Image of a house with all the logos of video streaming companies in it

AUDIO VERSION

Introduction

I am guessing you probably are the sort of person that checks YouTube for your video needs, twitter for news articles you might like and so on. I was once like that and I didn’t see any problem at all with it. Honestly, I liked it… Check one place for when I want videos and one where I follow along with what is going on in the world.

YouTube has lots of problems, it really screws over its creators. It sits right in the middle of suppliers (of content) and consumers. Cory Doctorow talks a lot about this in Chokepoint Capitalism, a book I strongly suggest reading! From a consumer side, it is also awful. YouTube pushes crap down your through to keep you on the platform, you end up in a spiral of watching one thing to watching conspiracy crap or videos of scantly clad women. You end up wasting your time while they force ads down your throat. I can’t say how much I hate using YouTube these days. YouTube has been forced to improve by the EU, you are now able to disable suggestions. Now when I open YouTube, I see this: Image of YouTube saying to enable suggestions if you want to see them

It wasn’t until the adpocalypse I heard about Floatplane. It was created by Luke and Linus from LTT, its a place where you could pay for the content you watched on their own platform. I loved it! It was also a place where I found the community much more engaging and less toxic.

Also there is a platform that lots of YouTube creators are talking about, which has some awesome exclusive content, called Nebula. It was a flat fee for all creators on the platform. Each creator “owned” part for the company (not that I really know what that means) and also the creators got a cut of the profits.

Odysee is a block-chain based platform. It was a awesome concept. I couldn’t watch it from collage though as all p2p tech had been blocked (I also wasn’t a VPN user at the time). It has some creators I like, though lots of the content wasn’t really what I was into. Not that I am saying its a bad thing, just not my cuppa.

Lastly, the one I have started using most recently, PeerTube is a federated platform like Mastodon. It is self hosted and there are lots of instances that host a huge range of content. That being said, I have found that lots of the servers don’t host the best content in the world.

I started checking these sites much more often. That being said, I would often know there was a new video only when I saw it in my YouTube feed which reminded me to check on the other platforms. For Nebula there was a extension that could redirect you, which worked for the most part. There was also one for Odysee. Surprisingly that one worked much better. That being said I ended up drifting away from these platforms. They were great, I just never developed muscle memory for checking 5 sites each time I wanted to watch something, which isn’t surprising.

A Humble Start

Later, I started wanting to move away from google, while its services were great, I knew it was restrictive and I know it doesn’t pay the creators a fair share of the ad revenue. Also, it has horrible practices when it comes to their video recommendations. It was time I put the work in. I the found out that YouTube provided RSS feeds for channels! This was great news! I immediately moved to a RSS reader and it became my muscle memory in no time. I also found out that Odysee done the same! That being said, Nebula and Floatplane didn’t come with one. This was sad! Quick side note, I wasn’t using PeerTube at this time but PeerTube dose provide a RSS feed.

I now have all of my content provided via RSS. It was mainly YouTube, with a small bit of Odysee thrown in. I think at this point around 95% of all the content I consumed was on YouTube, even if I did pay for Floatplane and Nebula.

Nebula

It was at this time I was set on finding Nebula feeds. I quickly found a third party RSS feed, for which I am for ever grateful to its creator. Nebula dose now provide a simple RSS feed for all channels. A little side note, I did reach out to support regarding some improvements to their RSS. Nebula doesn’t have thumbnails for their feeds nor channel icons instead of the favicons. While they seemed responsive to this when I emailed, I am yet to see anything (Not saying I don’t understand they might be busy). To me RSS with Nebula dose feel like a after thought and not something they want to prioritise(Also I want to say that I really do appreciate the time they put into this, it begin available at all is great. Even if I do whine).

There was a lot of creators on this platform that I watched, I think I jumped up to 25% of my video needs being provided by other platforms.

Floatplane

It was this time I started the hunt for a Floatplane RSS. Though I come up empty handed. I also tried emailing their support and they said it was something they “plane to work on at some point”. This didn’t leave me with much hope. Rightfully so, they still haven’t released one and it has been well over a year. If I wanted to get a RSS feed I would need to do it myself.

I have some coding abilities so created a simple bash script for this. It didn’t work well but it did work. At the time it was only used for LTT. Eventually, I added LOT. This script needed a lot of finagling. I ended up updating and fixing it about every week or two. I eventually gave up and recreated it in GoLang. It worked a 1000% better! I have worked on it a lot since then as it stands seems much more reliable.

Floatplane, at the time, was just used for two channels, LinusTechTips and LevelOneTech. That being said, LTT have around 10 sub channels on Floatplane so it is more like having 10 individual channels replaced. This is also the case for DankPods. It meant I only went up 10% of non YouTube streaming sites. Now I subscribe to 5 channels there, so it was really worth putting in the time to do this.

Odysee

There was also Odysee. It is a web-3 style platform; based off blockchain and p2p sharing. Its a cool concept but honestly there is a lot of conspiracy and right wing stuff which isn’t my cuppa tea. There are quite a few of the creators I like there. GreatScott, Seytonic, Louis Rossmann & Fireship are the main ones. I mean this was great for me, I found a platform that people wanted to move their work over to and best of all this host also provided RSS for their creators! This didn’t move the needle that much on my YouTube dependence but it it was really starting to add up.

PeerTube

As I mentioned before, PeerTube is a federated platform in much the same way Mastodon is. The only real difference is its primary use is for video content. Actually, you can use a Mastodon client to interface with peer tube as they both use the ActivityPub specification. PeerTube is similar to Odysee, in that it only makes up a small amount of the content I enjoy. The New Oil, Surveillance Report, The Linux Experiment, Techlore and Simon Caine. Simon Caine I actually found because their channel is on the same instance as Surveillance Report.

With Odysee and Peertube it probably adds another 5% of alternative platforms to my feeds.

Random RSS feeds

Also during this, I found a few of the creators I follow have blogs. Jeff Geerling has one where he posts most of his content in written form along with links to YouTube. While it isn’t getting me away from YouTube and its monopolies, it dose mean I am going direct to the creator. If they ever decide to also upload to another platform I will be able to know about it through their blog (assuming the do a write up for it).

Lots of news channels I follow, like some of the independent UK ones, host their videos as audio only podcasts on alternative sites which help a lot.

You also have some tech reporters like 404 media along side The Markup. They don’t make up much of my feed list but they do help a bit.

In Summary

I am now at a point where over 50% of the content I consume is from other sites. Ones that pay their creators for their work. Ones that break free from these tech giants. It is great to know that there are alternatives from big tech. While I still use YouTube, I don’t rely on it completely and I know as time goes on my use of it will dwindel.

I think this is a really important issue to consider. We need a internet where one tech monopily dosn’t controll all of what we consume. While I fully belibve regulation is the key here, you don’t have to activly take part in this control for everything. While it takes time, it is possible. I love being away from YouTube now. Watching content now is enjoyable again.