Yep, efforts to replace Youtube (and the rest of BigTech) should be spend on building better search and cataloging of videos across all the Web instead of focusing all effort on one specific hosting technology that nobody uses. I'd be much more inclined to use a service or software that improves on Youtube by including other sources of videos, then one that tries to replace Youtube with their own set of (drastically inferior) videos.
Miro[1] tried that a long while ago, but I haven't really seen much else going that direction since then.
Okay but what service exists that doesn't exhibit the same problems as youtube, ie the necessity of hyper-growth to satisfy investors, ads everywhere, total surveillance of its users ? Because a search engine that indexes only services like that won't really solve the problem _if_ the problem is to respect users' and community's freedom and privacy.
It's doesn't really matter what the service is doing when you aren't using the service in the first place. Right now I can use `yt-dlp`, download videos from Youtube and watch them in a video player of my choice. I never have to interact with the Youtube platform directly for this, it just acts as dumb server that hosts `.mp4` files. Same is true for a lot of other services.
The missing part is a good way to discover those videos in the first place. Subscriptions and recommendations are not something your average Web browser or search engine provides, yet are really important for discovering content. That's the kind of features I'd like to see implemented in a service independent manner. RSS went that direction, but not far enough, as it generally depend on the service itself to provide that information, instead generating it automatically from information found via webscraping.
You don't care about most users, and you don't care about creators, that's alright, but please don't behave as if they didn't matter. You are not representative of useful population if you use yt-dlp to bypass issues. It's nice that you can do it, but it's a shitty situation that you have to do it to evade pervasive surveillance and the madness capitalism brings us into.
YouTube doesn't want you to see their videos outside YouTube. They let you do it at the moment because it's more profitable this way, but you'll always be fighting against them. Why not propel a platform you don't have to fight against ? One that serves your needs because it is a digital commons ? yt-dlp and any other means of accessing content can be built with the platform instead of against.
You behave as if you were totally independent from platforms, but it's wrong: as a user you depend on them. You depend on developers maintaining it and making it better, on admins running it, on business people allowing you to freeride. It doesn't make sense to live in a society where we are adversaries by default, it's such a waste of time and energy.
> Why not propel a platform you don't have to fight against?
That does not exist and fundamentally can't exist. A platform is by definition a thing I have no control over. Somebody else runs the thing and they can do with it as they please. And even if a platform is nice to use today, it sooner or later will get enshittified.
The only actual solution is to move as much data to the client and let them decide how to handle it. Especially when it comes to metadata, that shouldn't be that difficult. There is no reason why something like channel subscription can't be handled locally.
Miro[1] tried that a long while ago, but I haven't really seen much else going that direction since then.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miro_(video_software)