Google is excelling again - as the whole “uncensored” Big-Tech IT now.
The short summary is that for nearly a year, Google was hiding Proton Mail from search results for queries such as ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’. This was highly suspicious because Proton Mail has long been the world’s largest encrypted email provider.
My one holdover is YouTube. There’s just no good replacement for it.
Use them at no benefit to them. Obviously, don’t buy yt premium.
I use Grayjay. Get it from the grayjay website and sideload it instead of through the apk store. Updates come quicker. It gives you commercial free YouTube, pretty much all the premium features, and let’s you download vids.
I already use Tubular, and I have been using NewPipe (or the fork Tubular) since the very first alpha.
Grayjay doesn’t work well for me since I’m subscribed to over 1000 creators and they force rate limiting over 200, which makes it completely unusable for my usecase.
Wow. 1000? I subscribe to like 10. Lol
My grayjay hasn’t worked for a couple of weeks now, “block attempt detected” warning and then the video starts over.
I had a similar issue, but I google searched and found a setting I had to redo or change and it’s worked fine since then. Afraid I don’t remember what I had done. It was like a month ago and late, but it’s been problem free for me.
Use piped or invidious instead perhaps.
Alternately, disenshittify YouTube using addons like DeArrow, Sponsor Block and uBlock origin.
I already use those things. My main way of watching YT is with Tubular.
The problem is that there is one, centralized hosting provider with an all-powerful, non-customizable (by the user) recommendation algorithm. That algorithm, like it or not, dictates the type of content that is made on the platform. If there is content that Google doesn’t like, they can (and have) very easilly shadowban the content, meaning only people who specifically search for it will see it, if not remove it altogether.
I don’t see YT being replaced in that sense any time soon. Federated text and image content is really still in infancy, and video hosting at the size of YT is a tremendously more complex feat, requiring, at the absolute minimum: a metric crapton of bandwidth and storage.
For me, I just use invidious and similar for the foreseeable future, or peertube when there are things on it.
At the very least, not being signed in to YT and having only a local watch history and subscriptions (=not on a YT or Google account) does starve the algorithm a bit.
I think the best bet at federated video hosting is with something like IPFS or even bittorrent. If every client is also a host, that would greatly reduce the bandwidth needed for any one server.
I like Nebula so far, but most of the videos are also on YouTube. I signed up for a promo through a channel (I can provide some if you like), so I got it for essentially $2.50/month.
I also sub to a few channels on Odyssee, and a couple on Rumble. If you’re good at searching for stuff, PeerTube can also work, but I personally haven’t found anything I really like there.
Only about half of the channels I follow are on YouTube, so if I really needed to ditch it, I could.
Good on you because the goal of getting off of google is definitely good but…these names sound like things that a writer would come up with as fictional social media platforms on a comedy show.
Yeah, the names kind of suck, but so does YouTube. Nebula has a much better name IMO.
Nebula is awesome.
What about Rumble or Odysee?
Of course it’s the lemm.ee user that suggest the fashyist of all streaming sites.
Can we please defederate them now?
Ironically, Odysee doesn’t have enough censorship for me. Like any fledgling community, the main inhabitants of any alternatives are people who aren’t welcomed on mainstream social media. And I don’t mean the modern “every person right of me is a Nazi”. I mean a lot videos have comments calling for killing all Jews, one of the top education videos on the front page is by an occultist about how the wrong witchcraft caused 9/11, another is how the vaccines are going to start killing babies, etc.
Technically, it’s fine, but who wants to post good videos or interact in a community of crazies?
This is actually pretty funny. I am glad I am staying away from Odysee.
In general, I am rather skeptical of “free speech absolutism” and what have you, comes off a little parochial to me.
Yeah it’s almost always a front for batshit right-wing nutjobbery.
Rumble is trash and should be avoided. It’s just right wing jerkoffs
It’s not so bad and you can follow some normal people or channels - there is whole spectrum of channels and the video upload is not bad and you can listen to videos in background but they don’t have any mobile app.
I looked up odysee as well, another right wing dumpster.
Rumble CEO was in the news for something recently. I’m feeling avoid-y of it at any rate because of the Qanuts and “Libertarians” on it.