Compared to text and images and audio, the economics of hosting video seem to overwhelmingly favor massive centralized services. Youtube had an early mover advantage and "won" and Google owns youtube. And they also own Chrome, and control a substantial % of the standards processes governing the web. Also, they are a fucking advertising company.
I've seen some people approach this with "Pay for Youtube Premium then! Show them that there is an eager customer base for non-ad-supported!" but my rather large problem with that is that youtube's "North Star" of maximizing watch time led them to build their business around white male grievance and other such socially corrosive shit, and when you can support individual video creators more directly (eg Patreon, which of course has developed its own problems), rewarding the platform for essentially being the monopolist nobody can afford to walk away from is totally out of the question for me. Hearing from video creator friends about what it's like dealing with a spurious DMCA takedown from some copyright troll makes it very clear to me that this company behaves as if they have no competition. And they're largely correct to assume that.
If I were making this post on Mastodon a bunch of people would show up to recommend PeerTube and while it's neat and I'm glad people built that, it really really does not seem like it or any other decentralized/distributed solution could ever achieve even a fraction of youtube's scale (and many of its users probably argue that that has never been its goal). Like I said, the economics of hosting video are incredibly capital-intensive, and I don't know if that is something we can clever our way past.
This is the part where I'd say "but wait, there's hope! [promising new development] might offer us a way out of this mess" - alas, as the title says, I have no idea where we go from here. I just know that video, more for ill than for good maybe, has attained a frighteningly central social importance and lots of bad things will happen downstream if one of the least responsible companies on earth continues to have a monopoly on it.
For mobile - Android only, I'm pretty sure - I've been using NewPipe for a good year or two now. It's an alternative to the Android Youtube app that doesn't show you Donald Trump ads1 (or any ads to be clear), doesn't require a bunch of dodgy permissions, and just generally doesn't contribute to google's gross empire other than keeping youtube semi-usable for a while longer. And hey, it supports PeerTube and a few other services so if those take off you'll already have an easy way to use them.
More recently, only in the past month, I've started using FreeTube on desktop. It's a standalone program built on Electron that provides very similar functionality to visiting YT in a web browser. With the LibRedirect Firefox addon I've set my browser to open YT links in FreeTube.
Thus you can make both of these your defaults for handling YT links, effectively going around a huge majority of google's tracking. But they still let you keep a browsing history, if you want, and a list of subscriptions. The main things I've given up by using them are liking and commenting on videos, and honestly I don't want to do those anyway because they add value to YT's massive video hoard.
Both of these are open source. There are definitely parts of either's UX that are sandpapery. But getting blasted with google's psychic pollution is worse, for me. So yeah that's what I'm using at the moment, to maybe Reduce Harm.
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guess what my last straw with the official android app was, haha
