Concerns with Youtube, and what YOU would do as a Backup Plan?

Communities Blog
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I want to say first that I am very very very aware that most people would not do what I am doing, nor will they work at the scale I am shooting for. However I am working to, at least in some small way, make a real change in the world. But with that, B have to work with what I have.

I have been working on youtube stuff this year since about april or june. I haven’t posted, but posting without a plan is a bit stupid if you want success. Os, I decided to think about what I could genuinely offer to the world.

While I have been thinking about this, the framework laptop dropped, right to repair and the USB consortium has gotten on apples ass, and oneplus went from a reliable brand to a repair hole that you could break in half. Intel started to show their latest line of ewaste, AMD has further taken the market over, oh and just an extra kick in the shin 3g phones re shutting down.

None of these things are generally related to each other, but everything listed has a common point. What happens after tho? And what if stuff still works?

So I decided that was the thing behind my channel, at least my main one. Since then I have actually found potential business aspects with this, and in turn, have had some luck with other things because of it.

Hell I’m about to go to a manufacturing convention and ask around about stuff.

But while all this is good and showing ppl hey this is how you can use stuff is neat, youtube is youtube, and some psychopath somewhere will probably try to use me. So, what do I do as a backup solution?

I was thinking maybe post shorter versions of my videos on youtube and have other vids on odyssy or have a peertube. I want an ‘uncut’ version, as it mere, but I don’t want a patreon off the bat or anything.

I even thought about torrents.

What would you do in this situation?

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Sounds like a solid plan there.

Offering all your videos via torrent to those interested is an approach I have not yet heard (or thought) off. With a big enough community, you would have a quite nice “distributed backup”.

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Decentralization and distribution is my game

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Hi Aremis, how’s life? :slight_smile:

I’m not sure if I understood correctly… this is supposed to be a backup of files or a resource available as an alternative to youtube.
They are both next to each other but not entirely the same. :wink:

Have a source copy of the material before upload. NAS or something.

Post it on other platforms in parallel. Run your own public https server where all files will be located.

Possibly a torrent, but in fact you have to put your own tracker and count on people to make some seed. Basing this on public / private trackers is unlikely to work. That would be even less stable than youtube. imho

Dave from eevblog does it…

  1. Youtube
  2. Odessy
  3. Your own server (EEVBlog Local Video Viewer)

Maybe talk to @FunnyPossum he has a nice equipment base at his place. Maybe you two could get along somehow about a small backup hosting. :slight_smile:

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In that case, try Floatplane. If you haven’t, of course.

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A few years back I was looking up information on a webcam and came across someone who gave useful information, so I decided to follow him. He mostly does audio gear reviews on that channel, but he also has a podcast. In that podcast he talks a great deal about being a YouTuber and a podcaster, and regularly brings up deplatforming and things you can do to protect yourself from it. I guess it doesn’t really matter if someone makes a mistake, or some internet vigilante decides to target you, being deplatformed can ruin a career in making content.

The thing he says is most important is to get your own website and a mailing list so you can keep in contact with your most avid supporters. You can always host your website from somewhere else should someone cause you trouble with your host, and if you get deplatformed elsewhere you can make contact through your mailing list to let people know that you haven’t fallen off the face of the earth as the saying goes.

Diversification of distribution platforms is another good thing to do. Some popular platforms may keep an eye out on other platforms so if you get in trouble in one place they will also ban you ‘cuz reasons’. or more likely a vigilante finding success at banning you in one place will plaster it everywhere in an attempt to get you banned everywhere because they can’t do anything better with themselves. You could potentially create long form content and then edit it down to fit the format of various channels all over the internet. Perhaps you could live stream for a few hours and then edit that down in to different chunks. Maybe have different segments, so the banter and DIY maker work is together in some places, and separated to target a different audience somewhere else. You could turn some of it into a podcast. You could take a few screen shots, add some blurbs, and turn it into a blog. In all of these places you can point interested persons to your website with links to join your mailing list and find your content in different formats and on different platforms so they can choose how they want to consume it.

I listened to that podcast you did on New Grounds a while back and you seemed very personable there. I like DIY maker type stuff. My best friend is a self proclaimed “Full-on conspiracy nutter” while I am not, so I wouldn’t be interested in the being angry at bad guys stuff as I already hear enough of that. I’d imagine different people would only be interested in one or the other, with a narrower group wanting to consume both. It would be a lot of work to branch out into the multitude of available platforms and deliver different content to different places, but the alternative is to put all of your eggs in one basket and risk everything, or not make content at all.

