Google is excelling again - as the whole “uncensored” Big-Tech IT now.
The short summary is that for nearly a year, Google was hiding Proton Mail from search results for queries such as ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’. This was highly suspicious because Proton Mail has long been the world’s largest encrypted email provider.
I already use those things. My main way of watching YT is with Tubular.
The problem is that there is one, centralized hosting provider with an all-powerful, non-customizable (by the user) recommendation algorithm. That algorithm, like it or not, dictates the type of content that is made on the platform. If there is content that Google doesn’t like, they can (and have) very easilly shadowban the content, meaning only people who specifically search for it will see it, if not remove it altogether.
I don’t see YT being replaced in that sense any time soon. Federated text and image content is really still in infancy, and video hosting at the size of YT is a tremendously more complex feat, requiring, at the absolute minimum: a metric crapton of bandwidth and storage.
For me, I just use invidious and similar for the foreseeable future, or peertube when there are things on it.
At the very least, not being signed in to YT and having only a local watch history and subscriptions (=not on a YT or Google account) does starve the algorithm a bit.
I think the best bet at federated video hosting is with something like IPFS or even bittorrent. If every client is also a host, that would greatly reduce the bandwidth needed for any one server.
It might starve the algorithm, but I still get good recommendations on Tubular for the most part, and I haven’t used a YT account ever since the first NewPipe alpha released.
I’m hoping storage will become cheap enough that something like PeerTube will be able to grow as much as Lemmy and Mastodon have over the past few years.