I haven’t personally used YouTube as often as before, since nowadays many creators just try to be clickbaity (and yes, I do use the DeArrow extension). I watch YouTube on the TV with my family, though

Yeah it’s undeniable that YouTube is getting difficult to get rid of. There do exist some alternatives like Vimeo or peertube, but as others say, lack of content is their biggest problem. Using alternative frontend is relying on YouTube after all, so there’s no way we can live without it, unless they do something very horrible, like what Reddit did to us.

lack of content from other competitors

i dunno, especially the music is really vast availability of full albums etc. Youtube + ublock is kinda my go to music. Used to search and store gigabytes, but it’s just not the same, not as easy. If youtube dies (ergo: it succeeds in blocking adblocking and third party such as newpipe), i’ll have a hard time finding alternatives tbh, that are just as user friendly.

I’ve been paying for Nebula account for a while now. It’s got high quality stuff and it’s owned by creators making the content.

They’re also peertube and other fedi variants.

Works great for me, I don’t feel like I need YouTube or I’m missing out on important stuff.

Yes, I can live without youtube I survived the 1980s and 1990s - I’m not saying my life is or was “meaningful” though - that’ll be discernable if the maggots enjoy their dinner whenever the time comes.

I also think there were at least a few generations of humans before that, some of whom may think they led at least slightly meaningful lives.

I don’t think youtube makes anyone’s life more or less “meaningful”, it’s just a way to pass the time - but that’s just my opinion on carbon-shuffling in general. If you accept peoples own objectives instead of mine, then youtube might help them learn stuff - but even then I’d look to measure the content of their consequent actions, much more than learning in abstract. They’ve still got to put their new knowledge together with skills , practice and the real world circumstances to before anyting “meaningful” happens - and that’s due as much to their hard work as much as to their teacher.

But I do prefer to watch a few people’s videos on there as entertainment, only a few of them post on that p2p thing “lbry” or whatever so i dont use that. I will continue to watch youtube videos given the choice, and not having somethign better to do, until those people move their videos to somewhere else.

I’ve recently been finding out that freetube client removes much of the front end unpleasantness.

I quit YouTube along with reddit last summer. I don’t use alternate interfaces. I haven’t found a replacement for most of the niche content I liked to watch there – and yes, that sucks.

I’ve mostly been watching offline content (like DVDs and things I downloaded years ago) when I want video entertainment, and doing other stuff with my free time.

You might think that’d mean more time playing games given my interests, but I’ve found I’m a lot less enthusiastic about playing through games if I can’t watch an LP or two of it afterwards. So, I’m actually playing (and also buying) less of those than I used to too.

Yes, will we do have Odysee and Rumble. But people say they’re Alt-Right (whatever that means). So fuck it, I guess.

I lived 30 years without it, I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard to do without it. It’s fun, but not necessary.

No, not really

Can I? Yes, I grew up before YouTube and got to see both the growth of the public internet and YouTube. So, I know how to get along without it.
Would I want to? Not really. YouTube is like many things which have come about in human history, it’s got it’s good parts and it’s bad parts. But, on the balance, I think the good outweighs the bad. The important bit is finding that balance where you get more good out of it than bad.

One of the great and terrible things about YouTube is the low barrier to entry. It’s very easy for someone with a passion in a niche area to start posting videos. This means that we can get hundreds of hours of videos showing people removing hornet nests. Or, any other random thing I would have never seen in a world of serial TV. You can also get videos showing you how to do almost anything. Granted, those videos can be outright wrong, dangerous or just really bad. But, you may also be able to discover and start a hobby you would have never known about. YouTube has democratized video sharing in a way which didn’t exist before it. And I suspect that, were YouTube to disappear tomorrow, something would pop up in it’s place to replace it. People want easy video sharing. People want to be able to find copious amounts of weird and strange things. Sure, if you dig too far into the darker corners, you are going to find something you find objectionable. But, that’s always a problem with large groups of people, there’s always a few rotten apples which need removing.

So overall, I’m pretty positive on YouTube. Yup, it has problems and those need to be worked on. However, I’m far happier to have a place where video sharing is highly democratized, which has problems with that ease of sharing being abused; than I would be without it. The free flow of information necessarily means that objectionable things will be able to flow as well. That sucks, but it’s much better than the alternative.

I haven’t been to YouTube in over a decade. Granted, many embedded videos have been hosted on YouTube. I see a need for video hosting, and I’m not sure how that could be sustainable without advertising.

Perhaps there could be something like a a torrent, where people volunteer a certain amount of free space, and files are downloaded in chunks from whomever is available at the time? There could be one central repository, with clones, that keeps track, and distributes these chunks in the most efficient way, and moves frequently accessed data to faster hosts.

I only primarily watch two channels on YouTube and while I would miss them I could get the content from articles that they reference anyway so it wouldn’t kill me but I wouldn’t particularly like it either.

Honestly it depends. A lot of my online time in the last ~5 years has strayed away from YouTube. Most of my time is just spent playing musicbee while browsing anidb/ MAL/ MFC, searching for rares / chatting on soulseek, or watching anime / movies. But YouTube does come undeniably handy for those times where you want something you can’t find anywhere else online, like people going solo into hard-to-access countries to record their journeys, or tutorials that explain things in much more detail than text could due to visual demonstration, or more in-depth reviews of products where the video makes it a lot easier to feel the size / scale of the product I’m looking at.

Could I do it? Sure. But it would definitely be hard for a long time, as I track down various blogs / self hosted websites with what I liked to use YouTube for. But honestly that kind of internet might be better. Or if a smaller platform would gain more traction so YouTube wasn’t the only option. I think that would be ideal.

I used to watch A LOT of youtube. Since I started educating myself about google and corpo stuff I lost most interest I had. Now I only watch gameranx and gamers nexus from time to time.

I started watching (and hosting peertube) some time ago and slowly add new channels to my list. Its getting better. Linux and tech stuff kind of works on there imo. Everything else needs more love.

We‘re at a particularly rough time imo since peeps are trying to switch but many hurdles work against them. Federated social media in general is still WIP, funding is a huge issue, accessibility is an issue and a healthy testing workflow (asking users for consent of automated bug reports, making them actually useful, shielding devs from too much user critique, etc.)

As someone with both accessibility needs and experience in customer relations I often see wasted potential because too few peeps with a samdwich skillset (between user and dev) are actually in the foss scene, particularly in small projects.

I really hope foss will endure these growing-pains.