I’ve been looking in to some of this myself since I broke my leg (again) in May. I can’t keep running around like the insane beast I was a couple of years ago. I do tons of DIY stuff, but I’m absolutely terrible at sharing it. I’m not afraid to show my face on camera, but I don’t like it either. I’d rather not have my appearance be a focus, and fortunately some of my favorite YouTubers and Twitch streamers have shown you don’t have to do that to be reasonably successful. I’ve been working on some things, writing some blog type content, recording a bit of gaming content, and being helpful to people who would gladly promote me if I were to step this up to the next level and go live with everything. Unless my leg makes a miraculous recovery, it’s either this or sit in the garage and work at 10% my previous speed, so I chose to dive in to learning about this, at least until the weather cools down.

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Torrent is not exactly video streaming oriented though. If you want P2P then take a look at IPFS. It’s sort of like torrent but there are nodes and public gateways that allow viewing videos and other content in a web browser.

You viewers can pin your videos in their nodes and that way they can seed it.

Some web browsers support it out of the box. Also there are big players like cloudflare that offer public gateways to the network. You can even host your entire website on the IPFS and point your domain name to resolve that gateway.

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Both. If a youtube wideo goes down, A it wasn’t the whole content piece in the first place, and B its just the most common option people use.

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I don’t want to do anything complicated. If someone wants to see the longform they can grab the torrent, or go to any other platform listed.

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I think I am going to go over to ltt and do this same post

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I lost you here. What do you mean?
If you’re talking about monetizations deals, channel networks and things like that you’re always free to say no and nobody can force you to sign anything. I don’t think any Youtube personality has ever been kidnapped to sign a contract (yet).

If you’re talking about Youtube getting shut down and losing your following, or being censored by Youtube I get it. I’d suggest you the same sites that TimHolus suggested. Or there’s was a fellow L1T member that was putting together a clips sharing software to self host. I’m sure you can find his work under the devember tag.

In all of this, what really matters, is the audience you’re trying to reach. If it’s a small niche any Youtube alternative will do because us tech heads can navigate different platforms. Other people less interested in the topic might not have the will to try new things and won’t follow.

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Fake takedown strikes etc

Yup. I am just trying to brace for potential rockfalls is all.

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If you are concerned about this type of action and copyrights, I recommend watching a few videos about it from Thunderf00t. He shows how he fights with such things and it looks like it’s not that scary now.

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^^^^ This. Heard of LTT and Devin Nash talk about this frequently

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What about using archive.org?
You can upload (& download) the raw video files to it.

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Well, there was this that happened recently: Specific-Scar5618 comments on A Chinese Virtual YouTuber was human trafficked (as well as a bunch of articles that was spurred by this event, e.g. https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2022/05/30/vtuber-recounts-being-kidnapped-and-sold-to-traffickers)

Not the sort of contract you were talking about, but yeah.

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I’d rather loosely distribute torrents

I have a sort of stupid idea, but I am unsure about implementing it. I am not well versed in setting up web servers, and I am awful at IP routing and shit, I got confused setting up icecast years ago, not confident about shit.

But I had a thought, if I wanted, I could just use a software package and set everything up my own way. Set up a BBS and make it an extra pain in the ass for companies to just immediately flag and destroy for profit alone. Yes they could easily investigate but they have to actually bother, and I’m pretty sure bots can’t just rip into shit.

I’ll have to keep the machine on a VPN, but other than that… I think Imma do that, and then I even have a forum, lol.

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That’s a bit of a stretch. Those are cases of human trafficking due to the situation in China: I think that those two cases are examples of how the governament there wants to repress any free expression of each human being. So a V-tuber that can express herself on Youtube is a potential issue. They try to make them disappear and do it trying to make some money off of disgusting human beings that think slavery is okay.

Not going political on this, just what I think happened. I don’t want to derail the topic.

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After seeing what happend to GN on the Intel ARC GPU review I think that it’s not a remote possibility. But I think that’s usually due to ddedicated bad people that want to take you down.

That makes total sense. But I don’t think it’s worth committing all your energy from the start to find a safety net before having posted or prepared any video. I’d be happy to follow your work!

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Actually thats the exact kind of thing I am tackling so you’re completely on topic. Also its not political, you’re talking about human culture in general.

Uh, with what I will be attempting to do, long term, no I needs to be this serious this early just to save my ass later.

As I am doing this as 1/3 of my career plan, I have been studying shit and watchin other people close. But everyone gets hit, so I’m thinking ok so something needs to be different.