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‘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.
You can use a VPS or cloudflare in that case
You don’t use a VPN?
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.
Reddit was the only service I used. The day my favorite 3rd party app stopped working. I gave them the finger and created a lemmy account and installed Jerboa.
Pretty straightforward! Congrats. :)
Can recommend Boost for Lemmy. Was a great app for Reddit earlier. They converted their app to Lemmy pretty darn fast. Sync for Lemmy is also good but is subscription based unlike Boost.
- 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.
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… 🤷♂️
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.
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.
Yeah. Same for me. I can’t let go since the discoverability of peertube is so bad for me.
I dont think ill ever stop youtube. It has an extremely toxic side, the side where content creators are doing it for a job. I don’t go there. I watch, and post videos that are purely out of a love of sharing. That is the blessed side of youtube. And Ill berelentless in blocking ads and paying for adblockers if nessecary.
I never used extwitter.
I only use instagram to share my photography with my family, and to chat with my younger cousins.
Never really got into discord.
And Reddit I still sometimes lurk, but only on PC, and rarely comment anymore.
Now lemmy via Jerboa is my best friend.
Ive also had so much more social interaction offline in the last 12 months its been a complete turnaround for me.
If YouTube finally takes away subscriptions then I’m gone from YouTube. I am one of the few people I guess that just logs in every day watches almost all my subs vids and then leaves. None of the algoithmic shenanigans directly effect me and I don’t think YouTube stands a chance of winning the adblockers stuff. Other than that it’s hard to imagine leaving, even if everyone jumped ship the archive of YouTube alone is so huge.
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.
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I jumped ship after the 3rd party app fiasco.
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I never used it, so I had no reason to make a switch. I also did make a mastodon account once, but I don’t know what happened to it and I can’t find it.
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I only ever use it for updates for a few games. Also, I can’t ditch it because the club I’m in at my community college, the club discord server is how we communicate and there’s probably no way I could convince the club to switch since the next year, various members might have gotten their degree or left the club for various reasons.
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If my favorite channels switched over to something like Peertube or even some place like Odysee, then I’d definitely switch. Most of the people I watch would never leave and I just don’t feel like putting in the effort to find new people to watch since I’ve been watching some of my favorites for over a decade.
The youtube thing is unfortunately the hard truth imo as well.
But I have good news on discord: matrix has bridges for all messaging apps that you can use to puppeteer your accounts. You only use matrix and talk to all your friends no matter the platform. I‘m only getting into it but its awesome. Some instances like tchncs.de already have bridges for you to use.
Good luck with your journey. :) feel free to hit me up on matrix if you visit. @haui:matrix.giftedmc.com
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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.
Sounds pretty good. The reddit thing is kind of relatable as well.
But you can bridge nearly all messenger app to matrix while losening the corpo grip further.
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.
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?
Trying to make one. Will update
Yes for Lemmy and Mastodon. YouTube has too much good content to skip, I feel like sites that can only rely on advertising to be profitable such as video hosting and search are going to be the hardest things to make fair.
I agree. Youtube is very good content wise and peertube still needs work but I dont think ads are the solution. Imo, some kind of small donation would work. Needs more thought though.
A small donation like YouTube premium? I honestly can’t blame YouTube too much for their monetization strategies. Hosting video is terribly expensive, so some form of compensation will always be required, whether it’s via ads or subscription.
While I agree that some compensation is a good idea, youtubes strategies are nothing but monopolist trash.
Take a large youtuber with 2000 videos. Each one being 20 minutes. That is 1 GB max per video. So 2 tb. With a decent connection we‘re talking 50 bucks for the server per month.
I don’t think you understand how much crap these companies are feeding you.
Anyone here tried Matrix and Discord?
Is Matrix even close to be as good? I want to do the switch, but there’s no way I convince any of my friends, if it’s not at least a little better at something.
Another alternative is Revolt. It’s open source and very similar to Discord, but it’s not federated, and thus not part of the fediverse.
Matrix is okay, but not a drop-in replacement for discord. No calling.
They’re testing calling now actually. Idk how good it is but I saw the option in settings
Element supports video calling and it has been working great for me.
Ooh, awesome to know!
Thats wrong. Video calls work flawlessly.
I use matrix exclusively since a month ago. Works pretty much the same, not ad polished but you can bridge nearly anything to matrix. Whatsapp, Discord, Telegram, Signal etc. i highly suggest you check it out.
Just to understand bridges:
Is it possible for me if, let’s say, I bridged Messenger, WhatsApp and Discord into Matrix, that I could write to anyone from that app only via bridges?
Or how does it work?
Exactly that. One app, all chats.
Matrix is great but in very much Work In Progress state. Many things are rewritten or not complete because of the low budget Matrix foundation has for all their ambitions.
I use it everyday, mostly without problems, but sometimes there is an error and my app cannot decrypt a message, sometimes calls do not ring… It seems like the best base for universal chat, but I don’t know if showing it to my friends and family instead of waiting a year or two more was a good choice.
I’ve been using Matrix for the last few months, via Element which supports some newer feature like video and voice calls, and it’s been great. My only complaint is that their Video Rooms feature is kinda flaky with video, which is weird given that one-on-one video calls are rock-solid. Voice-only in a Video Room is reliable tho. Video Rooms are still an experimental feature that you have to enable in your settings.
