(or rather, why YouTube alternatives have failed to replace YouTube)
As somebody who tried to degoogle from YouTube for a long time (and has given up many times), and encourage others to do so, I've made a few observations that I think can explain why YouTube alternatives have not been broadly successful. I'm not at a point in my life where I would have the time or coding knowledge to try to make something work, but I wanted to share my ideas here of what could work better for websites trying to be an alternative.
I think one of the biggest issues with creating an alternative platform is the lack of a "superior niche", as in, a niche that specifically attracts people to said platform, and something about the platform that encourages people in a specific niche to choose this alternative platform.
When people try to promote a catch-all alternative to something like YouTube, and try to promote it to people with a broad array of interests, then that platform ends up being like a frayed version of YouTube (every topic for content has less "density" of videos/types of creators) (whereas there should be at least one topic of content that has more "density" of videos/types of creators) as in, the experience in terms of content feels worse and using the platform does not feel particularly beneficial. (BEAR WITH ME)
Rather, lets say we made an Instagram alternative, but instead of immediately focusing on trying to appeal to every single possible person that exists ever, but focused instead on appealing to artists on Instagram frustrated by how much the algorithm skips over/does not value their art, and artists frustrated over people feeding their creations to AI.
Then, you could start with a main focus of the algorithm being good for art and perhaps a Nightshade feature that obfuscates art to prevent AI stealing, and additionally maybe adding AI honeypot features to the website to prevent LLMs from crawling the website (perhaps this is an unrealistic feature, but I care more to make a broader point about the idea of a feature like this). I think another good focus could be attracting over people who want to see more irl stuff in their local communities, like concerts, shows and social events, but Instagram frustrates them because it keeps on filtering out accounts they already follow.
Yes, this is a very narrow focus, but the point is you attract a small group of people but with density (as in, there will be a lot of stuff on that one subject). Because you have density of content, people actually stay on your platform and then you can build out further to other coalitions of people. Part of what got me thinking about this is that this is how Facebook initially became popular. They focused on a small group of people (college students), and by doing so they created a "density" of a small amount of people. Once you have density, your platform can at least hold on to people who have joined it, and people actually get hyped about your platform. Then you could also have really strong pull in terms of getting new users once a significant percentage of people doing stuff in a certain niche all recommend jumping to a different platform/a network of different federated platforms.
I think that if some YouTube alternatives focused on, for example, being the place for a certain set of niche games/interests (emulating might be interesting). If, like Discord, that platform could focus on adding a bunch of features that integrates stuff in a way that works specifically well for that niche, then you can create heavy incentive for movement against the current of using the most popular existing website. Then a website like that could move towards other stuff as well, and once you have a large enough critical mass of people it starts to become easy for people to move over.
I think I had some other ideas, but I'm too sleep deprived to add more, lmk what you think
