some people still recommend using a VPN and IP address from a country where YouTube ads are prohibited, such as Myanmar, Albania, or Uzbekistan.
Wait, you can just prohibit YouTube ads at a national level? That’s somehow awesome and terrifying at the same time.
What would be terrifying about it?
Yeah, I don’t see what’s terrifying. Countries can make laws, if YouTube wants to operate in that market it has to follow the laws there.
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A government that hates ads as much as I do. Truly a nightmare scenario
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That’s somehow awesome and terrifying at the same time.
The people of this country would find it just the normal thing.
Are these countries even safe to host a VPN server in?
Edit: Just checked my VPN (Proton) and it has options to connect to Myanmar and Albania. Nifty.
Good to know. I’d rather pay for a vpn than YouTube premium.
I’m wondering how the hell YouTube even makes money in those regions then. They must operate there at a massive loss.
Myanmar’s average internet speed looks to be around 10-20mbps, so they probably stream with lower quality. Their GDP per capita is ~$1,150, so ads being shown to people in Myanmar wouldn’t be worth much anyway.
Humanity accepts your challenge! See y’all on the battlefield ;-)
lights molotov cocktail
…
“are we not going to do that, or…? asking for a friend, of course”
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But we fixed this already, it was called TiVo…
YouTube’s next move might make it virtually impossible to watch YouTube
Google uses tax avoidance schemes and I use ad avoidance schemes.
you’re actually helping by lowering the amount of revenue they have to shuffle offshore and hide from the feds.
This must cost YouTube a fortune doing additional processing and reduced flexibility. They are going to hurt themselves and blockers will find a way.
There’s already extensions that somehow skip sponsorship sections, so it won’t even take that long.
That’s “crowdsourced”, i.e. manually done by volunteers on per-video basis.
It’s illegal to not identify an ad as an ad (unless you’re a movie maker, but that’s a different topic). All ad blockers need to do is read that indicator. That might not be super simple, but I have faith in the abilities of the brilliant people behind many ad-blocking technologies.
The problem is those blocking extensions are based on timestamps. Those timestamps are added by the users, it’s a crowdsourced thing. But the ads a single user will see differ from what another user will see. It’s likely the length of the ads is different, which makes the whole timestamp thing a no go.
Along with the timestamp, there needs to be a way to detect where the actual video begins. That way at least an offset can be applied and timestamps maintained, but it would introduce a certain level of error.
The next issue would be to then advance the video to the place where the actual video begins. This can be very hard, as it would need to include some way of recognizing the right frame in the buffer. One requirement is that the starting frame is actually in the buffer (with ads more than a few seconds, this isn’t guaranteed). The add-on has access to this buffer (depending on the platform, this isn’t guaranteed). And there’s a reliable way to recognize the right frame, given the different encoding en quality setups.
And this needs to be done cheap, so with as little as infrastructure as possible. A database of timestamps is very small and crowdsourcing those timestamps is relatively easy. But recognizing frames requires more data to be stored and crowdsourcing the right frame is a lot harder than a timestamp. If the infrastructure ends up being complex and big, someone needs to pay for that. I don’t know if donations alone would cut it. So you would need to play ads, which is exactly what you intend on not doing.
I’m sure the very smart and creative people working on these things will find a way. But it won’t be easy, so I don’t expect a solution very soon.
You need more data to recognize frames, but not a lot more data. A hash for each quality setting would be sufficient as long as they don’t start fuzzing the videos, which would be very expensive on their part.
You can check the SponsorBlock FAQ about this. They do not need to do additional reprocessing
Every bit of effort and resourcing they spend on this returns revenue directly. Which is more than they can probably say for a lot of things they do. And they’re smart enough to know that they can’t eliminate blocking, just make it harder and harder so that fewer and fewer people do it.
How it works is that once you start getting these Server Side Ads (SSA), Youtube will create a sort of queue of videos in place of your usual video, with the first few being ads that can’t be skipped and have a red bar (not yellow) and in the end you’ll get your video. They are not literally part of the original video stream, they are separate streams that get injected as if they were the original video. It’s called SSAP, and I’ve been experiencing it from the last weekend. In the meantime, they’ve pretty much broken their player to implement this.
