8 ms·

We really need an alternative to YouTube. But > When you publish with Streambus, you create a website, on your own domain name. Reach your audience over RSS on

• LdSGSgvupDV 5y ago
  What we need might be the decentralized search engine.
• hawthornio 5y ago
  Surely some enterprising folks can create video RSS crawlers and put together a video podcast app, right?
• flaque 5y ago
  (maker of this thing) > If I use Streambus, how will I get others to see my content? If I want to find new stuff on Streambus, where do I see others' streams? There's two answers to this. The first is that the discoverability works through all the same channels as podcasts. You can put your feed on podcast listings, rank in the search and discoverability of the many different apps. The second is that subscriptions don't need as large of an audience. If you're doing an ad model, you get a million people to watch your video and make maybe $5k in ads. But you could instead get 500 people to pay you $10/month and you make the same with a far smaller audience. New platforms are a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. Podcasts is our plan to solve it. If you publish a video podcast, you get to piggyback on the already large audience of podcast-listeners. Then subscriptions lower the audience size you actually need for the platform to be viable and drive more video-creators to RSS, which drives more viewers in a virtuous cycle. That's the plan anyway. Hopefully it will work! Youtube ads and their enormous % cuts really suck. If you find this as interesting as we do, or you'd like help launching your own show, send me an email at evan @ streambus . com. Or if you're in the bay area and vaccinated, let's get a coffee or go for a bike ride!
  • hedora 5y ago
    It would be nice if your service automatically handled submitting the RSS feeds to duck duck go. Their video search has started including a wider range of sources; I imagine they’d welcome your content (especially since you’re likely to have a better privacy policy than YouTube).
    • flaque 5y ago
      This is cool, we'll look into this
  • ajuc 5y ago
    Have you heard of twitch? Cause it sound a lot like twitch, and they already exist and have huge userbase.
    • throwaway316943 5y ago
      This seems much more difficult to use than twitch and much fewer features too.
  • throwawaysea 5y ago
    What’s your content policy like? YouTube is famous for aggressively censoring views that don’t align with progressive sentiments, which makes sense since they’re a part of Google, who has the same cultural traits. People have been pressuring Substack to censor/ban content as well, which would probably cause subscribers to abandon them (I know I would). What is your policy?
    • jjeaff 5y ago
      This is the narrative. But I haven't seen much censorship that wasn't well deserved. Perhaps there are a lot of left wing hate speech personalities out there that are not getting taken down, but I have seen little empirical evidence that google really is targeting non-progressive views.
      • 5y ago
• ff7c11 5y ago
  Probably just publish a few videos to Youtube and ask future subscribers to follow your non-Youtube channel instead.
  • pbhjpbhj 5y ago
    I imagine that's against T&Cs? And if it becomes popular then YouTube are going after anyone successful for lost revenue?
    • sofixa 5y ago
      I don't think it is, there are literally tons of YouTubers that advertise alternative platforms such as Nebula/CuriosityStream.
• MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  Which that last part is hilarious because it's exactly what helped propel YouTube to what it is today. IIRC the Janet Jackson Superbowl fiasco and some specific copyrighted song were what helped them out the most.
• Seirdy 5y ago
  > how will I get others to see my content? This service gives you a website, so I'd imagine you'd get an audience the same way you normally should on a typical blog: - Make good content - Judiciously share that content and collect feedback - Let members of the circles you shared with continue the cycle as they re-share, adapt, cite, and respond to your content. - Notice other people hosting websites of their own that mention you; advise them to follow the same steps. - Sit back as the recursion triggers logistical growth. This strategy has worked out quite well for multiple online identities of mine. Truly good content doesn't need a silo or advertising to be recognized.
  • pbhjpbhj 5y ago
    Could of observations: Many people are making good content. If you skip all of what you said and just upload to YouTube chances are you expose your content to X-hundred million people and you can then promote it just like you said.
    • Seirdy 5y ago
      You are correct. My point was that you can still build an audience without being locked into a silo or megacorp the exact same way you would for a normal blog. My point was not that doing so is easier. If your content is good, it should succeed without a megacorp's help.
