@frittoBee@lemmy.world !mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
IMHO, it’s better to boycott and abandon Youtube (and other mainstream platforms) altogether, either prioritizing open alternatives (PeerTube) and/or prioritizing the consumption (and production) of static content (text and images).
Regarding the open alternatives, it baffles me how Fediverse users often can recall of Invidious (and other workarounds) but can’t recall of a Fediverse platform, even when there are many PeerTube instances available out there, both general-purpose and niche instances.
Alongside the adoption of PeerTube and other open alternatives, the abandonment or de-prioritization of video formats is also interesting as a mentally-healthy option because video can’t help but deceive our brains into perceiving “something” that isn’t there (to better understand this, I recommend the René Magritte’s art “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” a.k.a. “The Treachery of Images”, as well as the René Descartes’s philosophy on the human senses). To make matters worse, YT and other corp video platforms are dopaminergic casinos, trapping users inside an ouroboric addiction of video feeds while creating the illusion of parasocial relationships (i.e. as if the gazillion-subscribers “influencer” were a personal friend/colleague/lover, when they’re not: each user is just another bitstream they both think they “see” amidst an unstoppable digital rain generated by a grid of three LEDs tailored to deceive our trio of retinal cones… but, well, this is a very bleak and digressing statement of mine).
Personally, It’s been a long while since I stopped accessing YouTube/TikTok videos. I used to publish my own videos, I used to be subscribed to hundreds of “channels” and I was even a paid “member” to specific YT channels. I abandoned it all and I rarely put myself into watching videos.
Yes, there’s a myriad of knowledge and content available only in motion picture format, and there is also the kind of knowledge that cannot be written as text or represented as a static image, and this is where open video platforms can thrive, but people, especially us Fediverse users, should advocate more for these alternatives such as PeerTube.
Of course, even PeerTube doesn’t solve the fact of how video unfortunately are perfect smoke-and-mirrors deceiving our naïve biological senses and making us overly used to fast and/or shallow content as we lose our own ability to read and write deep and lengthy texts such as this one. At the end of the day, humans are gradually ceding the ability to write, once extremely valued and valuable among humans, to Markov chain algorithms (a.k.a. LLMs), in part due to us getting more and more used to media formats. But, at least, PeerTube doesn’t try to trap us into an endless feed and doesn’t try to extort us or sell our personal data to countless partners/sponsors, so it’s way better than YouTube or any workarounds to continue accessing the Google’s dopaminergic casino.
@descartador@lemmy.eco.br !mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
Yeah, unfortunately. I’m aware of that… However, it’s both a Catch-22 situation and a self-fulfilling prophecy: content isn’t there, so people refrain from using it, but this leads to the very situation where the content isn’t there because they refrain from using it.
It seems curious to me how corporate solutions miraculously have the content, but open alternative haven’t. It’s not just the first-mover effect because TikTok also “have the content” and it came decades after YouTube. In fact, PeerTube first appeared in 2018, the same year when TikTok began to rank first in app stores.
This can be referred to as “The Cassandra Curse” seemingly inherent of open-source alternatives: people prefer migrating to corporate-owned Bluesky instead of going to Mastodon or Sharkey, because “Mastodon doesn’t have the content/people”. Sooner or later, the same people goes full SurprisedPickachu.jpg complaining when their favorite corporate platform eventually and inexorably goes rogue against their userbase.
And, even then, people prefer to pull the algorithmic Sisyphean boulder (Invidious, Grayjay just for accessing Youtube instead of the many other platforms it supports, etc) and mental gymnastics (“Google is evil but, hey, look, there’s a new Youtube video from Rossmann about how Google is evil” then proceeds to share some Youtube link that either requires logging in or requires one to find some working VPN/Invidious instance) instead of letting it go from a product sold by an company that explicitly calls themselves as “advertisement company” (Google). Both viewers and content creators continue to put their efforts and data inside a Walled Garden they often complain about.
That’s why the modern dystopia is getting worse as the time passes, because corporations noticed how easy it is to lure people into their Walled Garden and, once people are well-established inside, corps can do as they please: raise prices and/or starting to charge users, adding more ads, taking away or paywalling features (nods to +2K and 60fps videos) and content, and people will continue to sustain the abusive relationship… because the alternatives “don’t have content”.
I’m not against solutions such as Invidious or Grayjay (and I have nothing against Rossmann, much to the contrary), but to me, using Youtube through technical workarounds is just drinking the Kool-aid with extra steps.
Also… Vi que você faz parte da instância brasileira do Lemmy, também sou brasileiro. Devo apontar também à necessidade do Brasil ter uma plataforma própria/nacional de vídeos, seja pública ou não, principalmente pelo fato da Google (e por extensão Youtube) ser estadunidense e pelo fato de como os EUA têm tentado influenciar no cenário nacional (e o Brasil continuar dependendo de plataforma estadunidense como Google/Youtube e Meta/WhatsApp-Facebook definitivamente não ajuda na soberania brasileira).