Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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How do we replace YouTube? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi, my post is focusing specifically on YouTube since I observed the following categories have less intrusive solutions or privacy focused solutions, even if they are paid:

Operating Systems (Linux, for example)
Instant Messaging (Element, for example)
Community Messaging (Revolt, for example)
E-Mail (Proton, for example)
Office (libreoffice, for example)
Password Managers (Bitwarden, for example)

However, how do we distribute videos and watch them without data collection? I am NOT asking how do I use a privacy-focused front-end for YouTube, by the way, I am aware they exist.

I am wondering how we obtain a FOSS solution to something super critical such as YouTube. It is critical since it contains a lot of educational content (I'd wager more than any other platform), and arguably the most informative platform, despite having to filter through a lot of trash. During COVID, we even saw lecturers from universities upload their content on YouTube and telling students to watch those lectures. (I have first-hand experience with this at a respectable university).

I refuse to accept that there is nothing we can do about it.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Torrents solved this problem (big data distribution) over 20 years ago now, and is still a sizeable chunk of all internet media traffic.

All that's needed is for people to actually create torrents for their content, and a user friendly way for people to post and view magnet links.

I'm trying to integrate them into lemmy in various ways: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4204

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I appreciate your work. I'm thinking it should be easy to reach out to non tech content creators to get permission to migrate their stuff, and for end users like me to request that without a technical barrier. For example: I was watching a self defense channel throughout the week until the youpocalypse happened. What if there is a simple button for me to request his data to be integrated into your system? I'm pretty sure he is more focused on exposure and reach rather than ad revenue, so he might consent. You interpret this to be consent to ytdl it, store it, spread it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Sure, a lot of people do even have entire youtube playlists and channels shared on torrents without their consent even, downloaded with youtube-dl. Getting existing content onto torrents should be pretty easy.

We do need to get these content creators to create and seed their own torrents also tho, rather than have everyone else do it on their behalf, then post their own torrent links so others can help seed.

The only clean way I see this happening is some kind of a tool that simplifies this, or a readme that can help with the process, possibly linked to lemmy's post creation as a video/audio upload button, and on any other platform that supports magnet links.

If anyone knows of something like that already, it'd be really helpful.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm wondering what your thoughts on IPFS are.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I've never used it personally, so I don't know.

Torrents link to static data, each with their own explicit seeders, so that always seemed more safe than these universal file-system solutions where you don't know what might be changing, or what you're hosting.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

I only quickly looked into it. I'm also looking for a solution for my work. It seems very privacy focused and works a bit like tor, so like you say, you don't really know what's going through your system. But it also has a trust system that trusts friends of friends and so on, so perhaps that isn't a problem.