PeerTube links are at the bottom of this post.
It began, and ended, with a four hour YouTube ad wherein someone was talking to me like I was watching an actual video. The advertisement was presented in a way where it would look like a real video. It almost worked, until I remembered the title of the video.
I copied the video link, opened it up in Accessible YouTube downloader, and watched the video.
I then promptly deleted all my videos on YouTube. There was no way YouTube, Google, was going to get free content from me to train their AI thing. Many years late, unfortunately, because Google and other tech companies have been scraping data for training purposes long before AI became sentient and turned us all into toast.
I know I’m not going to get rid of AI and AI scraping, but I can make tech bros aggravated in the process, which is all worth it, in my opinion. There’s no way I can completely stop tech bros from scraping my website, for example, because I’d have to constantly put up walls and, well, in the end, it’s not worth it.
I can, though, use alternatives that are far better than YouTube, which is what I’m doing as of today. Because YouTube started to have a visceral war with ad blockers in 2023, I went looking for alternatives that would give me the features I’d need as well as provide a great user experience.
I started off by looking at podcast hosts. The most accessible podcast host, and the best one, in my opinion, Pinecast, doesn’t support video. I wanted one podcast feed to publish both audio and video. Pinecast is amazing in every other way, though. It didn’t meet my needs so I went looking at PeerTube.
PeerTube is a Federated video platform. You can read about PeerTube this Wiki link. PeerTube has grown a lot, with many accessibility improvements, and the best part? It’s a video platform that also supports uploading audio files.
I could effectively publish both an audio and video podcast with just one platform. This is fantastic!
I began by taking my time, looking at all the instances, and settled on an instance for now. I expect I’ll change instances again in the future, but for now, I’m happy where I’m at.
You can follow my PeerTube account from any other Fediverse project. Just copy my account link into your instance of choice and then start following me. My RSS feed can be found on my subscribe page.
What will this account be about? I really don’t know but it’s going to be all about me, obviously. Interviews, short stories, audio book excerpts, novellas in audio, clips of me at events, and everything else me.
However you subscribe, I hope you check it out and share it.
For ease of use, the links mentioned in the above post are below.
Find my PeerTube account at @weirdwriter@spectra.videoor on my contact page.
Robert Kingett’s PeerTube RSS for podcast apps is here or on my subscribe page.