    • rchaud 5y ago
      Incorrect. Uploading a video from a brand-new account on Youtube doesn't expose it to anyone. When someone searches "[your video topic]", what are the chances that yours come up, assuming it's a common enough topic? The algorithm doesn't surface videos unless you've created a fairly substantial library that tells YT that you intend to post up for the long term.
  • rchaud 5y ago
    This is a good description of Content Strategy. Nothing becomes popular on its own. You have to do the work of getting it in front of people's eyeballs, and improving the work after receiving feedback.
• macinjosh 5y ago
  Linking from social media is the discoverability mode here. And the decentralized nature will make it impossible for them to censor it unless they completely block 3rd party sites like AOL back in the day.
• 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  Why can’t we just add video to existing podcast aggregators? The only stuff I watch on YouTube come out episodically and don’t have shitty clickbait titles. Some of them already have sponsor ads similar to what podcasts do.
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• beebmam 5y ago
  I'd like to point out that one of the main reasons people publish content to YouTube in 2021 is because that content will be monetized (or, they want to be big enough to monetize their content). I see zero competitors that offer anywhere near the revenue that YouTube offers. Until you have another platform that can offer anywhere near this level of revenue for content producers, there will only be YouTube. (Twitch is a different market and doesn't compete with non-streamed YouTube content, which I think we'd both agree on) For that matter, perhaps it's a good opportunity to regulate YouTube's monetization policies, so that other companies can compete for content producers more evenly.
  • flaque 5y ago
    Streambus already offers a higher revenue model than Youtube. A Youtuber with a million subscribers that can convert 1% of their audience to paid subscribers at $5 a month makes $540k a year on Streambus. And they'd do it on their own domain name, with the full ability to leave at any time without losing their subscriptions or audience. They don't need to leave Youtube, or turn off their existing monetization models either. Meanwhile, their audience can use an app they already have on their phone, and don't have to watch ads from a middleman.
    • _drimzy 5y ago
      That's an insane price ($5 a month). HBO subscription costs $14.99 a month. Expecting indi artists to get that level of revenue is insane.
      • zeta0134 5y ago
        I currently pay this price for several of the Patreons I support, I'm not sure what makes this any different. I'd certainly rather throw money at a small handful of good content creators; quality over quantity, and my time is limited anyway.
      • larsiusprime 5y ago
        And yet people do it already just for a bunch of emails on substack. It’s worth it for somebody, that’s all that matters.
• TeeMassive 5y ago
  I don't know, Substack and Locals and the other content creators that are starting their own subscription based websites are doing very well, although they build their audience with YouTube.
• tester847 5y ago
  The main problem with the current alternatives is that you can't even upload a video. For example, that is the problem with this website Streambus. You can't upload a video. It's some kind of "beta signup" manual approval thing. On Youtube, you make an account, you click the "create" button, you select the video file you want, and it uploads. It works. Another example: have you ever tried to upload a video to peertube? Typically you make an account and then you click "create" and it says "uploads are not allowed on this instance" or something like that. As if the person making videos has any idea what that means. This is trying to use a printer and it keeps saying "PC LOAD LETTER", of course some nerd knows what that means but 99.9% of people are never going to care. If you want an audience, allow people to upload videos to the website. This website doesn't solve that problem. Peertube doesn't solve that problem except if you somehow manage to find the https://peervideo.club https://peervideo.club instance, which is apparently the biggest english-speaking instance, but if you go to the "about this instance page", apparently "video quota" is 20GB, and "User registration allowed" has a red X next to it. What the hell does that even mean? Why is it so hard for people to make a website that makes sense to the average person? It is astonishing to me the lack of urgency there is for creating an alternative to youtube. Isn't Peertube maintained by like 4 people? Isn't this a massive global problem? Why is no one taking this seriously? Do people not understand how powerful it is to be able to see videos of things? For example, footage of war crimes or atrocities or things happening around the world? All the proposed solutions look like cutesy little hobby projects. For example, I'm sure they are great people, but honestly I don't care about "Evan" and "Kevin" or their little cartoon portraits, which is the first thing you show me when I try to create an account on Steambus. It doesn't strike me as headed in the direction of being a genuine solution to this global problem. What's going on with youtube is a nightmare and to put it bluntly, lots of people across the world are suffering and dying because of it.
