I can’t wait for this to be announced as a threat to national security after creating mild competition for YouTube.

Maybe things change in the future, but right now I see VHS tapes at local thrift shops as being bigger competition to houtube than this.

Ye ‘ol Fail Army or whatever the fuck they call that stream of content now

Probably has a few same videos that still get shown everywhere?

Y’know, free market

Absolutely already a national security concern, but also technically already banned by the bill which banned TikTok.

Question is how hard they need to stroke Trump for it to be unenforceable.

What is the national security concern?

Psychological operations and warfare, mainly disinformation campaigns akin to TikTok used to sway political sentiment in favor of authoritarians such as Trump.

Equally bad: extreme data gathering, also akin to tiktok.

I guess. TikTok did raise awareness of the Gaza genocide and, by extension, create instability in the US. It also distanced the public from the US government’s closest ally, Israel.

theverge.com/…/gaza-images-starvation-tiktok-ban

It directly promoted GOP leading up to 2024 and even Trump by name:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/06/tiktok-pro-republican-algorithm-2024-election

Then they did the exact same thing by promoting the AFD in Germany:

https://globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/digital-threats/tiktok-and-x-recommend-pro-afd-content-to-non-partisan-users-ahead-of-the-german-elections/

This has NOT distanced the USA from Israel; they have never been closer. The GOP are pushing bills that will combine Israel military with the USA’s.

Brother, according to that logic, YouTube is a national security risk. I was refering to things the American govt labels as a national security risk to protect corporate interests.

YouTube is run by a company within the USA.

That does not compare to a company run by a hostile dictatorship’s military.

Nor has it had nearly the same impact: there was a 10 point shift among youth voters in favor of conservatives after TikTok, a complete reversal of a century old trend.

Your argument is that TikTok creates a national security risk by directing users to right or alt-right leaning views.

You are ignoring YT’s documented past of doing this exact thing because “China bad”.

technologyreview.com/…/a-study-of-youtube-comment…

YouTube also funneled German users to that same alt-right party.

nytimes.com/…/youtube-far-right-extremism.html

As an analogy:

If an American kills an American it’s a crime

If a Chinese op kills an American it’s warfare

Perhaps stick to killing yourselves instead

America is already doing more harm to itself than any external nation is, so you don’t have to worry if you want it’s people to suffer.

Ah yes, you say we should do multiple times more harm to people who commit self harm, is that your moral philosophy?

I see you are no longer interested in a rational discussion. Get blocked.

Why would I ever seem enthused to a discussion with a fascist?

Considering their company leadership backs Republicans which are harmful to US national security, yes

I trust this as much as I trust big American tech platforms.

Sure, but I’d rather have my info safely offshore in China than to give it right to big brother. I also bet far far fewer ads and more fun commercials because you have no idea what they are about. They are currently destoyjng the natural order in printer ink. I support that wholeheartedly. My Epson inks are 90 and the knockoffs are 20 and work just as well. It’s always temporarily beneficial when player 2 enters the market.

*Edit it does not like vpns. That’s a no for me.

Weird, the few times I've used it I had no problem with my VPN.

I’ll try again when I’m back on my own laptop.

Ah yes, instead of US big brother you give it to offshore Big Brother.

When you’re here, you’re family!

But China isn’t going to sell my data to Uncle Sam to help deport my family (who are legal citizens). So there’s that.

Why would you think that?

Who is more of a direct threat to US citizens ? At the moment I would say there’s way more chance ICE will come after you for posting or speaking out or protesting or hell just being you. I can’t remember the last time I worried about China selling me something because that’s what they will use the data for.

I’d say China is the greatest threat to U.S. sovereignty but that’s a discussion no one here seems to want to have. No one seems to think TikTok is an issue apparently.

Edit: it’s been an issue since musical.ly, just so we’re clear

Are you really sure? Oh wait, you're from .ml you probably actually believe it.

Not absolutely sure… but I’ll take “Probably wouldn’t” over “Definitely already does.”

Big Boss

safely offshore in china

Lmao

the same as Tik Tok?

I’ve avoided that platform so yes if I’m understanding you correctly.

Considering how much damage Google et al do, I legitimately wonder whether China could even do worse, and I’m not even a tankie.

Not terribly interested in this video platform as I also don’t use YouTube. I really hope Google gets broken up and I don’t like them harvesting my data and selling it to the US Government any more than I like companies like Bytedance selling my data to the Chinese Government. I am in the US and think we should have established data privacy and data protection laws long before things got to the point they have gotten too.

How do you do that? I would love to be able to avoid YouTube. I could go without the entertainment part of it, sure. But no more tutorials would already be a big pain. And then there are the news sites with embedded videos. Even the state uses it.

YouTube has single handedly almost nullified my degoogling project

If I have a project, I often prefer to read up on how to accomplish the task, such as going to blog posts or getting to the source documentation. If that is not possible, I use yewtu.be (it can be slow to load just FYI). There is also PeerTube, but it doesn’t have as much content. Lastly, there is FreeTube, which is built on YouTubes API and gives them revenue in some way, but doesn’t have ads. It doesn’t allow Google to learn your behavior or target you for ads. I also use a VPN (with DNS protection enabled) when loading anything. If you’re degoogling (as I and many have done), one other item I hear people say they have difficulty dropping is Google Maps. I know you didn’t ask about it, but just to add, other options exist, such as Open Street Maps (OSM), Organic Maps, CoMaps, Magic Earth (I think may be built on Google Maps API, but not entirely sure), and Kagi (I’m fairly sure it uses Apple Maps and Google Maps API). Also, I have just started looking into FlockHopper, but I’m not sure what it is built on, I think OSM and MapBox (not sure if I have that right), but I’m not sure. Also MapQuest still exists.

Youtube is about the last Alphabet service I knowingly use (except when someone shares a google doc).
I thought you meant no Youtube at all. I use Freetube and Newpipe almost exclusively.
Peertube too, when the instance I use to follow channels works (the two previous ones closed). It’s a pain to subscribe to stuff. Maybe with RSS feeds…

edit: I’ve been subscribed to Kagi for a while too, maybe going two years. Love it. Wish it was cheaper

I really liked Qwant maps, a good use of OSM, but the idiots closed it…

I meant to say, not directly use their services for video and definitely aim to give them less identifiable information. Like Invidious’s Yewtu.be (yewtu.be) scrapes YouTube and is not reliant on their API (but does give IP addresses to YouTube, hence the use of a VPN), but FreeTube uses YouTube’s API by default I think, but can use Invidious’s scrapping API (docs.freetubeapp.io/usage/privacy/). PeerTube is not reliant on YouTube at all and can be a good alternative even though it may have fewer videos (since you use that, then you’ve basically degoogled in that case). Maybe once a month or less I will watch a video from any of those services, so I don’t ever subscribe to any channels. I prefer to read documentation rather over watching videos when possible. To me that is in the spirit of degoogling. Same as I don’t avoid every website that has some script of Google under the hood. But I do block their trackers by activating “No Google” (github.com/nickspaargaren/no-google) from time to time if it doesn’t break a website (some website I need to access for work might not load if I have that on) and DuckDuckGo onionized on Tor mostly. I also need to use AlpaFold for work, but fortunately we have an instance that doesn’t go to Google’s servers. They created the protein folding technology and the instance and scripts had to be downloaded at some point from their servers. Degoogling is a fairly complex today. I have been reading more and more about digital cooperativism (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_cooperative) and even though something may be open source, as expected, companies can still profit off of it. From the sounds of it, when it comes to cooperativism, no one person controls everything or profits. You may know more about this any how. All that said, giving people more digital privacy and protection is not a technological issue, but more of social issue. Hopefully people get more informed and interested in their digital rights in the future and society moves away from the likes of Google and Meta and Amazon and Apple (and OpenAI) at large.

