The company Swan got kicked off Youtube today and that got me thinking: what is the best alternative to Youtube when it comes to video content?
Discussion
Rumble
Rumble advertises for free speech at least, time will tell if this is just another centralized vulnerable platform though. Also, feel like the video quality is pretty shite there.
Vimeo 🤷
i wish. i was hoping a nostr replacement would come to fruition
Well, there are ongoing discussions on PRs re: file storage on nostr with NIP-96 and NIP-95. We’ll see if that gets adopted.
Could also distribute torrents as nostr notes and build a website where you can discover and consume these torrents as well. Don’t think the UX would be close to YT or any other centralized platform though.
Rumble
BitcoinTV
Rumble.
There’s also Rokfin and Odysee, but Rumble is the most populous platform and the scale down drastically from there.
Of course there is no decentralization of video platforms, and all can be seized, compromised, co-opted, etc.
If you don't want anyone to take your shit and shut you down, just stream to your own Cloudflare Stream endpoint. Hosting video in Cloudflare is also cheap. Sure, they could shut down or seize it, but ultimately the real problem here isn't where the video is hosted, but how the video is located by potential viewers.
It seems likely that nostr could be built into something that aggregates video sources that are just URI pointers, just like it does now with images. A metadata schema would need to be implemented, but some of those already exist, like Dublin Core.
Ultimately the value of Youtube or Rumble is not as a host, but as a metadata viewer.