Apologies for being the bearer of bad news. “6 hours ago” means roughly 6-7pm Eastern on April 30, 2025. I have no further information; I only know because I was going to visit the wiki and . . . apparently now I’m not.
It’s under “Guides & Search Engines” in the Software section of the megathread, should anyone with rights care to update.
I don’t see this ever happening to be honest. Considering how much shitter YouTube has been for so much longer I don’t believe most people online will ever leave the mainstream platforms.
I believe fediverse will be like Linux. It’ll always have a dedicated userbase large enough to sustain itself, but it won’t be big like the proprietary platforms. And that’s ok.
On the other hand there’s not really a great alternative to YouTube. I mean, yes there are alternatives but these are still not as usable as YouTube (with Adblocker) is.
Hosting a video platforms on which millions of users upload millions of gigabytes is REALLY expensive so only a tech giant like google can host one to this extend.
Reddit (or the fediverse) are mostly text, some images and few videos. This is much more feasible to host than a YouTube alternative.
But yeah. Normal users probably just don’t care in the first place. We’ll see what will happen.
There are alternatives to YouTube though, there are a lot of them. It’s just none of them are viable for the viewers because content creators are hell bent on never using anything other than YouTube. To the point I believe they aren’t actually bothered by YouTube’s problems and only occasionaly complain about it for easy views.
Personally I don’t care anymore, YouTube’s problems don’t affect me. As long as PipePipe works I’m happy. And if it stops working I’ll just stop watching YouTube, or just minimize my usage to the extent it’s possible.
Lemmy already came such a long way though, when I first tried using it, it was a barren wasteland. Federated social media is the only kind of online platform that can brute force it’s way into viability so I’m confident Lemmy will continue to grow or remain big enough to satisfy it’s users. It just won’t be as big as Reddit.