Ublock Origin has released a temporary fix yesterday here
Alternatively, you can use this extension to redirect from YouTube videos to piped.video I used it, it works very well, can’t guarantee for much more.
edit: fixed wording
Anything that makes it distinct gives a blocking opportunity, I assume?
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You could also use something like GrayJay, I’ve been using it for a while now and haven’t had any issues with it.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy
And once everybody is watching ads and nobody is skipping them, YouTube will start making the commercials shorter and less invasive, right Anakin?
Worse case scenario, we gotta make an extension that detects the ad UI and blanks the screen and mutes the audio until its over
And fast forwards to the end of the ad, if possible
I just found a userscript that mutes, skips, and lets you black out the ads. Worked during my brief test of it. I’ll probably use this if adblock or other clients are bricked.
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/9165-auto-close-youtube-ads
Why not use that screen time to promote alternative to YouTube?. Or even a simple Fuck google screen : " insert why google sucks here".
What if we replaced their ads with our ads? What do you mean that defeats the purpose?
Not if it brings people to a user controlled FLOSS platform (Peertube for example ) and make them ditch Youtube. We need to move the viewers and content to FLOSS alternatives so anything that will bring new users is good. Youtube will be the biggest battle IMO. Plus it would be kind of fun to trash Youtube on their own platform. Let’s settle for an optional functionality.
Let me simplify this for you: If I’m getting an addon to stop seeing ads, I’m not going to choose an addon that replaces them with other ads. I will choose the addon that doesn’t give me ads.
The only people who would even consider such an addon are not the target audience for the ads because they already support it.
What if I offer you an add-on that would promote healthy life-habits instead of black screen? Would you be interested in that? For example, it’s important to squeeze the sponge after using it, this would be super useful to remind you about it!That’s just an example, there are dozens of small tips like that requires a daily reminder.
What if I offer you an add-on that would promote healthy life-habits instead of black screen? Would you be interested in that?
No. I want to watch the thing I specifically decided to watch, and not what someone else wants to advertise to me.
Ok hear me out: an add-on that promotes “Watching less youtube!!!”. Isn’t that genius? It could be 50/50. 15 seconds of blackscreen for people like you who enjoy starring at it, and 15 seconds of “less screen time” promotion. That way you are frequently reminded that you could do better things with your time. Example : “You have starred at a black screen for XX minutes today. Did you know that a basic ukulele cost around 30$ and you can learn playing by investing as low as 30 minutes per day?” On top of it, I will ad a functionality that let you customize the color of the blackscreen! What do you think, are we getting somewhere or what?
Because that would just be another ad lol
I accidentally watched YouTube the other night without adblock, OMFG what an experience.
If I can’t watch with adblock I’ll just stop using it, it’s only a rabit hole to waste time for me anyway.
Same, just like when reddit killed 3rd party apps
Yup, and I’m not willing to pay for Youtube Premium because the app kinda sucks and I don’t like Google keeping track of what I watch. I’m willing to pay, but I’d really like to keep using the 3rd party apps I prefer (Grayjay and NewPipe).
So like Reddit, I’ll drop Youtube if my 3rd party apps stop working. That’s my line in the sand. If Youtube wants to get money from me, it needs to be through an API disassociated from my identity.
Good. This is how YouTube dies. This is how Google dies. This is how competitors/alternatives are born. Stop fighting to make Google services useable against every effort of theirs. Let them drive people away to make (or discover) alternatives.
Do you have any idea how many billions with a B it would take to even start a viable, proper competitor to youtube? and how quickly that capital B could end up becoming a Capital T?
I hate people who keep screaming about let youtube die and alternatives will be born.
Youtube has been shit for years. No ones made an alternative that is viable.
Any an all alternatives are subscription based services, and tiny. Like Floatplane, Utreon and whatever the gunfocused one is that I cant remember off the top of my head, if it even still exists.
