I’m boycotting YouTube primarily because of their recent human right censorship against Palestine. But I’d generally like to reduce YouTube’s dominance in the streaming space, even if it means supporting a few alternative US-based platforms like Nebula, though obviously PeerTube would be ideal.

Edit: The comments here mention that it would be good to tie the email to monetization, so I’ll also be mentioning my support on Patreon in future emails.

Here’s the kind of email I’m sending to my favourite creators. You can usually find their email in their channel bio.

Subject: Please consider alternative video platforms

Hello <First Name/Channel Name>,

I’m writing to ask you to please consider uploading your videos to alternative streaming platforms, in addition to, not instead of, YouTube.

I’ve personally started to move away from YouTube because <INSERT reasons>. Here’s another creator who also recently wrote about their reasons for moving off the platform: https://joshgriffiths.site/youtube-is-awful-im-not-posting-there-anymore/

I’m currently consuming video content on <INSERT alternatives> instead of YouTube.

<INSERT reasons I’m a fan>. I would love to continue watching your content on any other platform, and I’m sure others would appreciate the option to do so as well.

Cheers,
<Name>

  • kent_eh@lemmy.caEnglish
    10·
    3 days ago

    While I’m not a huge channel, I have been posting on youtube for almost 10 years.

    And over the years I have also been duplicating my uploads to a few other platforms, until they have inevitably shut down for one reason or another (though running out of money has always been among the reasons).

    I’m currently duplicating my uploads on a peertube instance, and it’s getting about the same viewership as any of the other alternatives I have used - which is to say 10s of views (compared to 4-6k on youtube).

    For anyone who is actually trying to make a living from their videos (I’m not, it’s a hobby that pays it’s own expenses for me) that is a really hard sell to convince them to put in any extra effort for such a statistically negligible audience share.