I have been toying with the idea of various types of videos, including intermediate level painting videos, video game retrospectives, and some personal worldbuilding project videos. I don’t want to feed the YouTube machine, but also don’t want unsustainable expenses. I’ve looked at a few of the various not-YouTube alternatives but it is difficult for me to get a good read on that landscape.
I love how most of the responses you are getting are pure cope with the fact that hosting costs business. But yeah, unpaid labor is the answer guys.
Peertube
Their instances take forever to be approved. It has been over a week for me.Edit: I checked and the instance I requested an account with does mention there is a wait-list for approval. I just created one on makertube.net right now that says it should be approved in about a day which is more reasonable. It seems OP could create one on that instance. The Fediverse has alternatives for almost anything.
Minimum expense to you is YouTube, but your videos will be their product which is fine for some use cases.
There are fediverse video platforms, but their longevity is not guaranteed.
You could host your video content on AWS S3 and have it mirrored by the Wayback archive. There is a cost to hosting on S3, but it’s not massive.
I use S3 for my audio podcasts and import them into YouTube, it’s available on archive.org
You can also upload directly to archive.org; not so great for streaming to a large audience, but good for archiving for public access.
This might be something to think about since I’m contemplating making videos I promote directly to Lemmy and/or to my blog subscribers. I want to have a page, but I am not concerned about growing and audience for the profit.
I think PeerTube is ideal if you don’t want to use YouTube. The first selling point is of course Fediverse integration; the second is that it’s peer to peer, so that hosting costs don’t increase much if many people are watching at the same time.
The hardest part is to find a suitable instance (assuming you won’t self host), but it should be doable.
That’s interesting, I didn’t know that.
Peertube is pretty much it right now. Anything else is more expensive or YouTube.
PeerTube is the obvious one.
Shameless promo time:
An alternative is to make a community on PieFed and set it so only moderators can post. PieFed is Lemmy-compatible but with better support for video posts. Check out https://piefed.social/c/crazyfuckingvideos@lemmy.world as an example of how it can look. Now compare it with https://lemmy.world/c/crazyfuckingvideos. It’s night and day.
PieFed doesn’t host video files so you’d need to put them on S3 or wherever (imgur is fine if the video is small/short enough like in this video https://piefed.social/post/366849) and then create a post with the url to S3 as the post url.
This is the sort of thinking I’m looking for although videos area projected to be 30 minutes to an hour.
Yeah, that’ll get big fast so you’ll need some service that can give you a publicly-accessible URL to your files. There are endless discussions on the internet about cheaper alternatives to S3… Consider Backblaze - https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/pricing or Cloudflare R2 - https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/products/r2/
Someone suggested AWS S3 but that is ridiculously expensive. How much viewership do you expect? Self hosting is not that expensive unless you have big volume. Or you could just seed some torrents. I would stay away from “platforms” since afaict they all have the same disease as youtube, just in its less advanced stages.
I’ve watched some things on odysee, but also heard some pretty problematic things. I don’t recall the details but I think they have had issues with filtering neonazis and something about sketchy ownership. Hopefully someone here will correct me.
That being said, there are some open source and privacy communicators there. Louis Rossman and Naomi Brockwell come to mind.
but I think they have had issues with filtering neonazis
Any platform that proclaims itself to be a censorship free zone is going to attract nazis and other undesirables.
Didn’t they abandon decentralisation a while ago?
I think there was a plan at one point, but yeah. Not one of OPs requirements, but something we should all consider.
The videos are going to go somewhere. YouTube is not ideal, and peertube is basically still closed unless OP is lucky enough to get onto a stable instance.
Vimeo is basically for corporate video hosting now. DailyMotion might be an option although I never really used it.
I’d guess odysee is one of the better alternatives