Kagi switched Apple maps for Mapbox

At this point it should be claimed by the state and turned into a public utility…

I don’t know why but “Google et al” made me laugh

China makes palantir look like freedom respecting software.

As far as I’m aware, google isn’t enacting a genocide… as far as I’m aware

Maybe not technically “enacting” but certainly supporting/furthering: www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/…/ar-AA1LX8Lm

Sure, but Google’s just doing it because it’s profitable, not because they’re hell-bent on annihilating an ethnicity /s

Sure, if you remove the profit motive they wouldn’t provide resources.

Certainly not morally defensible… but also not outright evil either. Just absent any ethical compass.

IBM supplied the computing machines for the Holocaust, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google is giving cloud computing to ICE.

That means your awareness needs to be expanded my friend en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Nimbus

This is a good (but non-exhaustive) list to look through en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_companies_involved_in_…

Or my definition of enacting.

okay. your awareness of how genocides work also need to be expanded.

Don’t fall for the proximity bias, china is decades ahead on surveillance and stepping on personal rights. They act as a hive. They care more for what they believe that are they nationals and may look harmless to us non-chinese… but i do fear them.

In any case, I dont see them pressing a button to launch swarms of AI commanded drones to kill every person on a partially AI generated list that they probably already have in their hands, right now… i leave that dystopia to israel alone.

Flock is selling drones in the US.

and stepping on personal rights.

The racial make-up of the prison population suggests that the lead is not that big.

The US has the largest prison population on the planet but China is the one stepping on people’s rights?

I get that the CCP sucks ass but come on. As far as I’m concerned YouTube needs a serious competitor, it’s not like I’m moving to Shenzhen or something. YouTube is a complete and utter shithole.

You don’t know about their social credit system?

Yes they could, but it’s really a question of their incentives. They could easily use it to manipulate elections, etc. The biggest danger is probably to East Asia where China is trying to claim most of the ocean, using it to copy what US Republicans has been doing with Facebook and Twitter to support attacks on politicians opposing them. See also how Facebook ignored its role in the Myanmar genocide

Political censorship is definitely worse so I‘m not going to bother.

This is one thing I noticed using Chinese social media. There are almost zero discussions of local politics. Foreign politics is fine though

There is no politics in Ba Sing Se.

You get nuked from orbit if you attempt to talk about local politics is why. Like hard.

Depending on the politic

Because YouTube doesn’t engage in anything like that ofc.

Are you seriously insinuating that the level of censorship on YouTube is anywhere close to Chinese platforms? A quick look on both websites would give you that answer very quickly.

YouTube has rapidly censoring more and more by way of demonetization and language policing.

And had to revert much of that after a ton of complaints

Seems like a natural next step. XHS works well as a social media app across countries and has opened up China to average US citizens and vice versa. I’ve had a lot of good genuine conversations with people, they’ve managed to cultivate a good culture on the app.

As YouTube continues to enshittify, maybe there’s an opportunity for another app with an already large user base to take its crown.

Didn’t XHS shut down their international users? Their website only seems to allow Chinese phone numbers now

At the time of posting I was chatting with a woman from Guangdong about her recommendations for Samsung phones to buy my partner, so, I don’t think so.

Actually I dug deeper and they separated RedNote (international)/XHS (domestic) into different websites which my search engine didn’t want to show for whatever reason

BRB, gonna upload something about Tianaamen Square.

They will just remove it

Thatsthejoke.info

site not found

Great firewall strikes again

Same old shit, different day. Can’t you find anything original? Post something negative about ICE on YouTube or something negative about Israel.

I got perma banned from reddit because of my comment that all the ICE traitors will never get their sign on bonus - which they haven’t - and after this is all over, they will have to go back to sucking immigrant cock behind the dollar store.

So don’t talk to me about propaganda and censorship. Western tech companies are just as bad if not worse. Especially Twitter or X or Y or whatever that shit is called, doesn’t know the first thing about free speech. Not that surprising if the owner does a Hitler salute.

Edit: one last thing. How much better is the American TikTok after it was taken over by another right wing company? Yeah, I thought so.

The scale is different. There are tons of videos on social media right now that are thinly veiled instructions on how to destroy flock cameras. Something like that would NOT fly in china.

Believe it or not, two separate things can both be bad.

So should an article about a Chinese app not automatically get the ‘Tiananmen square’ response. Or any article about China for that matter. Like a Pavlov reaction.

The what response?

Should an article about a Chinese app not get a comment about Chinese censorship?

No. It’s highly relevant.

As a gay Uyghur I wonder how this platform is going to work for me?

You will be invited with open arms, mr Cumfart. And then shot, of course. Can’t have any of those pesky gay ass Uyghurs turning our kids gay and Uyghur, now can we?

Ironically I searched for something unrelated and got bombarded with a bunch of BL dramas.

What’s a BL drama?

Bacon lettuce

Boy love drama. The restrictions on homosexual content is overblown, though not entirely fabricated. XHS has plenty of LGBTQ content, for example, domestic and foreign. Not as much as Western social media, to be fair, but also I don’t see people bullying LGBTQ people or creators on XHS.

There’s more restrictions on overt sexuality, straight or gay. Make no mistake, Chinese culture is more conservative in some ways than the West, but it’s not as restrictive as the news makes it out to be.

“boys’ love” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boys'_love

Basically gay dramas, supposedly targeted at women.

If you are gay enough and familiar with Russian / Siberian culture you might get a job at miHoYo.

How many unskippable ads before I can watch a 3-minute video?

If it’s less than 2, I’m sold!

I just started a video and it didn’t play an ad right away.

Its 1, but the video is 2 hours 39 minutes long. It’s just “HEAD ON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD!” on repeat.

I’m pet Sue there are no ads. At least in China, not sure about the international version.

hello pet Sue there are no ads

Maybe if the American tech ceo’s have some competition they will stop acting like they own everything.

