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.
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.
I follow over 1000 creators on YouTube, many of them niche creators who don’t often upload content. There are a very small percentage who are on another platform.
The main app that I use (Tubular) also supports PeerTube, but PeerTube has a big issue when it comes to both content discovery and delivery. YouTube hosts not only the “full” quality video, but they also host many different versions of the same video at varying resolutions/bitrates. This is unfeasable for basically anyone but a big tech company. YouTube also has a very effective (albeit very flawed) recommendation algorithm that smaller platforms struggle to compete against.
I personally find the recommendation algorithm to be quite useless, since it seems to consistently recommend popular “engaging” videos, whereas my watch history is usually a bit more niche. Maybe it’s better for some people, but I’ve found myself getting better recs from places like Reddit/lemmy, YT comments, etc than the recommendation algorithm. It was so useless that I ended up turning off my viewing history, and I seem to now have better recommendations than before.
So at least for me, the platform itself isn’t particularly valuable to me, I care more about the creators themselves. I use Grayjay on my phone, which is nice because if a creator posts on multiple platforms, I can downrank YT so I’ll pull from those alternative platforms instead of YT. If I watch on YT itself, it’s usually because I’m looking for something specific, like music or information about a topic. The value of YT seems to largely be the sheer amount of content, not the actual features of the platform, so smaller platforms should be trying to get YT creators to also post on their platform. That way it’s easier to transition from YT to their platform, which is how I decided to sign up for Nebula (a handful of my favorite creators were on it, and I found a few new ones through their platform).
The recommendation algorithm (also using a third party app) recommends me tons of niche content. It’s how I found most of the creators that I follow.
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.