Technology

The vast majority of people that watch youtube, are most likely not using an ad block and won't be affected by this at all. Just like the vast majority of reddit users use the official app, and the vast majority of people on twitter stayed.

It will take a lot more than this to make something else the next big thing. Just like lemmy is nowhere near as popular as reddit, mastadon is nowhere near as popular as twitter. Yes those of us technical enough or that care enough will use an ad block or similar, but we are in the minority, and always will be.

In YouTube's case, I don't think peertube can beat YouTube.

The vast majority of content is content made by people who do it for a living. The monetization scheme is exactly why YouTube got so big - they make videos and the ad revenue pays them for running ads on those videos.

Even if creators have sponsorships and patreons, there's no way they'd choose a platform that they have to pay to keep running over one that pays them to upload their content. It doesn't make any business sense. - video is exponentially more expensive to store and process than pictures and text.

On top of that, peertube only has discoverability through word of mouth. There's no central recommendations page or anything to even give creators a chance at growing. The only discoverability they'll have is word of mouth and xposting/boosting on mastodon Lemmy and other webisites.

The only way it would become remotely viable is either

1. some kind of advertising scheme (which isn't really in the spirit of fedi, as it gives big advertising companies power over peertube instances that decide to do it)

2. some form of global patreon with a revenue split - essentially the server owner takes the money required to keep it running and then the creators fight over the rest. And most likely, if the instance gets popular, the costs of serving that video could possibly leave next to nothing for the creator - it might be mitigated by inter-instance video caching, but it's still not ideal - especially considering a large amount of traffic would go to mastodon and lemmy instances which won't or can't cache the video.

I like the idea of peertube, but I think it's only really viable for short clips that are uploaded specifically for Lemmy and mastodon use - in other words, users who aren't planning to make money off of the videos.

The thing is, none of the services you listed use YouTube's API. They scrape the data directly from the page. YouTube can't really do much against it. They're apparently currently trying to shut down Invidious, though I'm not sure how they're planning to do that considering Invidious is open-source, meaning anyone can develop and host it.

The apps you mentioned are scraping or pretending to be the official app.

The official API doesn't have public methods to build an alternative third party player .

The only way YouTube can stop those apps (beside blackmailing devs with legal letters) is to shut down both their own website and their own app