Hey, I welcome any serious competition. Youtube has devolved into a much more censored platform than what we used to make fun of the Chinese for. “Unalive”, “grape”, and several topics that are demonetized on sight.

I found clip.place , a peertube instance really good alternative to YouTube. I am sure there are others.

Thing is peertube is still pretty much new and empty. I didn’t find much content that I would be interested in or even an interesting community. Although I see its potential as a social platform I don’t think it will ever replace YouTube (at least for me) as it wouldn’t give creators the financial incentive to use it.

YouTube barely gives a financial incentive for most creators, that’s why most of them take sponsorship deals and/or use Patreon.

YouTube payout for creators is %55 of ad revenue generated per video.

PeerTube payout for creators is the ability to add a donation button on your page.

You ain’t got to lie Craig.

Tbh as someone who wouldn’t be in it for the money PeerTube seems awesome. And if you were in it for the money, imagine being like the first big channel on there? You’d probably really do well.

Do you understand what “barely” means? I didn’t say no financial incentive, I said barely. And Youtube taking almost half of your ad revenue (which itself is pocket change unless you’re a channel focused on investing, law, software development or real estate or you’re a channel regularly making over 100k videos) is barely a financial incentive. People complain about Valve taking 30% from game sales and Youtube takes 45%.

But you are correct in the sense that you can still make decent money with Youtube ads. But to make worthwhile money you need to make videos in the niches advertisers like, target an audience advertisers like (almost exclusively English speaking audience) and make videos that make at least over 1k views (which instantly puts you in the top 10% of content creators). Or be in the top 1% of content creators and average over 100k views per video. If you’re making something like gaming videos for 10k viewers Youtube pays you around $5 per video. At that point for the same video and viewers you’re probably going to make more money from the Peertube donation button than Youtube ad revenue.

So no, I’m not lying.

I wouldn’t say 8 years is new

The financial incentive is a big part of what ruined YouTube in the first place, so the lack of it is a W in my book. If a creator really is that good, I’ll support them directly.

These things take time. Depends on instances. There are audience for YouTube. I am happy to bet on Peertube.

but those terms come from TikTok in the first place

Compared to YouTube, it just means creators can’t pronounce a different set of words.

I already have to use subtitles on youtube because of the amount of indian content that’s not even in hindi so doubting that the difference is huge.

I mean in the sense creators use “unalive” and other euphemisms to not get demonetized. For the China market, any reference to a certain honey loving cartoon bear or references to a tranquil celestial place are out

After the US nonsense over TikTok these guys should have skipped the US in their international release and waited for Trump to complain about the US being excluded.

Youtube doesn’t want my business.

They keep blocking me.

What was YouTube expecting??? Answer: MONEY without having to WORK for it.

I think I get your point, but if your business isn’t contributing money to youtube, you’re not really business. You’re not contributing anything of value to Google if you don’t bring money to the tabel, and why would they give half a shit about you then? I’m not saying it’s right, but that’s capitalism for you.

I bring consumer data.

Data YouTube can SELL to Madison Avenue.

You know, what they have been doing until they decided to do this.

They monetize your data regardless

Remember when TikTok was just porn in western children frontpages? That’s my expectation, along with all the right wing loonies ironically setting up camp there and not realizing they’re being used, by the Chinese, which btw, they will then love.

as opposed to right wing western oligarchs? runnung x, youtube, etc

an English version of its website

No link to the website.

Semafor writes that the company is also hiring staff in Los Angeles, London, Mexico City, São Paulo, Istanbul and Tokyo, and plans to create an English-language version of its website to make it easier for video creators to upload videos.

It’s not ready yet.

I found https://www.bilibili.tv/en, but I am not 100% that this is the site that is refererenced by the the article.

Coming to a smear campaign near you!

I’d rather not use these services than switch to a Chinese state service. I don’t need to learn the unique ways this is equally as bad as YouTube. ID verification does not have to overt or direct, to exist, given enough data to correlate.

Then again the CCP has absolutely no jurisdiction over you.

Depends on if you’re Chinese abroad because they do try to exert pressure and have what are almost police in other countries

Bet its not allowed inside china, just like TikTok.

it was china only until now

so seems unlikely

alternativeto.net/…/china-s-popular-youtube-alter…

Bilibili is also expanding its international presence with hiring in markets including Japan, the United States, and Europe. A new X account aimed at global creators has said that Bilibili is “going global” and that the US and Chinese versions will offer the same content

As soon as I saw this news, I signed up there in order to see how it is like. I'm yet to find non-Chinese-language content, as I don't really know Chinese. I mean, I do know from memory some very specific Chinese ideographs (given my special interests) such as maotouying (猫头鹰 lit. "Cat-headed eagle", which is one of the words for "owl", aside from xiao 鴞) which was, unsurprisingly, my first search in Bilibili. (I also know words and ideographs such as hong 红 red, ni hao 你好 greetings, ren 人 person/people, among others that wouldn't suffice for me to, say, buy 500g of bread in a bakery during some trip to China, lol)

The platform quite of reminds me of xiaohongshu (Red note), including the same emoji pack.

Then I tried to search for words with Latin alphabet (e.g. "Ereshkigal" and "Pomba-gira") and the results were nothing directly related to my search query, with Bilibili returning me a list of recommended videos based on my watch history (owl videos) instead.

One thing I liked is the lack of notifications (TikTok used to push notifications a lot) and the (momentary) lack of advertisements, maybe because there aren't companies from my geographic region (Brazil) buying ad placement there yet.

As a Brazilian, I'm sincerely wishing to see more Chinese and nonwestern alternatives to things, including but not limited to video platforms. I've been boycotting YouTube for two years and counting, for example, and it would be interesting to see a Chinese alternative to it other than the westernized TikTok (which is nowhere near to Chinese-only Douyin and its likely better/educational content). And, of course, I'm also rooting for PeerTube to gain traction, because it's native to Fediverse.

!technology@lemmy.world

Thanks for explaining your experience, I’ll check it out once in a while to see what they have to offer.

I wonder if they are going to use advanced AI translations including voices. That would really open up their content to the west. Although much of it is probably pretty weird as far as I’ve seen (via website / GrayJay) - but so is youtube if you wander off the save paths lol.

Sincerely? I hope not, or at least it must be an opt-in thing rather than something forcefully imbued into the platform.

Languages that I don't know may pose a language barrier to me, but at the same time there's something magic in getting to recognize (and even trying to spell/write) certain words and symbols once I put myself into trying to figure out what's written and how it's written.