Anyone that has that kinda money are probably already in bed with googles capitalistic hellscape ideals for hte internet and not interested in going against them.
Creating competitors for things like Reddit and Facebook are relatively easy. Creating a competitor for something that probably accumulates hundreds of terabytes, if not more, per hour? That takes insane amounts of storage, and bandwidth, and overhead, and everything else that costs more than any regular person could ever have a hope of even having a wet dream over.
…i think pornhub’s leaving money on the table not starting a SFW video platform…
Normhub, the hub for normal videos.
Notpornhub
considering pornhubs history of legal troubles, I doubt they are much inclined.
If you tried to create a centralized one? Yeah, it would take a lot. Would a decentralized one be as expensive? I’m not sure.
I think the best goal would be to try to create a platform for creators that has a low barrier to entry - both in terms of cost and skill - that gives them the ability to easily and quickly set up a “channel” to “broadcast” from and earn some revenue somehow.
Why build one competitor to YouTube when we could build a billion of them?
Why build one competitor to YouTube when we could build a billion of them?
Because thats the very reason why people hate current streaming services, and you’re arguing to not only make it worse than that, but to make the end users eat the costs of storage and bandwidth.
You don’t understand why people hate streaming fragmentation.
You can have a billion decentralized openyoutube all on the same page, just look how lemmy already does it.
Podcast also did it with RSS. Agglomeration isn’t an issue on a decentralized open platform
If they shared the same protocol, or at least reasonably compatible versions of it, you could have one app that does all of them.
The protocol isn’t the hard part. It’s the monetizing that is. Creators aren’t looking to provide content for free, especially if they are also now paying for hosting costs.
Ad spots (like Google does) work well because they can inject an up to date ad into an old video. In something like the fedeverse today a creators only option would be ads baked into the video, but they would only get paid for that up front which isn’t ideal…
Sponsors pay much more than views. So does patrons.
The true issue is discoverability in my opinion.
Sponsors pay more upfront. If creators are only using sponsors than their whole back catalogue is basically valueless. If it costs a creator 2-10 cents a month to host a video (based off S3 pricing), but they only made 1000$ on it upfront when the video was made, overtime the back catalogue becomes a pretty significant financial burden if it’s not being monetized
Also it’s worth keeping in mind that many people are also using tools to autoskip sponsor spots, and the only leverage creators have for being paid by sponsors are viewership numbers.
Patreon is irrelevant, that’s just like Nebula, floatplane etc, it’s essentially a subscription based alternative to YouTube.
Discoverability is pointless if the people discovering you aren’t going to financial contribute. It’s the age old “why don’t you work for me for free, the exposure I provide will make it worth your time”, that hasn’t been true before and likely isn’t here. Creators aren’t looking to work for free (at least not the ones creating the high quality content we’re used to today)
Yet bittorrent does youtube fives times over with central governance. You have drunk too much cloud coolaid. My laptop could host my youtube channel without issue and I would still have enough juice to play counter strike and download the latest marvel slop movie.
Boy howdy, users sure would love to pivot to a peer distributed content system that randomly downloads chunks of a video file as they become available with speeds of anywhere between 2 bytes and 2 megabytes a second (which one you’ll get depends on who you’re getting the chunks from) with literally no guarantee of being able to even complete said download because the people they’re downloading it from may not all have the entire file’s worth of combined data across their respective computers, and they have to download the entire video before watching it to determine whether or not they even want to watch it in the first place. Also, there’s no capacity for monetization without literally doing what Google is trying to do and injecting advertisements directly into the video, so there’s no incentive for any content producers to use this system to distribute said content, meaning it would be a ghost town of a service from the start.
Yep, that would be a great system. /s
Exactly.
I’m feeling like this whole “distrubuted youtube!” argument is nothing but a variant of the blockchain fantasy. Seeing a lot of the same style of arguments and ignorance.
It’s a common trap for certain types of people to assume technology can fix problems that are inventive or socially driven.
Its also a common trap for idiots to grasp hold of a fraction of a fragment of an idea and think it gives them complete and total understanding, and then go around proselytizing their absolute incompetence as if its techno-gospel.
