I’ve spent a long time De-Googling my life, and YouTube was, for a long time, the final piece holding onto me. In honor of YouTube’s AI age verification systems, let’s talk about how I’ve been removing it from my life.
To emphasize: These are not YouTube frontends. Any traffic to YouTube right now is traffic I want to avoid.
All links provided will be plainly listed in the footnotes.
Consumers
The first fundamental problem with it is that none of us are looking for YouTube alternatives. You’re looking for a place where your favorite YouTubers put their stuff besides YouTube. Look in their bios to see if they have a link list, and check their other social medias, sometimes they’ll have other places that they post their stuff. If not, then if you want to de-Google this, you’ll just have to say goodbye to them, at least for a while.
If you can be not obnoxious about it, and the poster has a contact page somewhere, you can maybe send them a message/email/pigeon saying that you’d like it if they host their stuff elsewhere, but that’s about all we got on that front.
For something that already has a bunch of YouTubers on it, Nebula is great, I’ve been a subscriber for two years. It has a lot of the content creators I watched on it, but a lot aren’t on there. It’s $6/mo, $60/yr as of 2025-08-14, and has a lot of creators on it. You can see the channels on it without signing up here. 1
I’ll be covering more platforms in the creators section, so even if you’re not one continuing might be relevant for you.
Creators
For creators, if you’re looking for YouTube alternatives there are a good few! Most of the ones that are worth using will cost money in some way, shape, or form. The good news is that when they do, you often make your own TOS (along with your hosting provider), so you don’t have to worry about being flagged for nudity because you had the audacity to show a queer person being queer on the platform.
For video, the main self-hosted option is PeerTube2. It’s great, based on ActivityPub so it can share content with Mastodon (for consumers this does mean you don’t need a PeerTube account, any ActivityPub account will work!) and the like. It’s free to use, and simple to set up.
It’s available on the YuNoHost store, so you can just use that if you’re not technically inclined. Super easy install, and if you’re using a VPS you don’t even need to worry about port forwarding or anything. Only problem is you lose all advertisement revenue, though you can still keep sponsorship revenue. There are pre-existing instances that you can join3, which can help, so look through the list to see if any of them are appealing.
There are other platforms I’m not personally familiar with, like DailyMotion4, and a bunch of ones I’m not talking about because they’re full of stuff I’d really rather not support, or even mention.
Links: