- Scuttlebutt

- GNUnet

- Secureshare

- Fereenet

- ZeroNet

- Retroshare

- Diaspora

- Mastadon

- Matrix

- Cabal

Decentralized platforms put more responsibility on the user (key management, account recovery, content hosting, etc) which is unlikely to get mass adoption from mainstream users unless the decentralized platform is as easy to use as twitter.

What would be a good way to make these platforms mainstream? Would you support some sort of a mandatory requirement to federate for the big players? Of course, they would still be able to refuse to talk to instances that violate their own policies.

But isn't that ability exactly what many people consider a violation of free speech on mainstream social media platforms, only applies to accounts rather than instances?

Complaining that you don’t have a ready made audience is pretty weak. You need to hustle for this stuff. People used to xerox and give away zines for an audience. As the Pirate Bay founder said recently[0], it’s embarrassing how easily people are giving up.

It’s almost as if they don’t want to actually put the stuff out there, but rather be held up as martyrs. Pirate Bay and SciHub are still up, and have multiple billion dollar corporations actively gunning for them socially, legally, and extra legally. It can be done.

[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/3an7pn/pirate-bay-founder-th...

It can be done, people are just being lazy instead of creative.

It’s like there’s a whole generation of engineers that don’t realize that you can actually buy a computer instead of just rent someone else’s.

Then you're in luck, YouTube is not the only video website. It's not even the biggest. Some video formats it can't even compete in because competitors are so far and away superior.

I think you really mean that YouTube is a popular site. But it is certainly not the site going by site size. That would be FB. Not the most engaging either with snapchat and tik tok out there. It's certainly better than the other "also rans" like daily motion though.

(Actually, now I think about it, I'm not even sure I would say it is necessarily "better" than DM. Maybe a better phrase would be "seems to be more popular"?)

We could just change our culture to be satisfied with 720p content and use traditional websites that don't use p2p tech. Like, we could all just start using bilibili.com or some other chinese competitors instead of youtube.