Being more and more fed up with Youtube (ads enabled in not monetized channel, now I should pay for impressions, no real growth on my channel), I decided to start a video platform dedicated to makers, artists, musicians and diy folks.
What came out of it is https://makertube.net , a video platform which is part of the peer-to-peer network Peertube. It is without ads and open to everyone in that realm.
If you have similar feelings or just want to try out platforms besides big corp I invite you to register for an account and share your creations!
I operate the site myself and is dependent on donations so any support is highly appreciated.
You started it just a few days too late for me! I moved to Diode.Zone last week, another similar Peertube instance. I like how Peertube has video import tools, so you don’t have to upload stuff twice if you don’t want to immediately leave Youtube
Hi Jan, I just read this with interest yesterday. YouTube is a definitely buggy (or broken). I subscribed to your YouTube channel a year ago when you published you DIY analog polyphonic synthesizer, since then I can honestly say non of your other videos have ever popped up on my feed or come up on my suggested video lists I therefore spent most of last night catching up on your content.
Its not just your channel I recently noticed I had this problem with Cusi Sounds channel.
With more bugs, censorship and soooooo many adverts I wonder how long YT can stay number one?
John
Not sure what platform you’re on but in the YT web interface:
Subscribing doesn’t mean you get notifications of all new content. You have to take the extra step of selecting All notifications:
(and even then it seems to notify only for long form videos, not shorts, but to me that’s a feature, not a bug. I hate shorts.)
The Home feed can be largely ignored, except for discovery purposes (and it’s a poor tool for that). Do you use the Subscriptions feed?
In my experience I haven’t noticed any failure of new content from my subscribed channels to appear there.
Another solution to keeping up with new content is to use RSS. There’s an RSS feed associated with each YouTube channel. I use Inoreader for RSS, it seems not to have a way to set how often a feed is checked but does it based on how frequently it has seen the feed update in the past, and as a result new content notifications can lag quite a bit. But they do turn up. Generally I find it more effective just to check the YT Subscriptions feed, though.
As for ads, I pretty much see none with uBlock Origin installed. Of course we’ve read how they’re experimenting with preventing watching videos if an ad blocker is installed; if they go ahead with that, YT is dead to me, but for now ad blocking works fine.
YT certainly is bad in a number of respects but failure to present new subscribed content hasn’t been an issue for me.
diode.zone looks interesting. It appears the YouTube import is an option which not all PeerTube instances enable (at least from looking at the About pages). Live streaming likewise.
While I have not yet started using PeerTube, I’d say as with Mastodon, features and policies vary from instance to instance, so comparing those is definitely recommended before signing on. Likewise it’s good to get a sense of what the admin is like, a lot of Mastodon instances are run by people who really shouldn’t be doing it and in too many cases an instance has only one admin/mod and when the instance gets large that becomes a problem — definitely check for similar with PeerTube. Of course in MakerTube’s case the admin is familiar to us.
I assume it’s in part about the Peertube project not wanting to take on the liability to bundle youtube-dl / yt-dlp, most instances seem to enable it.
At the very least it’s a way for me to link to my videos somewhere without ads (no way you’ll ever see any kind of grown-up level money from youtube ads unless you get millions views per vid)