Which I think is why this distributed youtube bull follows the same general argument trend as the mythical and holy blockchain. That does nothing, but somehow can magically solve all problems.
We solved this problem BEFORE youtube was even a thing. Youtube only exists out of convenience for normies. Youtube can die tomorrow, we will still have unlimited video. In fact, think youtube slowed down innovation on this front. Torrent trackers are unchanged in their form from 2003. I wouldn’t mind federated content, browser integration of torrent systems and locally running content recommendation system as well as social crowdsourced review systems (aka the like button and comments)
To be fair, a LOT of people swear by Popcorn Time, which is exactly that. I was surprised it worked as well as it does, too.
If the file is that poorly seeded, and therefore extremely sparsely watched, then the laptop with a broken screen in my closet can serve it to anyone who wants it.
The only reason we need a scalable system, is to handle high demand / broad appeal media and in that case, what you describe WON’T happen.
For low demand media, https off my mom’s coffemaker will do just fine.
That means anyone posting 100-200 video to youtube today, can easily handle all these situation with less expense than the price of whatever camera they filmed the content with to begin with.
Youtube only exists, because us, old internet fucks, got lazy and relied on google for mail and video.
We could EASILY EASILY EASILY done it ourselves.
A service people want to use is typically one with redundancy and high availability. Your laptop could overheat, have a drive failure, spontaneously lose its wifi connection, or a million other things. It’s fundamentally unreliable.
only reason we need a scalable system, is to handle high demand
Scalability isn’t just about distribution. It’s about reliability and convenience - two things your system as described lacks by design. A video file that no one but you has ever seen has the same exact degree of accessibility as one served to millions.
We could EASILY EASILY EASILY done it ourselves.
This is the copium talking. If it had been easy to do and monetizable, it would have already been done. That’s the other part of the problem here. There is no incentive for anyone to use this system to consume or distribute content other than to decouple from Google. Opposition to an existing service is not enough of a motivator for people to use a system. It has to provide some comparative benefit that outweighs the cost incurred by continuing to use the other service. The big thing that Youtube has is, obviously, content. Exabytes of it. Your new service would have…nothing. We have left the age of services starting up and gaining massive movements of people behind them. We are now in an age of the internet in which the inertia of existing services will carry them decades into the future. Youtube is now too big to fail, and too big to be replaced.
We are in the age of the toy internet, it is all about to crumple like a house of card bought on cheap credit and unviable business models. Youtube is not long for this world and nobody will miss it. The only question is how much of it Archive Team can save before if goes up in flames. Well, the good parts of it, that’s easy but can we save the garbage too, I’m not sure. Take any channel on youtube and its creator can easily serve it’s entire catalog out of a obsolete chromebox with two usb sticks on the side. Even as small as a terabyte would still be mostly empty space. Youtube was built defective by design using 1970s ideology, it is immensely wasteful.
I want to see how you can serve thousands or millions of people with a Chromebook in your closet. And if you say p2p, that doesn’t deal with spikes in demand and a lot of old content will just vanish even easier than on YouTube. Also it would rely on people being willing to seed.
Blockbuster is now too big to fail, and too big to be replaced.
Blockbuster died because its business model was rendered obsolete by virtue of widespread adoption of the internet and the advent of streaming. And because it refused to shift its business model away from physical media distribution to digital. Let me know when they invent something that makes the internet obsolete, will you? Because that is what it will take to dethrone YouTube.
Your laptop would become suicidal the second it had to start serving streaming, 4k video to dozens of people, much less hundreds or thousands.
My laptop can copy files at 15 mbps, very very easily. Hundreds ? Again piss easy, that’s what bittorrents are for, even easier when the swarms takes care of all the traffic. The more people are 10 or so and the faster it will copy itself. Do you cloud people still know how to copy files or was that arcane knowledge lost to the sands of 1995 ?
I hate the cloud you perfidious incompetent. The only thing more stupid than the “cloud” is your belief that you can serve hundreds, if not thousands, of simultaneous streams,possibly 1080, most likely 4k, from your 15mbps laptop.