This is how I managed to learn (albeit imperfectly and in a fragmented manner) the ideographs I mentioned earlier, among several other languages, including the so-called "dead languages" such as Sumerian and Akkadian (e.g. whenever I see "𒆤", I know it's "lil" meaning wind/spirit)... And this is how I learned, to give broader examples, what a "bumat" (البومة) is in Arabic and which letters are involved in its writing, or what's the difference between a "búho" and a "mochuelo" and a "lechuza" in Spanish, or what a "fukurou" (フクロウ) is in Japanese, or what a "chouette" is in French, or what an "oehoe" is in Dutch (especially how one was able to enfrighten two Dutch villages years ago, the cute yet fierce "terror-oehoe"), or "Eule" in German, or more symbolic words such as "lila" (לילה) "night" in Hebrew or "Лилит" as the Russian transliteration for Hebrew "לילית"... I was able to learn, or at least memorize, a ton of things across languages... Without AI.

Any kind of automatic translation, especially when AI-powered and fused into the UI, would hardly let me learn a language, because it'd bring the whole thing chewed up and translated, with no means for me to break the sentence down to its constituent words and letters/symbols and how much the surrounding context changes their meanings... not to mention how it ends up wiring our brains to expect the machine to do the reading for us, then we become dependent on machines to do what's essentially part of being a living being (humans and whatnot).

Also, translation often involves nuance, tone, sarcasm, emotions. AIs can be able to do "sentiment analysis" and connect words together in order to derive an assessment, but it'll be devoid of the attempted connection from whoever wrote the text being translated.

That said, Bilibili does have an automatic translation for titles and comments, turned on by default. I deliberately turned it off, because I want to see the Chinese ideographs, even though I'm not able to truly understand what I'm reading there. I expect to learn them from context and repetition, from trial and error... And when I get to see one of the ideographs standing out before my vision as something I know, getting to see them and yelling "hey, I know these two symbols, these are baxi 巴西 and together they mean Brazil"... Oh, there's a whole fun to it, a fun that's virtually non-existent when a clanker is doing all the heavy lifting.

Don't get me wrong, I do use translators, I'm not against translators, but I personally prefer using them manually, under my own pace and command while also being able to isolate certain words from surrounding sentences, this way getting to expand my vocabulary a little bit through a research of my own (e.g. looking it up on Wiktionary or other dictionaries out there), because I want to be able to learn something, anything, from it.

!technology@lemmy.world

Sounds like you’re pretty talented with languages! But people learn differently. I would like to learn Chinese though. But I would like to learn a lot of things haha.

Right. Because what people are just clamoring for is MORE draconian over sight on their public video platform.🙄

The thing is i dont give a shit if china tracks my web usage. What are they gonna do? Arrest me if I ever go there? But here in the US the US govt literally will come to your house and arrest you, that’s the actual threat to me.

Billig billig

Gut und günstig

If they actually have age divided portions of their platform, where adults are free to make adult content such as history, reviews of hentai, and so forth, I am all for it. Youtube sucks because it doesn’t treat the audience or creators as adults, and often changes the rules at the drop of a hat.

Personally, I am guessing it will fall to Peertube and other fediverse platforms to offer genuine freedom for people, but I wouldn’t complain if Bili breaks the camel’s back known as Youtube.

It’ll just be one more source to add to my GrayJay client at the end of the day lol

How well does GrayJay work? Freetube used to work amazing but it’s a tug of war now with google which frequently bans my IP. And it’s yt only.

I found this article actually explaining how to bypass this for yt-dlp. But I wonder how far we’ll come to have this in a multi source app.

Hasn’t had any issues that weren’t rectified within a day for me. It has sorta yt-dlp functionality integrated with any source (so exporting your playlist to a local backup is a breeze).

Since the community can add their own sources, it’s relatively easy to find one if the one you want isn’t on the official support list. You also can use the client on any non-apple device so that’s cool. (Even has local sync which is sick)

As for the IP stuff, it usually only stops playback if YT flags you as a bot (since the client doesn’t send the telemetry data back to google that would normally validate your “humanity”), but something as simple as a VPN location/address change is enough to keep on watching (and the original address will work again within an hour).

I thought China has extremely strict porn laws and laws censoring gory content, I’d expect it to be even worse in that regard. PeerTube and Odysee seem the most promising right now

Porn is illegal in China in any form. That’s why their social media is 90% softcore porn of girls “testing workout equipment”. I’m not even kidding, until you train your algo to ignore this almost all content is softcore porn bait and not even social media. Even e-commerce is just porn now lol

Oh or the NPC streams? Those are weird, yo.

From what I’ve seen, you can avoid the gore issues by desaturating the gory image or part of the video. The porn thing is true, women will use image stickers, mosaics or other obscuring methods to cover up even small amounts of cleavage, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t thirst trap content, it just looks a little different.

That just doesn’t have a big impact on the content I actually want to see, so I don’t really mind it.

chat do yall think this is good or bad

Depends on if they require sign in or not.

Last I checked using a browser they didn’t, could be changing though.

If so, Proton aliases FTW!

IDK if it accepts Proton aliases or not but it rejected my custom domain

I knew if I scrolled enough I’d find a good take

at least it won’t require passport for signing up anymore lol

alternativeto.net/…/china-s-popular-youtube-alter…

The popular Chinese alternative to YouTube, Bilibili, with around 376 million monthly active users, has confirmed plans to expand more aggressively outside China. The company has relaunched its international app for Android and iOS, and removed the previous requirement for overseas users to provide identity documents such as a passport.

People in this thread having a normal one, predictably. Like even if (or especially if) you genuinely believe that China is the evil monster you were raised to believe, wouldn’t you be at least a little bit curious to get a window into their online culture? Don’t you want an opportunity for more interaction between Chinese and US/Western netizens?

On the one hand, Chinese companies get an unfair advantage domestically. On the other, I would love to see Google sweat.

What is an unfair advantage?

Being blocked is one I think

I just dislike the traditional framing of things like “unfair” in contexts like this. It’s always been used by dominant powers to destroy any domestic capacity. In this example, if China had never put up any barriers to foreign tech, they would have none of their own at all by now.

Hell ignore that, Google helps to write us trade policies. Do people really think there’s an open free market system in America or Europe for that matter? Look at Donald Trump’s inauguration. The Peasants were kept out but all the tech bro CEOs were there. Y’all are dreaming if you think that things are fair right now. Especially if you don’t think it’s a two-way street.

Literally every company is given a domestic advantage in their home country? Subsidies and visibility etc in home turf is not a new concept China has invented for their products.

How many foreign films are allowed into China per year?

As an American I’ve been using billibilli for a long long time as I consume a lot of Chinese media.

Billibilli is dog shit, the company is awful, the platform is cancer, and the entire thing makes YouTube and Google look like fucking saints.

Like holy fuck. I do not give one fucking flying piece of shit about china bad america good or any of that nonsense.

The fucking Chinese bullshit that people have to put up with on billibilli is outright nonsense. I just want to watch my fucking silly videos and dramas.

And all that said YouTube is ALSO dog shit with out any saving graces. It’s all fucking awful.

So… what? You’re against this becoming more accessible outside of China?

I’m not the commenter you replied to but I read their view more along these lines. That no large online video provider gives a good experience and while this is more competition for YouTube it’s kind of like comparing two piles of shit - both stink.

