If you’ve been on the internet for the past five years, or even the past ten years, you might remember that moment on Twitter where someone noted that the people at Google’s headquarters in California took down their “Don’t be evil” sign and/or removed it from their CoC, as if they were cartoon villains getting ready to do something nefarious. And nefarious things they did do, and are preparing to do more of.
If you’ve been paying attention as of late, Google is preparing to force ads through your adblocker via Youtube, and they are also, of course, yet another tech giant incorporating AI into every service you access (even if you have no qualms with the no-consent ethos of these AI image scrapers, you have to care about your privacy, just a little bit).
Nearly a decade ago, I didn’t really care much about my own privacy, or how ads were shown to me. I just used the internet, watched the ads, viewed the products, and went about my day as if it wasn’t a big deal. But that was also back in the day of Mafia Wars, and doing my daily clicks on Facebook. There were a lot of things I didn’t really think about all that much.
But I’m older now, and more conscious of the ways my data is being used by billion-dollar corporations as they prepare to do even further damage to our climate, our mental health, and our privacy, with extremely aggressive advertising, and scraping, to boot (see this video on Roku, and how they plan to push ads through your HDMI inputs via a new patent they’ve filed). All in the name of adding zeros to the already planet-sized amount of money they have and absolutely do not deserve to hoard. To hoard, and gain, in the false idea of infinitely expanding profit. An idea that will surely destroy our entire species.
To the point of this post, though, and yes, I know the above linked video goes straight to Youtube, which is owned by Google. And that’s why we’re here. We’re here because I don’t think enough people understand or know what Peertube is.
We already know about Mastodon, the non-corporate replacement for the engagement and AI-hell that centralized social media is. It’s easy enough to escape the coming ad-pocalypse via written communities, but what about the visual?
As you may know, Mastodon is connected via the ActivityPub protocol, so all servers can see and interact with each other, along with their users. Well, Peertube is exactly the same. PT is a Youtube clone, that acts as a peer-to-peer video and streaming service. All instances are connected, and not only can you view videos across a network of connected Peertube instances, but they even show up as normal posts that you can see via a Mastodon instance.
Pretty genius, right?
Yeah.
The reason, the real reason I’m writing this, is because I want MORE content to watch on Peertube. Sure, there’s a lot of good stuff on there, but I want my true crime, I want my space documentaries, and I want my random gaming vids.
Join a Peertube instance, and tell Google to shove Youtube and their profit motives directly up their noses.
This has been a public service announcement.
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