We’ve become so…jaded. I remember flying home from Japan, watching movies on my Ipad and dicking around on the net via inflight wifi. Literally flying over the ocean, in a chair, in the sky, with a supercomputer the size of a book, using invisible waves to communicate instantaneously across the globe.

Yawn.

Our calibration for extraordinary is out of whack. That’s the issue, I think.

You already know the answer, I think. It’s because they didn’t land.

Orbiting the moon - super cool. Seeing new stuff from far side - super cool. Emotional investment in something we’ve more or less done before? Well…

Which is actually a damn shame, but brains are funny like that. The entirety of human progress (and hubris) is down to chasing the next dopamine hit - and that probably includes the original moon shot.

Artemis is asking you to feel the same thing twice. Your lizard brain isn’t stupid - it’s just honest and lazy. If novelty is the drug, then this isn’t a new drug. It’s a carefully rebranded rerun with better CGI and a press kit. Plus, you’ve probably had a lot of other proxy hits to the ol’ reward center so that something as big as “humans in a tin can fly around the moon” just registers as “meh - I’ve seen better on For All Mankind”.

And I hate that for us.

Don’t tell em :)

Sorry - don’t have Android Auto so couldn’t tell you. Please report back if you do?

I’ll take that as a thank you :) It’s good, ya?

monochrome.tf

I get where you’re coming from, but the issue isn’t that YouTube makes money, it’s how aggressively they’re doing it simultaneously.

• Charge advertisers? Fair enough.
• Charge viewers a Premium fee to avoid ads? …ok.
• Quietly tighten the screws on ad-blockers while doing both? That’s where it gets cynical.

The platform runs on creator content, yet payout rates, especially for smaller channels, have barely moved while YouTube’s revenue keeps growing. They’re squeezing every side of the equation at once while the people actually making the product worth watching see the least of it.

Ad-blocking isn’t theft. It’s a rational response to a platform that’s decided unskippable ads are acceptable on top of an already profitable model. If the value exchange felt fair, fewer people would bother. Early days of streaming showed that people accept a fair deal. Enshittification has driven many of us back to the seven seas.

Izzat anything like FreeBSD?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/amirhusain/2026/04/01/ai-just-hacked-one-of-the-worlds-most-secure-operating-systems/

The second one, sadly :(

Still, the infra is there. So, it’s one of those “if you build it, they will come” (eventually) things. Maybe.

Why ewww?

Huh, Pipeline. OK, I’ll look into that. No point in reinventing the wheel.

I was poking around Grayjay last night and saw that a lot of extensions I had in mind had already been added, but still no lean back couch mode (at least, without casting from phone).

That might work for you and I but isn’t generalizable (eg: kids, elder kin etc).

If Pipeline has an android TV fork, it will save me from engineering something out of spite.

PS: network effect is real but we / they forget sometimes that other things exist. YouTube is a frivolous luxury…and the quality has been sliding for a long time.

There are (very few) content creators I regularly watch on YT that aren’t elsewhere - the rest is opportunistic crap and brain rot the kids are in to.

I can engineer around all of that. Most people could.

It would be the work of a weekend to yt-dlp the vids I’d like to keep and then switch off. Hell, I’d set up PinchFlat to run as a cron job twice a week an d/l shit into a folder so I can watch it off line if I have to.

Thinking out loud; I’d need a janitor process too: age-based expiry by default, but treat user likes as a retention signal. Thumbs-up could promote a video to a 30-day TTL; hard cap retention at 2 extensions unless explicitly locked, in which case it gets moved to a permanent archive folder.

If I cap quality to 720p, 1TB gets me rolling stock of what…2000 vids? 5000?

I could integrate that directly as an auto updating folder in JF or Nova Player…shit…now I want to do it.

Anyway, the second Smarttube dies (it will; it’s too good at what it does) or the m.youtube pipe dries up, people will leave in droves.

My guess - and this is a guess - is that Google is deliberately playing whack-a-mole rather than going for one giant hard lockout all at once, because too much pain too quickly risks pushing people to the alternatives.

Boiling frog and all that.

Wonder if its anything to do with this

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/etimes/trending/claude-discovers-the-kobayashi-maru-test-what-is-the-benchmark-safety-test-the-ai-chatbot-outsmarted/articleshow/129479347.cms

A vile den of scum and villainy :)

YouTube is too big to fail” is not the flex you think it is.

No, I do not expect any one of those platforms to “become YouTube.” That is not the point. The point is reducing dependence on a platform that has spent years making itself worse because it assumes users have nowhere else to go.

