The China-centric video sharing platform is expanding with a new international app and an English version of its website – with no identity verification (for now at least)
YouTube’s censorship has become worse than cable TV’s (in the US). I have a feeling that BiliBili will only further normalize the aggressive censorship, like TikTok did.
I mean. This is… Not worse than now, I guess?
Any entity that can take a chunk out of YouTube’s dominance is a good thing.
But I’m not going to celebrate another corp making a shamelessly monetized video site. They’re independent-ish now, yes, but for how long? It’s just a different flavor of attention gaming and enshittification in the long run.
And I’m skeptical they have the muscle to significantly displace YouTube’s iron grip on everything, even with Google tightening the screws.
Yes! We have peertube which is actually cool.
Unfortunately Peertube is going to be… very difficult to scale.
It needs more people to engage and more exposure.
This won’t help PeerTube become mainstream either.
Hosting videos is extremely expensive, thus there is a financial incentive against hosting a PeerTube instance.
Unless PeerTube fixes the incentives, it won’t be sustainable long-term.
They should do something like Nebula. A subscription maybe in cryptocoins so you still get privacy over your credit card.
It’s more that (as I understand it) the storage requirements increase exponentially relative to the number of users.
thats good news youtube was mainstream so looong that it becomes to eat itself slowly seeing some competitions maybe lead the long form video market better
I’m all for it, America needs to be reminded of what capitalism actually is.
I just downloaded it. No sign up necessary but it asks for a birthdate. (I just picked June 4 1989 randomly, ofc.)
It uses AI to translate from Chinese to your selected language. The image below shows available languages.
You don’t need to login to upvote videos. However, you not be able to comment or reply. Also, viewing comments is limited.
To create your account, you have to provide your phone number, which is an automatic “not happening” for me.
Once your phone number is “bound”, you can link your Google account for your login. This will make it easier for East-West cooperation in data mining and mass surveillance.
You can also use an email and password of your own choosing.
Overall, I can’t see me actually binding my phone number to make an account.
Anyway, here’s what my feed looked like when I opened the app and skipped account creation/login:
Some AI looking slop, of course.
Of the first dozen or so, only two seemed interesting - the Rick Roll meme history and a Brazilian explaining how to use “lá ele” in conversation. (I speak Brazilian Portuguese so this was actually very cool to see.)
I’ve heard of Billibilli. It’s great for pirated films and TV shows that you can’t get anywhere else.
I don’t really trust it to be much better at respecting privacy than YouTube, but at this point, I’d be surprised if it was any worse, and YouTube has been getting worse for lack of competition for over a decade now
Unless I can make A whole channel dedicated to 1989 Massacre Im not interested.
Cool. If they allow views while using ad-blockers I’m in.
Well more competition is good and we really need more alternative platforms. Can they make a browser as an alternative to chrome… Or push Firefox?
Honestly not sure why more people don’t use Firefox. It’s brilliant, especially with uBlock and Sponsorblock added.
2 reasons imo.
- Chrome inertia. Everyone who’s locked into it from the days it was legitimately faster.
- Every time it gets mentioned, its supporters like to “no true Scotsman” the original project and suggest their preferred fork instead.
No true Scotsman is one of the biggest reasons open source anything struggles to catch on. Normal users never have any fucking idea what to do and everyone always just screeches forks of forks of forks and then the normal users just get paralyzed. Lol
Both the bane and blessing of anything decentralized lol.
Most people on their phones use the default browser, either Chrome or whatever Chromium-based the manufacturer includes. But otherwise it’s the browser included with the Facebook app, as some are literally locked into the Facebook-and-Youtube walled garden.
I think being the only browser with a credible stance on ad blockers will help them in the long run.
There might not be a long run if google can dictate web development enough in the short term to essentially kill off all competition.