I’ve seen a couple of Discord servers that use a Matrix Bridge to sync up Discord chats with Matrix Spaces. The only downside to that is that bridges and bots don’t support E2EE, which if you’re bridging to Discord, isn’t much of a downside anyway.
With the exception of YouTube, I have left all platforms completely. I would leave YouTube too, if there are good tutorial-style web-dev content creators on PeerTube. Also, PeerTube needs a good app. Also, PeerTube instance search sucks, in my opinion. Haven’t tried Sepia Search, maybe that is good.
No, sepia search sucks a lot in my opinion. We need to work on that. But if you have web dev experience, feel free to help with that. :) and you‘re totally correct with the app as well.
I mean, I could, but right now I have decided to not contribute for some time. I hate one-sided contribution and I only want support open-source communities that give back to their devs. This isn’t about money. I worked for GitLab as a contributor starting from last September. This was around the same time I graduated, but I did not get any campus placement, and I was confused about what I should be doing, given that there was a bad recession affecting my country. But I did not get anything of value back in return for all the code I wrote - and by return, I mean something like a job referral, mentorship or good connection.
I felt like I got a bunch of corporate gratitude nonsense, who were able to spend less on hiring devs, because they were able to find similar idiots like me, and that did has not helped me from my current situation of joblessness and poor mental health. This is why I stopped working on their code around July. Closed my half-complete MRs and all the assigned issues I had, moved away from the platform gradually at the start of November, because that experience left a bad taste in my mouth.
I‘m not sure if I understand you correctly.
I know there is gitlab.com, the commercial site and then there is the open source gitlab you can self host, right?
Working on the code and being a contributor to big open source projects is quite the thing for your cv. I don’t see how a „normal“ open source project could do anything for you except look great on your cv. Because thats the point. Open source is not someone who has to be thankful to you. It is like working on the church in your small town. People work together on it or donate to make it possible.
The „i only give if i get back“ is kind of the reason we‘re in megacorp dystopian hellscape rn.
Working on the code and being a contributor to big open source projects is quite the thing for your cv. I don’t see how a „normal“ open source project could do anything for you except look great on your cv. Because thats the point.
Except that it wasn’t. Not a single employer looked at this. I’ve been applying for jobs since the last four year, starting from my second year in college. I’ve been rejected from international job offers because my identity comes with all the worst stereotypes, including sweatshop programmer and scammer.
I was also rejected locally, because I’ve graduated from a shitty tier-3 college. I’ve done my due diligence to highlight whatever open-source projects I’ve worked for “free” selflessly, without demanding for compensation or fame - I just wanted mentorship or access to opportunities - which I did not receive, but I did not complain, as I thought to myself that my contributions could have given some value.
The only job I was able to procure last October was a shitty internship because I had experience with RoR, which isn’t popular anymore in my country. It was a disgusting, dehumanizing experience, where I had no freedom to work on my own project, I was humiliated, treated like an IT sweatshop labor, and there was no concept of work-life balance. Left that job at the end of January.
Open source is not someone who has to be thankful to you.
And I am not asking them to be. Suppose you’re a volunteer for a church, or a temple, and your partner is right now in a coma from a serious case of sepsis, and you have lost your Medicare. Are you telling me that the church ghosting, or giving lazy Facebook “prayer” posts, instead of actively doing what they can, in their best interest for their active members acceptable, for all the hours you’ve put in for selfless contribution?
The „i only give if i get back“ is kind of the reason we‘re in megacorp dystopian hellscape rn.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has three types of needs, starting from the highest priority to the lowest in it’s most generalized format: basic needs (physiological and safety needs), psychological needs (belongingness, love and esteem needs) and self-fulfillment needs. I can’t even fulfill the first one, the rest of them are far-fetched ideals. Mega-corp dystopian hellscape is of no concern to me, just like privacy or freedom, when I’m starving to death, have no place to live, and have the total balance to afford only food for a month (by the way, I’ve not touched my bank account since March), and the only one supporting a family of four people is my illiterate, unskilled tenth-fail old man, who has been working since he was fifteen, and all four members of the family have poor physical and mental health, but can’t do anything about that.
Here’s my combined GitHub + GitLab contribution by the way. The brighter squares means 20+ contributions per day (33 is the highest I’ve done). My personal projects are on Codeberg, which I’ve chosen to not include. Most of my contribution around October-November is empty, because I had a breakdown. I was dedicated starting from my second year, until I lost all my interest around July this year, but I kept going. My contributions involve not just GitLab, but also Ruby gems, database adapters, machine learning libraries, Nix package maintenance, and Svelte ecosystem. Now, I’ve just had enough.
I can absolutely understand your frustration, I do. But it has to do with a completely different thing.
Being discriminated against for your degree from a school not deemed „worthy“ and employers not caring about your resumes is cruel and unfair but nothing open source can help you with.
Imo, you‘re pursuing this wrong. Its not „pour all your efforts into open source and you‘ll be successful“ but „occasionally help out if you can to bolster your cv“.
What you are describing is a singular focus that can only lead to burnout and breakdown. It’s not your fault you dont fit their criteria but you need to understand that it’s not anyones fault in particular either.
What you can do though is talk to an HR professional to go over your cv with you and help rewrite it so its more straightforward.
I hope this helps.
