I switched over since I heard it was more privacy friendly than YouTube and have been using the platform for a while without issues, but this cookie banner just popped up. You can opt-out of things like "Access precise geolocation data" but a lot of other information is still shared by third parties and not opt-outable.
It seems "Reject All" is the correct choice here, but I'm not sure if it is the best choice for browser users who have to constantly log back into their accounts.
Are there any alternatives I should consider? PeerTube seems really empty so I'm not sure what I should switch over to.
There are no other big platforms. There was a very extensive discussion about it recently. Making a service like YouTube is extremely expensive and not even very profitable. YouTube exists because Google has the resources to maintain it and it's too important for everyone to shut it down.
You can either use YouTube with a ton of privacy hardening (using a private browser or a VPN) or host videos on your own website.
It seems like I will start using a YouTube frontend. It's really sad that Google doesn't have any competitors in this area.
Wait I thought you wanted to make videos. If not then there are various YouTube frontends with various levels of privacy. I use Piped/LibreTube but it's probably the least convenient one out there. You can just use a VPN tbh.
YouTube was Google's competitor, or rather the other way around. Then Google bought them. I can imagine they'd do that to others if they could.
Content creators have to earn money somehow. But the fediverse seems very against capitalism, so I don't know how it will attract people who want to make a living creating content if everybody tells them it's wrong.
There's nothing stopping creators from doing sponsored videos and/or sharing their liberapay/opencollective/patreon on peertube, they even provide a dedicated place for it.
Most of the youtubers I follow claim YouTube's direct compensation makes up very little of their overall income, especially since YouTube keeps lowering the compensation/demonetizing everything. Most of their income comes from sponsored videos, patreons, and merch sales. Maybe it depends on the youtuber but it seems consistent with those I follow.
If u simply want a better yt frontend then there is tubular wich is a sponsor block fork of newpipe with some extras. Then on desktop u can use any of the various nvidious frontends.
I use tubular cos it works with peertube so ive started to replace the few yters that do publish for it with the peertube version and uts all part of thr same feed.
PeerTube is not great but it's not empty either. You just have to find an instance that federates with lots of other instances. Due to file size and bandwidth required, this is one thing that most people self-host, so it's very fragmented.
I created my own and just set it to auto-follow other instances.
yt-dlp and jellyfin