The solution for me, in this specific case, would be for Beato to act against YouTube and take his channel elsewhere. He has enough followers to be able to start his own Peertube server, find a few sponsors and keep going forever.
Businesses/creators need continued distribution, see Nike as an example of what happens when you "take your audience elsewhere to monetize them better/more."
1. People buy the other option (in Nike's case they kept going to footlocker and buying other shoes rather than only buying Nike DTC, in Beato's case they would continue to go to YouTube to discover new guitar content)
2. The business can't get new customers because no one is on the new platform (Nike DTC/Peertube)
It's viable for a split second (covid, "stick it to Youtube cause they suck") then people just go back to living their lives.
He's in a unique market position though because he's got industry respect. Joe Bloggs in his bedroom can't compete with "guitar content" because Dave Gilmore, Pat Matheney and Glynn Johns aren't all going to sit with him for a 2 hour long interview.
People are lazy. If you add even a small complication for people to consume content, then it doesn’t matter how much respect that content creator has, people will just follow someone else instead.
Google knows this; which is why they can screw over content creators on their platform.
So when grayjay says "Follow Creators, Not Platforms" I'm pretty sure that the minute that regular people on the street know about the existence of "grayjay", they will become essentially also a platform that enshittifies in the same way (cf. https://xkcd.com/927/).
It's a common pattern. Be an aggregator first, then slowly introduce exclusives, and become a competitor that climbed up on the backs of the others. Somewhat similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
> YouTube already was built on the "distributed" premise.
What a load of BS.
Of course they can. If they smell money and sell, they can change it to whatever they want. It's just a client for now.
It's like arguing for Skype back then based on tech aspects. It's P2P! Yes, P2P until it wasn't.
Youtube wasnt distribute in tech, but was in marketing and if you were there around 2007-10, you remember it was much less social-media-ified and felt more direct and raw. Subscribe and get notified. Just a platform.
The only way to avoid that same path is by remaining obscure and small.
I guess every new generation of tech enthusiasts has to get burned to get sufficiently disillusioned.
There is no "Extinguish" for open source applications, systems and protocols. The closest attempt at EEE that one could try to argue was Facebook/Google leveraging XMPP at first for their messenger apps (FB Messenger/Google Talk) and then closing them down, but even that would not be accurate, given that the number of people using "truly open" XMPP has not gone down.
Talking about "branded" software is nonsense. People use what is most convenient and helps them achieve their goals. If there are no significant vendor lock-in, the cost of swithcing from open source vendor to another is essentially zero. GrayJay has no lock-in, all they do is aggregation of different video platforms.