfhost it too.
Youtube is the hardest. Rest are fine.
I agree.
Twitch will probably be even harder.
I’ve gone full Lemmy and Mastodon. I’m not going to pretend like Peertube is ever going to be a serious contender. None of my friends are on matrix sadly, so will probably be stuck on sms/discord for a long time.
Two things: peertube is not doing illegal stuff which is how youtube got successful so obviously, people are gonna want to do the right thing if anyone is to have a chance against corpo media. Second, there are matrix bridges for (nearly?) all other platforms (discord, whatsapp, telegram, signal, fbmessenger, etc).
Could you recommend any good tutorials for setting up a bridge?
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Yes
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Yes
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Should say XMPP, the IETF internet standard for IM. Matrix is a venture capital sham not compatible with existing standards.
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No, there is a huge content gap.
Please elaborate! I‘ve heard people say matrix is problematic and xmpp is better but thats it. Please help me (and others understand).
The whole point of XMPP or Matrix is to provide interoperability between IM services. For interoperability to exist, we must agree on standards. Matrix is not a standard, but essentially a product controlled entirely by NewVector, a venture capital funded start-up.
They are not profitable and increasingly desperate to make money. Recently they forked Element and Synapse and make contributors sign a CLA which enables them to change their software to a non-free license in the future for monetization: https://drewdevault.com/2018/10/05/Dont-sign-a-CLA.html
You might say “But they made a non-profit foundation for Matrix” which is kind of true, but not really. The “core spec team” is all people working for NewVector except a single guy. Go checkout their linked GitHub profiles.
The whole Matrix thing should build on the existing XMPP internet standard. Instead we got yet another incompatible IM protocol, effectively controlled by a single corporation and more fragmentation. Bridges don’t help as they break almost all features, most regrettably end-to-end encryption. We really need proper internet standards for interoperability.
XMPP is also more lightweight and has proper native clients for all platforms instead of Electron apps. On the server side the difference is even more severe.
This indeed reads pretty brutal. Thank you for pointing this out. I might look for alternatives in the future.
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