this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
589 points (98.0% liked)
Technology
61964 readers
3775 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Youtube is not just entertainment tho - the catch is that Google has way too much actually useful info hostage, like lectures, guides or documentaries.
It's somewhat of a catch, that's generally how monopolistic moats work but you really shouldn't be relying on google as a backup service for obscure videos you wish to keep.
I've no idea of the amount of lectures, guides, documentaries and other non-entertainment media that is available exclusively on youtube, but again it isn't an archiving service.
They can, will and have deleted whole channels for various reasons, most of which were bullshit, if you find something you absolutely have to keep, download it.
That being said, the process of downloading, archiving and curating content on anything more than a trivial scale can be much more involved than it seems, especially if you want backups/redundancy.
I've never been a big youtube user so my opinion on this is coloured by the fact that i don't have that much invested in the platform.
I am now downloading everything I personally need or like. Wish there was, say, a torrent index of Youtube videos)
Not sure how versed/willing you are to selfhost but I've heard good things about tube archivist.
There are also a bunch of ui's for yt-dlp, though i can't vouch for quality.
Neat finds) That was not my point though. I just use yt-dlp and don't feel the need to have a server for my multiple files. I just was wondering if I could help share the preserved content somewhere. I could just link to the torrents on my website, but that wouldn't be of much use because no one ever would think of searching there...
@EngineerGaming @Senal tbf a lot of the creators I watch on YouTube are now on nebula and/or patreon. I ought to explore alternatives.
True. But I am not even talking about dedicated content creators (for whom it is indeed an option!). I am talking about, say, an old laptop disassembly guide that a random master uploaded and just forgot about it. People not actively managing their content are not going to bother.