Im gonna be honest, im glad a lot of people don’t use ad blockers, or they would come down a lot harder on ad blocking. As it is google is trying their hardest to push their authentication nonsense everywhere to lock us all in to whatever software THEY decide we are authorised to use
I use it and I install it on every family and work PC I can but the memory of the bloated Firefox that made so many originally switch to chrome is still there. I want apple to base their browser on Firefox to maybe get some traction back
lots of people don’t like the direction the company is heading
Fair point but are you seriously saying you prefer the direction Google is heading?
whataboutism? two competing companies can be bad
Yes but if you only have two choices, a kick in the nuts (google) or a flick of your ear (firefox) everytime you open your browser, it just makes sense to use the one that causes less pain. I think more people should use Linux too, Microslop have become way too orwellian and obtrusive for my liking.
The question was why more people don’t use Firefox. I answered.
Sure if you have more choices.
But you don’t. You have two choices.
Chrome/chrome based or firefox/Firefox based.
Do you want a bullet to the arm or the leg. You get one choice and your option can’t included neither.
Pick one. That’s how this works.
Yeah but if you need to use a browser are you seriously going to support Google over Mozilla?
no, but we weren’t talking about that. the topic was “why more people don’t use Firefox” I’m replying to you in Librewolf. I still don’t have to like Firefox, nor recommend it to people at this point.
Forks are also fine. But the phrasing often can come across in a way that supports chrome
What direction is that? I haven’t been keeping up, I just use the browser.
pro-AI for starters, lots of people aren’t happy with that. (this is related to the AI, but started long before then: ) their insistence on focusing on anything else but the actual browser, Firefox also occasionally changes (privacy related) settings after upgrade (Edit: as reported by users online) or when they installed extensions remotely to people’s browsers as part of some kind of promo (I believe it was Mr. Robot?).
There might be more, but this is what I can think of from the top of my head.
Edit: typos
Google is such a bully, I want china to succeed.
Good.
Americans are left with such a terrible, enshittified digital information economy that we must entertain even our enemies for alternatives.
To be fair billibilli in a lot of ways is much worse then YouTube has ever been.
It’s aggressively poor as a platform for history channels. And while foreign politics are fine. Anything Chinese poltic related gets nuked from the platform aggressively.
The app is barely functional, changes for the worse more then YouTube does and basically has no way to support small creators.
It’s in no way a YouTube alternative beyond that it hosts videos.
Why is China your enemy?
I’ll be more specific. The PRC (government) is an enemy to humanity in my view.
Well because they caused a couple million to die due to covid. Not only did they lie by saying the virus wasn’t transmissible to humans, but they then let people fly internationally to spread it to the rest of the world instead of trying to quarantine the outbreak hotspots. Then they got a bunch of CCP dickriders internationally to empty the shelves in their respective western countries of all their medical supplies to ship over to China, who then made deals to sell it to poorer countries only on the condition they make a spectacle about it with big banners saying thank you china. And the US helped by funding gain of function research in the wuhan institute of virology where they kept live bats riddled with diseases and sold the bats to the wet market on the sly when they were done with the research. Millions die because a shitty country’s leaders want to save face instead of saving millions of people from a preventable death. Theres a tonne more shit they do out of the media spotlight, but they do a great job amplifying the dumb shit Trump does instead to distract from their own weasly asymmetric warfare against the west.
Competition.
Oh boy coyote urine over coyote urine my fave.
I think we should be looking for decentralised alternatives not something prone to enshittification.
It’s a really hard problem to solve though. Video hosting is a huge data hog I don’t think small independent instances would be able to keep up with the storage requirements. Especially at the moment considering storages so expensive.
honestly i think it’d be nice to have a full p2p video directory instead. something like peertube but without instances, resembling a torrent tracker like nyaa, aimed generally for educational stuff, entertainment, music, etc. basically youtube but as a torrent tracker, to reduce the storage requirement. you’d be able to seed your favorite media and the fact that people would not want to waste their storage on seeding worthless stuff and the technical hurdle of p2p would keep the mindless slop out.
I like the idea. My only gripe is it’s complexity for the average user. If there was a way to make it super simple. Torrent clients and trackers are way to complecated the average user.
I think you just might be right, which is sad.
They’re going to need to drastically change how the platform looks if they want to succeed. In typical Chinese app fashion the UI is incredibly bloated and overwhelming, not what a Western audience wants at all. They also won’t be able to match YouTube’s CPM so creators won’t bother switching either.
