The thing I need that I currently use YouTube for is a place where I can store long, large videos (think around 2 hours). I want to be able to link to these videos, and disallow anyone who doesn’t have the link from seeing them. I have a lot of personal videos at this length and at a much shorter length that I want to be able to keep saved both for myself and to be able to share with various friends and acquaintances. YouTube has filled this need and still does, but I’m looking to move off of it. I’ve looked at some alternatives and few of them worked out for me because they don’t support long/large enough videos.
I’d go for PeerTube, personally. LBRY/Odysee would also do the trick, but it tends to have a lot of far-right bullshit on it, as well as being built around crypto.
To be fair, LBRY seems to be one of is not the instance where using a Blockchain actually makes sense. I’d agree with you entirely but the currency was very freely given from just participating so it never felt scummy like the rest of Bitcoin does. Each video is staked with currency but it’s just for the actual intent of the Blockchain, which is proof of existence. Surprisingly it worked pretty well in theory and in practice, as for users it was easy to view worthwhile content (until it got co-opted) and for creators it was reliable since it’s delivered P2P. I was always worried that a creator would get spammed with claim requests by people, but it never seemed to happen which was particularly surprising.
Basically, if I upload a video I’d put down, say 10Lbry to make the stake and hold it for me. Theoretically someone could just boot me out and price it at 1,000Lbry but it just didn’t seem to occur. It may just not have existed long enough for it to become a problem.
None of that really matters though because like you mentioned it got really heavily infested with the wrong crowd. Anti- everything but fa. :( It was really sad to see it go from small content creators moving away from YT to conspiracy vaccine political disinformation disaster.
I’m not on LBRY anymore and haven’t been since the Odyssey rebrand, but with the SEC fine it seems not many will be for much longer anyway lol. I’m no fan of crypto but I think LBRY did have potential at being a decent YT alternative. Maybe it’s naivety but I never got the sense that they were using crypto entirely as a trend but as an actual application. Especially given that it never got over $2.50, I just feel like there’d be more effective ways to scam than to create a video application just to scam?
Is peertube safe? Is there porn on it? I looked around and it seemed ok but I don’t wanna send someone a link to my upload and something dicey comes up next to it
PeerTube is safe, with odd exceptipns. Most instances have completely blocked the porn instances, and NSFW-tagged videos often have the titles and thumbnails blurred.
You can find far dodgier stuff on YouTube.
Have you checked out PeerTube? Or Odyssey (however they spell it)? Or LBRY?
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If you want privacy and control over who sees your stuff, I’d look into storage platforms that support live video playback, rather than video platforms. And if you have a LOT of videos, you’ll likely end up paying a small amount per month.
If you’re sharing videos that don’t have any copyright concerns or issues, then something like Google Drive, Dropbox, or Box should work.
If you want something FOSS, I’d say you’re limited to self-hosting with something like NextCloud, OwnCloud, or SeaFile. A more plug-and-play (but not FOSS) self-hosting option would be a Synology NAS.
A lot of my videos get copyright concerns and get flagged on YouTube because there’s copyrighted music playing in the background, or it’s me or a friend performing a song. We’re not some cover band doing this for money, it’s literally just us doing it for our own pleasure and maybe sending it to a few of our friends. Whether the song is in the public domain or not, it always gets flagged. Part of why I want to move off is because I think this affects whether I can redownload my video or not. I’ve been using YouTube as a place to offload videos for awhile, so I probably won’t be able to redownload a lot of my videos.
I really don’t think I’m in a position to self-host. Thank you anyways!
Honestly, the breaking point is the mild inconvenience I experienced today where I hit the video upload limit. I’ve got 9 videos I shot today that I need to upload, it only let me do 7. I could have gotten around this by filming everything as one or two continuous videos instead of 9 separate ones. I didn’t because I’ve never run into the limit before and was unaware it existed until today. I wanted to have them all up to share with my friends today (they do have a playlist link that the videos go into, but I wanted them all available today), but I have to wait for 24 hours 😒