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You must not want a youtube competitor then, if your goal is to just okay-ly stream to just a couple dozen or so people.
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You are correct. Nearly all youtube channels can be fully served off a single laptop. 260 concurrent streams at 1080p 3mbps is achievable over gigabit ethernet. Very few channels exceed this for any appreciable amount of time. And in those cases we can leverage a very small amount of the client’s ressources to further propagate the stream. This can be done with repurposed bittorrent dht. Now all we need is federated RSS and a locally running content curation algorithm and a social review system (like buttons and reputation history)
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It has been THE viteo platform for literally decades. There is so much content there; it would be a tremendous effort to direct that elsewhere.
And that other site would quickly succumb to storage and bandwidth costs. What options could exist?
The only option left would be PeerTube if it federated with every other PeerTube instance by default, like Lemmy
Nebula is interesting. You pay for a subscription, which funds creators and platform costs.
So… YouTube Premium.
Yup, but no Google tracking, but they seem to do other tracking.
Sounds like a survivable approach. Except: has anyone heard of it? I hadn’t.
It’s owned and populated by history and science/engineering YouTubers, so if you’re not usually watching that side of YouTube, you might not find much on Nebula for you.
On the flipside, that’s most of what I watch, so I hear about it all the time.
The youtubers that are on nebula place ads of it on almost every one of their videos.
If you haven’t heard about nebula it’s because:
- You don’t follow any nebula creators.
- You use sponsor block.
I fail to follow how a competitor can pop up if the main users it’s attracting are ones that don’t want to view ads or pay for subscriptions.
The alternative should be libraries hosting the peoples internet.
You may balk at the idea, much like you would have at the idea of free public libraries when originally conceived.
I like this idea so much. Do the public libraries not have some kind of video service already? Seems like a network of library-powered PeerTube instances would serve that niche really well.
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How can a competitor that is courting people that aren’t revenue sources compete
I like youtube, i use it quite a lot. I wouldn’t use it at all without ad and sponsor block. I don’t know how so many people do it, it’s crazy to me.
Doubt. Never underestimate the hate and motivation against ads.
I don’t see any technical specification in the article, but if they inject the ad at the start of the video, making it part of the video itself, would make possible to just skip it using video controls. To avoid user skippin ad thru video controls there should be client-side script blocking it, so an ad-blocker can use this to tell apart an ad from the video itself.
Can anyone correct me on this?
Also, would this affect piped and invidious too?
I believe this describes them altering the ad host at load time for the page. DNS blocking of ad serving hosts only work if the hostname stays predictable, so just having dynamically named hosts that change in the loading of the page would make blocking more difficult.
Example: 1234.youtube-ads.com is blocked by AdBlockerX. 5678.youtube-ads-xyz.com is not on the blocklist, so is let through. All they have to do is cycle host or domain names to beat DNS blocking for the most part.
Previously, injecting hostnames live for EACH page load had two big issues:
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DNS propagation is SLOW. Creating a new host or domain and having it live globally on multiple root servers can take hours, sometimes days.
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Live form injection of something like this takes compute, and is normally set as part of a static template.
They’re just banking on making more money from increased ad revenue to offset the technical challenges of doing this, and offsetting the extra cost of compute. They’re also betting that the free adblocking tools will not spend the extra effort to constantly update and ship blocklist changes with updated hosts. I guarantee some simple logic will be able to beat this with client-side blocklist updating though (ie: tool to read the page code and block ad hosts). It’ll be tricky, probably have some false positives here and there, but effective.
As long as the naming pattern is distinct from important domains you can still block it based on pattern matching. They need to obfuscate ad domains and other hosting domains the same way.
Creating subdomains is quite fast because the request goes right through when it’s unknown to caches, it’s updates when you reuse existing ones that causes trouble with lag.
I’ve tested making new subdomains, it’s literally minutes in real life. Sure, in some pathological case it might be hours, but it’s not actually going to happen realistically.