  • st1ck 5y ago
    I didn't even realize you can potentially upload videos on Peertube instance which is not hosted by yourself. I'm totally not surprised this feature is not allowed on most instances.
  • rchaud 5y ago
    Peertube's UX could be better, but it doesn't present itself as a Youtube competitor, does it? It's the cult of decentralization people that bring it up everytime somebody gets kicked off Youtube. But it's not Youtube and never will be. Pretending that it can be defeats the purpose. As does an overly simplified UX that hides the system capacity underpinning the technology (20GB limit). It will feel like a bait and switch when a newly converted user runs up against the limits of decentralized solutions, because they were not educated about that before.
• devetec 5y ago
  How bout Odysee? - People using it (not that many, but there's a sizable community) - Decent recommendation algorithm (okay ) - Decent moderation (part of the whole appeal is "free speech", but it's pretty toned down compared to some others) It's pretty okay on all fronts, but not the best. Still something to check out though!
  • Seirdy 5y ago
    Unfortunately it uses cryptocurrency/blockchain nonsense. A better alternative is PeerTube, which is part of the Fediverse; people can share videos, comment, and post across Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, and others seamlessly. Plus, you can pick (or host!) an instance that agrees with your moderation preferences, and block instances that don't (e.g. alt-right and troll havens). The distributed/federated approach to moderation and hosting scales well with a limited budget.
    • kilodeca 5y ago
      It would be nice if Peertube wasn't developed using Nodejs.
      • skinkestek 5y ago
        Why does it matter (unless you think about contributing to the codebase). I'm a vocal opponent of unnecessary Javascript (TypeScript is fine) but I never care what other people use for their backend.
    • devetec 5y ago
      It's not nonsense, it works. But yeah, PeerTube is a good alternative too!
      • devetec 5y ago
        However, discoverability and ease of use are always factors. With Odysee, you just use it like YouTube, not much is different.
• ldiracdelta 5y ago
  The discoverability can come through community at some level. I have a large blog roll on my self-hosted TTRSS reader that I have curated over the years. I find new blogs when people mention them on a blog I follow or a friend sends me an article.
• throwawaysea 5y ago
  > YouTube is too severe, yes, but you really don't want hate speech and shady stuff on your site, and especially recommended. It’s not clear to me why you’re advocating for censorship. Why do you care if someone else shares content that you’re offended by? Just don’t click or watch it. Vague policies like “hate speech” are always just ways to suppress political opinions, and end up reflecting the biases of the provider or loud vocal activists. There’s almost no point to seeking out an alternative platform if it cannot differentiate itself by upholding basic free speech principles. Moderation should just stop at explicitly illegal content.
  • sofixa 5y ago
    Because when you want to go watch cat videos, having a "HOW THE JEWS ARE CONTROLLING THE WORLD WITH 5G" video next to it is: * buzkilling and revolting * makes you associate the platform with nonsense * scares people of association with the platform.
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• psandersen 5y ago
  Agree with everything you said, especially on the challenge of recommendations and feel this is where those designing the recommendation engines have at least the same moral responsibility as a bio-engineer doing gain of function research on viruses. IMHO the core problem is the recommendation engines are optimizing the wrong metrics and this leads to destabilizing feedback loops. The problem is likely AI complete, but it should be possible to tune recommendations so they don't create self strengthening conspiracy theories. I suspect a reinforcement learning environment that mimics users interacting with a recommender system would be the best way of tuning the larger system behavior so the longer term properties aren't catastrophic for society. OTOH if the platform was setup so "good faith" arguments were somehow incentivized, there might not be any need to optimize for any other metric than engagement.
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