MakerTube Video Platform

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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.

Let me know what you think!

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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

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nice!!! good name too. ill look into it! good idea

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@lookmumnocomputer Oh, lovely! Pop over and give it a try!!11

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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

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Cool, thanks for digging into my stuff! Yeah, yt is pretty broken, at least for small content creators like me. It’s time to look for alternatives.

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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:
    x
    (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?
    y
    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.

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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.

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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)

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You sir are a real king. I’ll gladly look into that project, maybe even contribute.

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FYI live streaming is now also available on MakerTube.

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Youtube channel synchronization and URL import of videos is now enabled on https://makertube.net :rocket:

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So, I had moved my Peertube activities to Makertube, and tried to ping your Mastodon accounts multiple times in the last 6 days to understand the policies better, but to no avail yet (1, 2)

To paraphrase what I said in those threads:

1 week ago, Jyoti Mishra mentioned their video entitled Derby Palestine Solidarity Demo was blacklisted on Makertube:

They’re a SoS writer and have a pretty big reach for Mastodon, and they immediately jumped to Twitteresque outrage without tagging you first, not a fan of that, so I deleted a pair of replies I sent them.

And also, it was not clear to what extent they were an established user of Makertube, with an extant history of participating as a member of the DIY community.

But it’s concerning. The rules didn’t really give us clear expectations those kind of videos wouldn’t be acceptable. Makertube is for a specific community (“makers, musicians, artists and DIY”, I’m all of those), but never sets out clear expectations how much every single video has to be on topic.

I see there’s a Makertube account, for example, that mostly posts gaming videos, but also posts about the costumes they presumably craft. By proportions, the account is mostly off-topic, but the user is nonetheless clearly a member of the DIY/maker community.

Which makes me wonder, was it about the specifics of the politics?

As much as I wish it weren’t the case, my mere participation in diy synthesizers as a very blatantly trans person is inherently political. Even if the lyrics of my music were not as political as they are, to simply sing with my vocal register or show my face, and juxtapose it to the name I chose for myself, is political, in that it pisses off right-wingers and liberals.
The songs I’m writing deal directly with identity, reclaim slurs used against people like me, and take confrontational stances.
I’m pretty damn far left and on the record supporting Palestine liberation, among many other things. Basic punk stuff really, musicians are like that.

Video hosting is a load-bearing pillar of my promo as an artist: hearing that a random video supportive of Palestine can just go poof on Makertube means YouTube is much safer for me. They may show ads and have frivolous copyright bullying and every other problem with corporate platforms, but they don’t delete things for being political. I’d be sad if it’s the end of the Peertube experiment for me.

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