So, I still haven't gone back to #Youtube since the #boycott started, and honestly, I don't miss Youtube, I just miss some of the creators I watched on there. As substitutes, my main go-tos have been #Preservetube and #PeerTube.

Preservetube in theory is great, but it's extremely limited with no channel search, no ability to archive playlists, often does not archive the entire channel if the channel has too many videos, and it frequently fails when archiving.

Peertube I've talked about on Plural Café, but the dearth of content is just... really not great. I found some larger instances with more videos, and even then, I still can't find much to watch that I actually care about. Even on instances with other 1,000 other instances federated, there's still at most a few dozen videos uploaded daily. Then there are times where some videos just... won't load when I actually do find something interesting, or how PeerTube will randomly convert a P2P video to HTTP, which often breaks it by either ruining the audio, disabling playback, or just removing the audio entirely. Fun.

To put it in perspective for the people who go, "You just have to look harder!" I recently saw a video by cgfocus on Preservetube where he went over dozens of Blender-specific Youtube channels, said he found 400+ of them and he said there's absolutely more out there that he missed. If you compare that to PeerTube, there's only at most, 12 #Blender channels I can think of, and that's in general, not just active channels. That says a lot.

And I'm not trying to be nothing but a complainer since I have suggested before that we should promote PeerTube to Youtubers as a means of having a backup and avoiding Youtube's insane censorship.

I also briefly tried #Glomble, but that also is extremely limited in search capabilities and it even more limited in content breadth than PeerTube.

My point being: I don't miss Youtube itself and ditching it wasn't as difficult as I thought it was going to be, but the real challenge is trying to fill the void. It puts into perspective how much of a monopoly Youtube really has over the video space, and honestly, I wish that monopoly would crumble already. I hope the age verification crap is enough to convince people well enough to ditch Youtube, or at least boycott hard enough to get Youtube to bend its knee.