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It’s not literally part of the video, exactly because of what you describe. They are separate streams that get injected into the player before the normal video. You can’t skip them or interact with them in any way (pretty sure it also breaks any purchase links etc). Piped or Invidious don’t have them, ytdl also doesn’t download them.
As of now, afaik, you won’t see them if your account wasn’t selected for the experiment, if you are in incognito mode (with uBO on) or if you have uBlock Origin (and other adblockers) off (you’ll see the normal ads and then the video).
How does this actually works? Can you point me to technical documentation about this?
I’ve only found info about SSAI, not about SSAP. Is it the same?
That sounds correct for me. It is possible for them to switch to a system where everyone can manually skip past the ad in the video stream but adblockers are useless (by not sending and indication of the ad to the client), but I don’t see that happening since most people don’t use adblockers and letting all of them easily skip past every ad is probably bad for profits.
There’s already addons that can recognize in-video sponsored content and skip, if youtube splices in ads into the video stream these addons will still work (although depending on how strict server side logic is, they may have to pause when the buffer runs out until the time of the ad length has passed)
It doesn’t recognize the sponsor sections. The community does that. I don’t believe there is any tool right now that can automatically detect the sponsor sections.
Honestly it would be trivial for them to make the video controls server side too and simply not accept fast forward commands from the client during the ad.
We might be in a “Download and edit to watch ad-free” world with this change.
I accept having to wait until the video downloads past the ad. Certainly not going to watch the ad.
Seems too much, really. Even if they do such a terrible thing, would they not expose a “report ad” or “see the product” buttons? Video buffer is still locally downloaded.
My gut reaction is that this won’t work long-term. Users on youtube often point to specific timestamps in a video in comments or link to specific timestamps when sharing videos, meaning there needs to be some way to identify the timestamp excluding ads. And if there’s a way to do that there’s a way to detect ads.
Of course, there’s always the chance they just scrap these features despite how useful they are and how commonly they’re used; they’ve done similar before.
Feedback across the Firefox and YouTube subreddits highlighted that it could break timestamped video links and chapter markers. However, YouTube knows the length of the ads it would inject, and can offset subsequent timestamps suitably.
The move also adds a layer of unnecessary complexity in saving Premium viewers from these ads. If they are added server-side, the YouTube client would have to auto-skip them for Premium members, but that also means ad segment info will be relayed to the client, opening up a window of opportunity for ad blockers to use the same information meant for Premium subscribers and skip injected ads automatically.
It sounds like there’s a silver lining after all.
The ads won’t be baked in beforehand, they’ll be injected into the stream in real time. Videos are broken into chunks and sent over HTTP, they’ll just put ad chunks in during playback. There is no need to re-encode anything. If you deep link to a timestamp, the video just starts from that timestamp as normal. If you are a Premium user, the server just never injects the ads.
But you are correct that the client needs to be aware that ads are happening, so they can be indicated on screen, and so click-throughs are activated.
This is why Chrome went to Manifest v3 - so you can’t have any code looking for ad signals running on the page to try to counter it.
But you are correct
That’s what the article says, not me! lol
Surely at the server side it knows the premium status of the user it is supplying the video to, so just wouldn’t insert the ads? I don’t see why that would need to be client side.
I’m prette sure they have to send the metadata to the client where an ad starts and ends. Just to make the ad clickable.
Timestamps can be calculated on the server, but maybe there will be an api endpoint that can be abused to search for the ads.
I mean, I’ll just continue to not use Youtube…
I will see you on peertube ;)
I really wish this would gain some traction. As it is, there is just not enough content there to compete with YouTube in any reasonable way.
Well the problem here is that youtubers need some type of monetization too for compensation. Idk Peertube can solve this without ads.
Paid subscriptions per month, you watch the newest video for free. Have the youtuber host the server themselves for their own videos and federate that access.
Would incentivize more evergreen content too.
This is new to me; are there any decent android apps for it?
PeerTube has a variety of third-party applications for Android, desktop, and a few other platforms.
They’re working on creating an official android app that’s all I know.