Fuck that and fuck them.

Scale? Things do not need to match YouTube’s total global footprint to be useful.

They need to serve actual human beings well enough that migration becomes viable.

That is how this starts: not with 2 billion people moving at once, but with chunks of users, creators, and communities deciding they’re sick of eating shit.

As for “will the videos stay there forever?”

They are not staying on YouTube forever either. Videos get demonetised, geo-blocked, copyright-nuked, hidden by algorithmic sludge, or deleted all the time.

Centralisation does not guarantee permanence. It guarantees dependence.

I’m not for that.

That is why people mirror, self-host, archive, syndicate, and build bridges between platforms.

People imagine only one possible future: “Everyone stays on YouTube because YouTube is big.”

I am pointing at the much more obvious one:

“YouTube keeps enshittifying itself until more and more people route around it.”

It does not have to die overnight. It just has to become less necessary.

Soon enough, YT will block all the clever back doors we use with uBlock, Smartube, Revanced, Newpipe etc. Then what? Eat shit? Nah.

This thread has inspired me to roll up my sleeves and see what I can think thru. I already have a back of napkin idea for a basic MVP that joins all those services I mentioned into 1 front end. I will make it for myself and when its solid enough, throw it up on Codeberg for others to fork and improve.

I disagree. The fight isn’t lost - it hasn’t even started yet.

People are apathetic and/or ignorant to alternatives. Some of those people can be appealed to - or on sufficient enshittification, motivated into action.

Spite is a wonderful reagent.

Additionally, the apathy of the masses has no impact on individual response.

Things already exist that marry disparate platforms (eg: Grayjay, Kodi plug ins etc).

We need not wait. And while I remain sanguine that YT will piss off enough people eventually, I’d sooner code my own app, that joins all my streams - and release it into the wild - than let others dictate what I can and cannot do.

All we can do is point the way. There are alternatives - we’re using one right now.

I’m for giving people choices. People should be empowered with knowledge.

Whether they choose the act on that knowledge is up to them.

https://odysee.com/

https://peertube.tv/

https://nebula.tv/

https://curiositystream.com/

https://www.hoopladigital.com.au/

Hey YouTube? The endpoint of enshittification is this: I wipe my ass and flush you.

Keep going, YouTube. You’re not so important that we can’t just leave.

Nebula exists. Curiosity Stream exists. PeerTube exists. Odysee exits. The people I value on YT already have footholds on all four. More will arrive soon enough.

So keep at it.

Keep injecting unskippable ads, flooding the feed with AI slop, letting bots post porn, demonetising and hiding quality content, using DMCA like a digital SLAPP against content creators, and using the algorithm to warp reality.

Your value proposition is ubiquity. That’s it. That’s all you have. Without popular buy-in, you’re dead.

We proles? We have something better than loyalty.

We have spite.

So keep pissing people off - because watching you die on a very stupid hill of your own design will be entertaining AF.

For everyone else, see you on !selfhosted@lemmy.world and !privacy@lemmy.world. Come and learn how you can replace all of these pieces of shit.

And in the meantime - yt-dlp should still work to download what you actually want to keep, and SmartTube is black magic incarnate.

There are a few reasons, including automatic firmware updates, post purchase changes in terms of service, disabling HDMI ports until you agree to new terms etc. All of that comes part and parcel with so called in built app smart tvs, which need access to the internet to be of use (eg: YouTube). Once that’s enabled…they work in the background to update self (yes, even when disabled, at least by basic means). Without it, the apps are limited utility - catch 22. See - Roku TVs, some TCLs, Sharps, FireTvs, Samsungs Blauerpunkts etc.

OTOH

There are devices (like older google chrome cast with TV - the ones that look like a oversized nurses watch) that sit behind your TV and can be solely powered by the TV.

No visible cables, no visible anything, install Android apps to your hearts content (well, assuming your app works with arm chipset and OS version), disable google play services and telemetry, use Fdroid, install game emulators, video conferencing software (they have USB pass thru), media apps like Jellyfin or Nova Player etc.

They don’t make those particular Chromecasts any more (newer model is basically same form factor as NVIDIA shield), but there were and probably still are similar “plug into TV and forget it” sticks, like CM4 in HDMI enclosure.

TL;DR: I’m for having stuff perinstalled too…but not if manufacturer can change how it works after point of sale with silent or mandatory firmware push. If that’s the play, I’d rather roll my own. YMMV.

^ I can confirm this. It’s why I refuse to interact on Reddit anymore. Fuck em.

https://lemmy.world/post/41398418/21528414

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