Which idk never used it but yeah China has its own brand of suck compared with the West. Still, I agree it’d be good to have more cultural exchange - that’s the sort of thing that over time leads to better relations between nation states and decreases the likelihood of war.

You know the older I get, the lesson of “there are no good guys” really keeps getting hammered home. This is just a reminder of that.

These reactions just seem a little overwrought to me. I’m sure everyone commenting watches plenty of YouTube, but the mere mention of a Chinese platform brings dire warnings and energetic condemnations. Like maybe it does suck, but most people here wouldn’t really know! That’s my point-- that it’s crazy to have such strong opinions about something that you have no experience with.

I get it. There’s a lot of propaganda out there (that goes both ways) about China.

For better or worse they’re going to lead the charge into the 2100s, this is the dawn of the new Chinese century and the USA is busy handing them the reins as we implode our country.

I think China is a little friendlier overall in their foreign relations and while freedom of expression is important I would not say their society as a whole is better or worse than all the rest of the world. It feels like sometimes, from what I’ve heard and seen, China is “more” free in certain aspects compared to the USA (and definitely less free in others)

What I believe is in freedom of the internet. As in everyone should be able to access it and no one should be able to police what is on it. Complete free flow of information. Reddit should exist in the state that it does and lemmy should be there to counter balance it and no nation state should be able to say “no, we only allow one of these”. This doesn’t undermine any existing legal frameworks mind you. For example: distribution of underage pornography is still a crime almost everywhere and those who operate such sites are fair game for prosecution.

I get this may be too radical of an idea for some, but I truly believe education is the key to information literacy, not censorship.

This just means rich individuals decide what people see instead of states. It doesn’t result in education.

I think its the same problem with the press on TV and print form. Rich individuals can buy up all press outlets and control the narrative. Its hard (and restrictive) to broadcast on TV and print. On the internet, at least the freedom to publish and access information has a low barrier to entry. A rich individual may buy one lemmy instance, can they buy them all? Can they buy its successor? The lower barrier and less restrictive nature of the internet (or how it should be) is too fast moving for them to compete imo. All the states need to do is educate people on how to consume media correctly.

A rich individual may buy one lemmy instance, can they buy them all?

Yes, easily. Additionally, they can control the search engines which lead there or not, the commonly used platforms for code sharing so that development is more difficult, and so forth. They have an incredible advantage through economy of scale. The barrier to entry for putting any information on the internet may not be very high, but making it findable and accessible has a very high barrier, and relies on corporate-controlled platforms.

I think the better question is will they be able to buy them all. Buying implies the other party is willing to sell.

Its true that this information will be harder to access if not indexed properly, but word of mouth is a good backup for that. I didn’t find lemmy from google, someone (non corporate entity) posted a link to it somewhere. Now, that ‘somewhere’ may be corporate controlled and ban certain links but I’d argue that will just split the internet into two (a corporate side and “free” side) with little cooperation between them and I don’t think anyone will be able to keep people from either side - as long as the internet remains neutral.

I think its just too hard to completely control information unless you are a nation state (and even then).

No they don’t. If I don’t want to see what Reddit wants me to see, I just switch to Lemmy instead. Reddit cannot ban Lemmy. But if the state had censorship powers, they could ban Lemmy.

This isn’t a new idea though, it was the “hacker” ethos of the 90s. Most nerds believed in that. But it was wrong because we do need to limit hate speech. Because racist speech is racist recruitment. And we do need to limit the influence of plutocrats and corporations on information.

I also believe neoliberalism is a failed and genocidal ideology that should similarly be banned like advocating for fascism.

Like the other commenter pointed out the other problem is the massive power imbalance. They have billions and they crush us. It doesn’t matter if something is right or wrong if billions are spend to hire the smartest sociopaths to craft an ad or PR campaign to emotionally manipulate the masses.

And the truth matters. We have a fundamental human right to reality. Constantly amplifying bullshit for revenue makes the actual flow of important information and ideas impossible.

OK?

You can already get a VPN for ingoing traffic to China and “experience” it.

I’m missing your point. I started interacting with Chinese people on XHS.

It’s not for us to decide that. CCP is literally holding Chinese hostage and even if this platform comes to the west the Chinese will never be allowed to mingle with us.

I think chinese internet is very interesting and wish China would be part of global internet one day but until autocrats change their mind it’s not happening.

Literally none of what you said is true. Chinese people regularly interact with people of other countries on the global internet. its Literally impossible not to run into Chinese netizens on any major social media site.

What is not true? The great firewall of China doesnt exist? Or that few rebels with vpns that btw are constantly hunted down and ccp even inspects packets now with AI tools I identify vpn looking traffic?

Can’t believe people justify this. You’re either a bot or a useful idiot.

You can literally just make an account on Xiaohongshu and chat with normal people in China.

I routinely swap recipes, talk about video games, new tech, swap cleaning tips, chat about restaurant recommendations and fashion. There’s a big cultural difference, sure, but Chinese people are, on the whole, incredibly friendly and hospitable and they’re curious about breaking down the myths they’ve heard about America and happy to break down the myths we’ve heard about China. We think they have a social credit system and they think a dishwasher can afford a huge “villa”. Though now that it’s opened up a bit they talk about a poverty “kill line” where if you fall below a certain income you are pretty much doomed to die. Which is exaggerated, but has some basis in reality, like most of these myths.

The one thing I think is a huge barrier is that they can’t understand why we drink cold water, even in the winter. So many conversations I’ve had have been about drinking cold water and asking “don’t you get dampness???” Honey, I’ve either never had dampess or I’ve been damp my whole life so I don’t know.

Either way, they’re just, like, people. And thanks to the magic of the internet, you can just talk to those people.

Missing my point entirely that Chinese people literally can’t do that.

Also it’s very hard to get into Chinese internet from the west too with this one exception almost everything is either geo blocked or requires Chinese id/phone number.

Make sure to like, comment, and subscribe so I can get to 1,000 social credit!

Congratulations, you paid off your credit card debt. As a result your credit score just dropped, good luck on getting that mortgage approved.

fortunately, posting that Donald Trump is a pedophile rapist online doesn’t tank your credit score.

try speaking out about China online and see what happens.

personally, I’ve been harassed enough to know I should never visit China.

Europe exists with neither of these problems. You can get a credit card if you want but loads of people don’t. From a low effort search it actually looks like most people in almost all European countries don’t have one. Few exceptions like Norway but even there you have a very significant minority without one.

UK here and I bought a house without ever having a credit card or worrying or knowing what a credit rating is.

Credit Score it does vary tbh in whether they care about it

Like just to rent a place I had to have good credit score here in Scotland, but when I lived in England they didn’t care as long as I paid them

Interesting, not rented in Scotland but in England I just had to sign on some toilet paper and hand over a deposit in cash.

