Yes. You will quit YouTube. But 99% of people won’t and they make YouTube more revenue via either watching more ads or giving up and subscribing

All we can do is point the way. There are alternatives - we’re using one right now. I’m for giving people choices. People should be empowered with knowledge. Whether they choose the act on that knowledge is up to them. odysee.com peertube.tv nebula.tv curiositystream.com www.hoopladigital.com.au

None of those have all the creators and people don’t want to go between multiple apps. This fight is lost. The way to win it now is legislation or blowing up data centers.

I disagree. The fight isn’t lost - it hasn’t even started yet. People are apathetic and/or ignorant to alternatives. Some of those people can be appealed to - or on sufficient enshittification, motivated into action. Spite is a wonderful reagent. Additionally, the apathy of the masses has no impact on individual response. Things already exist that marry disparate platforms (eg: Grayjay, Kodi plug ins etc). We need not wait. And while I remain sanguine that YT will piss off enough people eventually, I’d sooner code my own app, that joins all my streams - and release it into the wild - than let others dictate what I can and cannot do.

None of those well ever compare to youtube. You think all the videos are going to stay on those platforms forever? You think they well scale to youtube levels of users?

YouTube is too big to fail” is not the flex you think it is. No, I do not expect any one of those platforms to “become YouTube.” That is not the point. The point is reducing dependence on a platform that has spent years making itself worse because it assumes users have nowhere else to go. Fuck that and fuck them. Scale? Things do not need to match YouTube’s total global footprint to be useful. They need to serve actual human beings well enough that migration becomes viable. That is how this starts: not with 2 billion people moving at once, but with chunks of users, creators, and communities deciding they’re sick of eating shit. As for “will the videos stay there forever?” They are not staying on YouTube forever either. Videos get demonetised, geo-blocked, copyright-nuked, hidden by algorithmic sludge, or deleted all the time. Centralisation does not guarantee permanence. It guarantees dependence. I’m not for that. That is why people mirror, self-host, archive, syndicate, and build bridges between platforms. People imagine only one possible future: “Everyone stays on YouTube because YouTube is big.” I am pointing at the much more obvious one: “YouTube keeps enshittifying itself until more and more people route around it.” It does not have to die overnight. It just has to become less necessary. Soon enough, YT will block all the clever back doors we use with uBlock, Smartube, Revanced, Newpipe etc. Then what? Eat shit? Nah. This thread has inspired me to roll up my sleeves and see what I can think thru. I already have a back of napkin idea for a basic MVP that joins all those services I mentioned into 1 front end. I will make it for myself and when its solid enough, throw it up on Codeberg for others to fork and improve.

You can also contribute to PipeLine, it’s a desktop client that aggregates YouTube and a few others. And it’s written in Rust. The issue with YouTube is the network effect though. Even if you can get a lot of users to use one of those multi platform clients, it’s still hard to get the creators to leave. And till they stay, the users stay.

Huh, Pipeline. OK, I’ll look into that. No point in reinventing the wheel. I was poking around Grayjay last night and saw that a lot of extensions I had in mind had already been added, but still no lean back couch mode (at least, without casting from phone). That might work for you and I but isn’t generalizable (eg: kids, elder kin etc). If Pipeline has an android TV fork, it will save me from engineering something out of spite. PS: network effect is real but we / they forget sometimes that other things exist. YouTube is a frivolous luxury…and the quality has been sliding for a long time. It would be the work of a weekend to yt-dlp the vids I’d like to keep and then switch off. Hell, I’d set up PinchFlat to run as a cron job an d/l shit into a folder so I can watch it off line if I have to. There are (very few) actual content creators I regularly watch on YT - the rest is opportunistic crap and brain rot the kids are in to. I can engineer around all of that. The second Smarttube dies (it will; it’s too good at what it does) or the m.youtube pipe dries up, people will leave in droves. My guess - and this is a guess - is that Google is deliberately playing whack-a-mole rather than going for one giant hard lockout all at once, because too much pain too quickly risks pushing people to alternatives. Boiling frog and all that.