Gfycat.com shuts down on September 1 and all Gifs will be taken down

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 754 points –
Gfycat.com shuts down on September 1 and all Gifs will be taken down - gHacks Tech News
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Alternatives to YouTube include Vimeo and the fediverse's Peertube, but I am not sure they qualify as competitors.

Actually, the peer-sharing nature of Peertube makes me wonder if it could handle a sudden surge of users better than the rest of the fediverse.

Unless content creators get paid there's never gonna be a critical shift to a fediverse platform from YouTube, Twitch, or TikTok. Users may switch but they'll be straight back if there's no content.

Personally, I think that's better. Let people have their favored platforms. Have accounts on several. Use them as much or as little as you want. Advertising might be a deal breaker for you, but some are willing to put up with it. Some are happy paying for premium.

It doesn't stop federated platforms from existing. If anything, it helps deal with the volume of users. These closed platforms with VC money can barely afford to keep the lights on - self hosted servers can not handle that kind of traffic.

Sadly, Twitter is similar to Youtube. It may not have as many ADU as other platforms but the news media is heavily dependent on it. You'd need essentially every significant US politician to migrate to a new platform to see a critical shift away from Twitter.

That's an extremely good point: youtube actually does pay out to creators in a way that most other sites do not. Sure, they will often supplement this income with kofi or patreon, but if that youtube income stream dries up, a lot of the youtubers will simply call it quits instead of migrating to other platforms.

If YouTube does go entirely the route they are going, peertube may as well become a competitor. We need people to start downloading and storing YouTube videos to host on these servers. It just sucks, the legal hoops people will need it fly through... It's almost as if people are going to need to start moving to the darkweb as well.