What do you expect? Video hosting at scale is expensive and most instances aren’t setup or financially equipped to handle videos larger than clips of a few seconds in length (if even that).
You occasionally see direct MP4 links there to catbox or imgur, but those don’t always work universally or are slow or hugged to death. Recently I’ve noticed that a few users here utilize their own homelabs to host larger media uploads, and I like the thought of that. Those seem to just be private “repos” for them, though. I would NOT want to run something like catbox, open to everyone, on my own infrastructure. The thought of what I’d end up with gives me the heebie-jeebies. I don’t know how catbox deals with problematic uploads, but that’s far beyond my comfort zone.
Ok, so what about Invidious? Invidious links are just shittier and slower Youtube links because they’re just proxying, so that’s not really a solution. And I’d rather see a YT link posted than an Invidious link since my Lemmy client and/or browser plugin can rewrite YT links to my preferred Invidious server but can’t do that for the infinite number of random Inv links in the wild. That then forces me to manually massage the URL to go to my preferred server or click through to the slow, overloaded server on the other side of the world with the original link. Yuck to both.
Wait, what was I talking about? lol
Oh, yeah. There’s also the expectation that videos linked here should be universally accessible, so linking to a Netflix documentary or something on Paramount+ isn’t really going to go over well.
There’s just not that many open video platforms. Odysee is one (and I have support for it in Tesseract UI), but it’s kind of sketchy. Vimeo isn’t really an open/general purpose video platform but does have quality content if you can find it (Tess also supports embeds to there). However, Vimeo was recently acquired by a private equity firm and isn’t doing great.
What’s left?
Well, we have Loops. That’s kind of niche in that it’s for short-form videos but it has potential if that’s your thing.
Peertube is also pretty great, but we’re back to the “video hosting at scale is expensive” problem. I recently setup Peertube for my instance and have been trying to share links to that instead of to elsewhere, so I’m at least trying to address what the meme is saying. Lemmy.WTF also has a Peertube, I believe.
Did I miss anything?
Thanks for your write-up. But it’s just a meme ;) I know there are a lot of troubles connected to video hosting. I find YouTube links annoying and almost never click them, but I know that’s preference.
I use NewPipe btw
Heh, perhaps I did overthink it a bit lol.
I’ve just found that there are generally kernels of truth to most of what gets meme’d here, so I tend to subconsciously zero in on that.
Be the change you want to see!
Upload to peertube and link. And/or to fedi like lemmy/piefed directly.
Only PeerTube videos at [email protected]!
Ironically it’s one of the more secure options, the embedded players have a habit of revealing your IP address.
If I could play them in Newpipe, I would greatly appreciate it.
I got tired of YouTube videos on Lemmy. It’s always just copy pasted title of video and link to YouTube. I hated it
On Voyager app I added a blacklist on anything with YouTube in it and it cleared that problem up a lot. No countless YouTube ads from accounts that just post there YouTube videos for more views