Not saying it doesn’t exist. But its easy to go through live without ever giving a shit about it. Been working for me so far even when deeply below poverty wages. Now I am between UK minimum and median wage so shits easy.

yeah, no. credit score is very much a thing in Europe. good for you, though.

Not saying it doesn’t exist. But its easy to go through live without ever giving a shit about it. Been working for me so far even when deeply below poverty wages. Now I am between UK minimum and median wage so shits easy.

in finland there’s no such thing

Isn’t the dystopian social credit system in China just an exaggerated propaganda? I thought its a similar system to the US credit scores.

You got the direction of your argument wrong (credit scores are a big problem and proto surveillance state stuff) but no, the social credit system is indeed worse both in terms of what it is used to punish and the means of punishment.

Not arguing, asked a question if my knowledge of a topic was right.

And I was merely giving an answer.

It’s identical basically

So generally, in the PRC, the central government will put out a request or state a problem, and then provinces will attempt to implement a solution independently. If the central government likes the out come of one of the trialed system they might make it national policy.

That’s basically what social credit was. The central government gave a vague cryptic request for potential solutions about low trust in modern society, and a bunch of different provinces implemented various ideas, some via contract to private companies. Some provinces didn’t trial anything, some trialed systems that were basically just credit scores, some trialed a system of ranking “how good of a citizen you are” and gave gift cards and stuff to people who scored high.

Ultimately, the central government choose not to adopt any of them and the various trials were spun down. So, social credit was a lot of things, and thus multiple different ideas of what it was are correct, although a lot of reports on it mixed and matched different parts form different trials to make it sound as bad as possible, and some will just talk about one particularly benign system to make it seem like others are being hysterical. Ether way it wasn’t ever a nation wide thing and is largely defunct now.

Thanks, thats really interesting.

I’m so glad I live in the west where we don’t have social credit

Anyhow, how’s your credit score looking? Pretty good? I’ve heard posting things that are anti-capitalist can reduce it, so be careful what you post!

credit score

I’ve heard posting things that are anti-capitalist can reduce it, so be careful what you post!

It really isn’t helpful when you just make shit up. Undermines any point you were trying to make.

Have you proof?

Of shit you made up? The one making the claim (you) has the burden of proof.

It really isn’t helpful when you just make shit up.

That’s literally the point that they’re making.

Welp

There goes my bootleg international wrestling show full shows I used to watch there because copyrights will catch them atp

[X] doubt

I used to watch all the newest air crash investigation videos on bilibili. It could be difficult to find, due to being in Chinese but once I found one, I could find them all.

It’s China they very much don’t give a flying fuck about international copyright law, at least from what I’ve seen. Maybe I’m wrong about that.

Haha fair enough

I used to watch hella New Japan events on there

yeah…ok…but no thanks…the idea is to use youtube less, not youtube++ more…but I guess a hosting alternative is good. Just not for anything even remotely critical of China.

It’s gotta follow the local laws of where it’s hosted, so I doubt they’ll be allowed to have as strong censorship laws when they make a USA and EU version tbh

Well, they’ll be just as strong in the USA, but focuses on different topics

is it illegal to not host content critical of China in EU? otherwise local laws are irrelevant.

Corporate Censorship is generally illegal here, there’s still Censorship, but only via the gov

Source for that please? First time hearing that.

Edit: and web search didn’t give me any relevant results

Private companies are allowed to decline to host at their will. USA nor EU mandate that a platform must host content they don’t want to.

In practice, it’s possible that China companies operating outside of China won’t implement the same restrictions that they do within China. Whatever the Chinese government thinks the importance of maintaining censorship within the borders, it seems probable that the government and companies will be more pragmatic about realities in other nations.

They’ve got people in other countries entirely afraid to even utter the word Taiwan. I wouldn’t count on their pragmatism in this case.

and how many videos critical of China do you watch daily?

On purpose? Not much.

The bigger concern would be when a criticism of China would be an important facet of a topic that would be covered, and omitting that would detract from the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the content.

Imagine if video hosting platforms couldn’t call out any of the stuff Trump does as wrong or incompetent. So so many topics would have to be ignored entirely to avoid offending the administration. Currently China criticism is a little less critical in the moment by comparison, but things shift over time.

eg I used to watch those blokes, serpentza and laowhy86, for a non-china-sponsored-influencer view of China.

Well more competition is good and we really need more alternative platforms. Can they make a browser as an alternative to chrome… Or push Firefox?

Honestly not sure why more people don’t use Firefox. It’s brilliant, especially with uBlock and Sponsorblock added.

I think being the only browser with a credible stance on ad blockers will help them in the long run.

There might not be a long run if google can dictate web development enough in the short term to essentially kill off all competition.

I use it and I install it on every family and work PC I can but the memory of the bloated Firefox that made so many originally switch to chrome is still there. I want apple to base their browser on Firefox to maybe get some traction back

2 reasons imo.

1. Chrome inertia. Everyone who’s locked into it from the days it was legitimately faster.
2. Every time it gets mentioned, its supporters like to “no true Scotsman” the original project and suggest their preferred fork instead.

No true Scotsman is one of the biggest reasons open source anything struggles to catch on. Normal users never have any fucking idea what to do and everyone always just screeches forks of forks of forks and then the normal users just get paralyzed. Lol

Both the bane and blessing of anything decentralized lol.

lots of people don’t like the direction the company is heading

What direction is that? I haven’t been keeping up, I just use the browser.

pro-AI for starters, lots of people aren’t happy with that. (this is related to the AI, but started long before then: ) their insistence on focusing on anything else but the actual browser, Firefox also occasionally changes (privacy related) settings after upgrade (Edit: as reported by users online) or when they installed extensions remotely to people’s browsers as part of some kind of promo (I believe it was Mr. Robot?).

There might be more, but this is what I can think of from the top of my head.

Edit: typos

Fair point but are you seriously saying you prefer the direction Google is heading?

whataboutism? two competing companies can be bad

Yeah but if you need to use a browser are you seriously going to support Google over Mozilla?

no, but we weren’t talking about that. the topic was “why more people don’t use Firefox” I’m replying to you in Librewolf. I still don’t have to like Firefox, nor recommend it to people at this point.

Forks are also fine. But the phrasing often can come across in a way that supports chrome

I don’t really care. :)

Edit: There are other options than just Chrome and Firefox even without the forks. Most people just don’t wanna use them.

Sure and some of those are coo. But if you can’t even get people moving to firefox, good luck with the more obscure ones.

Not trying to make anyone change their web browser, so we all good.

Sure if you have more choices.

But you don’t. You have two choices.

Chrome/chrome based or firefox/Firefox based.

Do you want a bullet to the arm or the leg. You get one choice and your option can’t included neither.

Pick one. That’s how this works.

Yes but if you only have two choices, a kick in the nuts (google) or a flick of your ear (firefox) everytime you open your browser, it just makes sense to use the one that causes less pain. I think more people should use Linux too, Microslop have become way too orwellian and obtrusive for my liking.

The question was why more people don’t use Firefox. I answered.

Most people on their phones use the default browser, either Chrome or whatever Chromium-based the manufacturer includes. But otherwise it’s the browser included with the Facebook app, as some are literally locked into the Facebook-and-Youtube walled garden.

Im gonna be honest, im glad a lot of people don’t use ad blockers, or they would come down a lot harder on ad blocking. As it is google is trying their hardest to push their authentication nonsense everywhere to lock us all in to whatever software THEY decide we are authorised to use

The timing couldn’t be better, considering that YouTube doubled the amount of views required to become a YouTube partner for new Creators. If you can get monetized on BiliBili aas well amd earn money with it like you can with YouTube, new Creators might indeed choose BiliBili over YT now.

The only people who care about these limits are spammers. The minimum gets you like 30$ a month - no one is making real content for 30$.

Cool, I’m gonna upload Tienanmen massacre documentary as a first thing.

Try following it with something scathing about Trump.

Something something the one joke (about China)

They ran over children with tanks and it’s a crime to talk about it there.

Yes I will make fun of the Chinese government for not acknowledging their atrocities. Yes I also refuse to shut up about the US government putting Japanese-Americans in camps during WW2, or shooting college kids at Kent state, or putting Mexican kids in cages under the past 3 presidents. Don’t let governments hide the boot they want on our necks

They very explicitly didn’t run over anyone with tanks. No one but Adrian Zenz has ever claimed that and you will not find a source that is not Adrian Zenz suggesting that they did.

What about this guy?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fang_Zheng

I’m pretty sure multiple eyewitness accounts corroborate the use of armored vehicles, tanks or APCs, running people over?

I think a police truck lost control and ran over a dozen or so protestors somewhere in Beijing, killing many of them. Of course, this has since been exaggerated to an absurd degree.

I’ve asked multiple Chinese colleagues who have lived in China for most of their lives and they all openly discussed it with me.

This Reddit tier hoax needs to die.

Were they in China when they did that?

We already have Odysee, Rumble & other platforms. They don’t even count for a tiny dent in the YouTube universe.

They don’t have a Chinese megacorp behind them though.

Competition is a good thing. YouTube needs competition, so they fear of losing users and creators and do something useful. Where other platforms exists as a niche alternative and don’t even have the power to rival YouTube, this one Bilibili at least has a chance.

Good. Seriously - enough with YouTube’s vs censorship and making predators like Jake Paul and mr beast into millionaires

Edit: Ugh… checked on bilibili and noticed he also has a channel there. The guy is like a parasite to humanity

Thank you for pointing out that shitnugget, its enough for me to know that i never will use bilis platform out of sheer principle

I mean if another competitor rises up, he’ll just create an account there too. You’re stuck with peertube pretty much

Bilibili isn’t going to be any better about censorship. It just has a slightly different list of forbidden topics.

Niconico should do the same

Now you can choose between a platform owned by the far-right and a platform owned by the far-left.

EDIT: Lemmy being Lemmy. Gonna say it again. FUUUUUCK COMMUNISM. FUCK IT ALL THE WAY UP ITS ASS. FUCK ALL COMMUNISTS. DEMOCRACY FOR THE FUCKING WIN. Move to China and see how much they actually love you. I’ll read your story in an article like this: nbcnews.com/…/american-family-moved-russia-seekin…

Every time one of you “Mamdani is right-wing” communist cunts downvotes me and presumably has their blood pressure spike to dangerous levels I reward myself with a cookie.

What far-left? It’s an authoritarian-run capitalist state with better social safety nets than the US, doesn’t make it far-left.

better social safety nets

Given the horrifying dashcam footage, that doesn’t seem to keep some of their citizens on cars or trucks from plowing into other cars or people.

The social credit system thing was largely just US propaganda. It was tested it one city and abandoned. China has a credit score system just like most major economies, but from what I understand, the US system has far more restrictions on citizen’s actions based on the credit system than China does. Theirs only impacts lending, ours can impact housing and employment (though I think this practice is on the out and banned in many states).

The US system sounds more like a social credit system tbh.

Eh, not in the way that the propagandists and subsequent memes describe it, but I get the impression it affects more of the basics of daily life than the Chinese system.

Yeah, at least I’m neither Chinese nor American.

FUCK ALL COMMUNISTS. DEMOCRACY FOR THE FUCKING WIN.

Yeah, Pinochet was a real democracy lover, right?

Good.

Americans are left with such an terrible, enshittified digital information economy that we must entertain even our enemies for alternatives.

Why is China your enemy?

Competition.

I’ll be more specific. The PRC (government) is an enemy to humanity in my view.

Well because they caused a couple million to die due to covid. Not only did they lie by saying the virus wasn’t transmissible to humans, but they then let people fly internationally to spread it to the rest of the world instead of trying to quarantine the outbreak hotspots. Then they got a bunch of CCP dickriders internationally to empty the shelves in their respective western countries of all their medical supplies to ship over to China, who then made deals to sell it to poorer countries only on the condition they make a spectacle about it with big banners saying thank you china. And the US helped by funding gain of function research in the wuhan institute of virology where they kept live bats riddled with diseases and sold the bats to the wet market on the sly when they were done with the research. Millions die because a shitty country’s leaders want to save face instead of saving millions of people from a preventable death. Theres a tonne more shit they do out of the media spotlight, but they do a great job amplifying the dumb shit Trump does instead to distract from their own weasly asymmetric warfare against the west.

To be fair billibilli in a lot of ways is much worse then YouTube has ever been.

It’s aggressively poor as a platform for history channels. And while foreign politics are fine. Anything Chinese poltic related gets nuked from the platform aggressively.

The app is barely functional, changes for the worse more then YouTube does and basically has no way to support small creators.

It’s in no way a YouTube alternative beyond that it hosts videos.

Dude, You havent seen how enshittified things are going to get.

Cool. If they allow views while using ad-blockers I’m in.

I think we should be looking for decentralised alternatives not something prone to enshittification.

It’s a really hard problem to solve though. Video hosting is a huge data hog I don’t think small independent instances would be able to keep up with the storage requirements. Especially at the moment considering storages so expensive.

I think you just might be right, which is sad.

honestly i think it’d be nice to have a full p2p video directory instead. something like peertube but without instances, resembling a torrent tracker like nyaa, aimed generally for educational stuff, entertainment, music, etc. basically youtube but as a torrent tracker, to reduce the storage requirement. you’d be able to seed your favorite media and the fact that people would not want to waste their storage on seeding worthless stuff and the technical hurdle of p2p would keep the mindless slop out.

I like the idea. My only gripe is it’s complexity for the average user. If there was a way to make it super simple. Torrent clients and trackers are way to complecated the average user.

it would be cool if i (or any user) could just contribute a part of their storage space / network connection to the video platform. something like “i store this video (that i just watched) for a month sothat others can see it too”.

unfortunately, as i understand it, there’s both technical and legal hurdles.

• technical hurdle: this doesn’t work for mobile, where network traffic is often limited. e.g. if i pay $10 for 50 GB upload/download capacity per month, then i don’t want 49 GB of those to be sucked up by other people’s video watching behavior.
• legal hurdle: what if some of the content is accidentally illegal? then i would be distributing illegal material, which can quickly become a problem for myself … (seeing how it is illegal in many countries to distribute copyrighted material, but not to watch it oneself).

It wouldn’t be worth it anyway. Assuming we’re trying to compete with YouTube you’d want fairly long fairly high quality videos, 25 minute video at 4k (reasonable length and resolution for 2026) would take between 12 and 13 gigabytes of storage, assuming some videos are slightly shorter or slightly low quality maybe 1080p you could personally contribute about four to five videos on your storage plan. At which point you wonder whether or not it’s even worth the effort.

Even one terabyte storage drive wouldn’t store enough videos to really make a competitive product.

The only reason that YouTube can make it work is because they get their storage in bulk and therefore get massive discounts.

This means that even if Google was broken up I can’t see YouTube being a viable standalone product.

I mean. This is… Not worse than now, I guess?

Any entity that can take a chunk out of YouTube’s dominance is a good thing.

But I’m not going to celebrate another corp making a shamelessly monetized video site. They’re independent-ish now, yes, but for how long? It’s just a different flavor of attention gaming and enshittification in the long run.

And I’m skeptical they have the muscle to significantly displace YouTube’s iron grip on everything, even with Google tightening the screws.

Yes! We have peertube which is actually cool.

Unfortunately Peertube is going to be… very difficult to scale.

It needs more people to engage and more exposure.

It’s more that (as I understand it) the storage requirements increase exponentially relative to the number of users.

how so?

Ah, I was misremembering an aspect - though the requirement is still there that as users join the storage* requirements will increase in the worst case exponentially, it’s not inherent to the ideal system, rather it’s a byproduct of cacheing requirements. At a certain point there will be enough users that popular content being accessed will overwhelm the instance hosting it - this is somewhat fixed by caching popular videos on other instances, but as the network of instances grows the need for cached resources grows with it. There may be ways to get around this, if so I’m simply not familiar enough with the current state of the software to know what those solutions are.

nah i think that the storage requirement grows approximately linear with the number of users, and maybe in the worst case quadratically; but the typical case should be linear.

In an ideal scenario for sure, but in implementation you’re going to run into issues like network throughput and resource access distribution optimization (i.e. feynman parallarity). I got out of the house without a whiteboard or a single grad student (you just never remember the important things) so I can’t confirm more than napkin math, but you may indeed be right that it’s at worst quadratic.

This won’t help PeerTube become mainstream either.

Hosting videos is extremely expensive, thus there is a financial incentive against hosting a PeerTube instance.

Unless PeerTube fixes the incentives, it won’t be sustainable long-term.

They should do something like Nebula. A subscription maybe in cryptocoins so you still get privacy over your credit card.

I would prefer it if it wasn’t Chinese because I don’t really trust Chinese companies, but then again I didn’t really trust Google and YouTube super duper needs competition.

I don’t trust Chinese either, but I trust the US and the 5 eyes mob even less. Chinese for me is on the “not as bad as the US, UK and AUS” list. The reason being that I could not care less what the Chinese platforms gather on me with what little they can gather (which is not much due to how I use the internet as a whole), but the US, due to the relationship they have with me and with my country can actually do some damage.

You shouldn’t trust any country. keep a low profile. theyre all c*nts and will use it against you if/when the time is right. One only has to look at the US to see the perfect example of what happens when governments go rogue

I think this is one statement that everyone here will get behind.

Bilibibi is just as big as Youtube. There’s almost no difference between them, except that one is the Chinese version and the other isn’t.

I just downloaded it. No sign up necessary but it asks for a birthdate. (I just picked June 4 1989 randomly, ofc.)

It uses AI to translate from Chinese to your selected language. The image below shows available languages.

You don’t need to login to upvote videos. However, you not be able to comment or reply. Also, viewing comments is limited.

To create your account, you have to provide your phone number, which is an automatic “not happening” for me.

Once your phone number is “bound”, you can link your Google account for your login. This will make it easier for East-West cooperation in data mining and mass surveillance.

You can also use an email and password of your own choosing.

Overall, I can’t see me actually binding my phone number to make an account.

Anyway, here’s what my feed looked like when I opened the app and skipped account creation/login:

Some AI looking slop, of course.

Of the first dozen or so, only two seemed interesting - the Rick Roll meme history and a Brazilian explaining how to use “lá ele” in conversation. (I speak Brazilian Portuguese so this was actually very cool to see.)

(I just picked June 4 1989 randomly, ofc.)

🤣

🚚💯 🧑‍🎓

Have you started uploading Tienenmen Square videos yet?

Gotta have an account for that. So no.

You wouldn’t have an account for long if you did anyways. Billibilli makes the censorship on YouTube look like fucking childs play.

Foreign politics are fine, world history is fine. But anything that remotely touches on modern Chinese history or politics gets nuked from orbit and aggressively attacked.

It’s a big reason why if you use Chinese apps for any length of time the one oddly absent thing from all of them is chinese politics.

It’s extremely hard to over state just how aggressive billiblli can be about this.

Assuredly this won’t become the new “Tiktok ban” in the US.

YouTube badly needs a competitor imo

Kinda hope it succeeds

8 trackers from 6 different companies, hard pass.

Isn’t the usual amount hundreds?

Yes, but none of them are Chinese.

At this point I’d prefer the Chinese government to track me over US companies. The Chinese government won’t let the US government access its databases, whereas Google will.

YouTube just has google firebase analytics (which I also don’t want)

they probably mean, 8 trackers loaded in the frontend. hundreds are still possible by selling backend collected data, they just don’t get direct access.

Yes, just what aurora app store detects loaded in the app.

I’ve heard of Billibilli. It’s great for pirated films and TV shows that you can’t get anywhere else.

I don’t really trust it to be much better at respecting privacy than YouTube, but at this point, I’d be surprised if it was any worse, and YouTube has been getting worse for lack of competition for over a decade now

I feel like we’re entering a world where you have competing surveillance states, and citizens from either would be behooved to use technology from the other. For the simple fact that these two states don’t cooperate, using the other sides technology is inherently safer. They have far fewer manners of or financial interests in fucking you.

Yeah. At this point as an American I’m way less worried about in the Chinese government tracking me than I am with the US government. The Chinese government is evil, but I don’t live in China.

Yes but never forget they aren’t above building profiles on people and selling them. The US government regularly buys these sort of data packages as a loophole to bypass constitutional protections against search and seizures.