I have nothing to sell you
I really don’t.
My blog is self-hosted and free. When I stream, and lately that’s rare, my stream will be free. You can listen to my music on any streaming platform for free, but the masters are free on SoundCloud, regardless. As a matter of fact, as soon as I have my fiber delivered, I’m moving all my YouTube content to a PeerTube instance and putting that up for free. Why did I do all this?
Well, I’ve recently gone through a healthy overhaul of my interests and have committed to throwing out things that fail my somewhat fuzzy mental-health criteria. What I mostly mean is, I’m exhausted. I truly feel virtually exhausted, but it started with YouTube.
A few weeks ago, while glancing at my YouTube feed, I realized I had an overwhelming contempt for it. It was a literal 80s coupon booklet of unfunny posed Photoshop cutouts. All pointing at some obnoxious scene from a game I’ll never play with their mouth wide open or in some stupid pointing pose. Or the “7 Reasons you suck at writing” trope being pulled off by an author with only self-publishing credits for planners and cookbooks they also try to hock. Or people stitching together reused stock video with some sad piano song over it AI quoting jack handy nonsense from those inspirational pictures your HR used to put up in the office. Or worse. Way worse. The con-artists putting out videos on how to get more video views by only making videos on how to get more video views.
Don’t get me wrong, I tried to make side money over the years with this stuff too (mostly tutorials), but I truly can’t express how tacky and disgusted I feel because I contributed to it. I can’t believe I let the Google machine have this much control over what I watch, how much I earn, and how important I feel. I feel so bad for the creators that take it up the tailpipe. Meanwhile, we get served a dozen ads Google got paid for, while the creator can’t even monetize because they don’t have enough watch hours. That alone was reason enough to ditch them.
It’s not just YouTube though. I deleted indiscriminately. I started with Google for feeding their AI empire off my photos and docs, Instagram for the Tren sucking fitness models claiming natty status and selling creatine at 4x the price. The superfluous FB pages I thought were good marketing for me, however the only interactions are bots selling me stuff from my browser cookies. The Twitter/X cesspool, which needs no introduction, all deleted. Likewise, if I could support other streamers with no need of an account of my own, I would burn Twitch to the ground too. I've been streaming on OwnCast for free to more people that I ever had visit my twitch stream.
So what didn’t I delete? What was the compromise?
Well, I still kept FB for family. I think we all have to do that. Occasionally, I spend time on TikTok, making fun and short form content, so it survived for now. I have a Bluesky account that I really love, but I’m not getting to attached just in case it turns X. I have a SoundCloud I will probably die with unless I find a self-hosted alternative, but that’s about it.
Was it hard?
Surprisingly…. no.
I used Brave and Brave Search and still found what I wanted. I just looked for a written tutorial first, some other options second, and if none existed, I would click on a YouTube as a last resort. If someone just randomly hit me with a post, that’s all “check out my video…” I wouldn't click it if it’s YouTube.
I left Bluesky up throughout the day and just refreshed, enjoyed my feed and interacted with other like-minded people.
If I get an urge to make a video in the future, I’ll put it on PeerTube. If it’s short form, all I got is TikTok. Hmmm. Seems like an opportunity for a self-hosted app.
Was there any gain from it?
It’s still too early to tell, but I started writing more, that's for sure. Which is always good. I replaced my night routine of watching YouTube videos for entertainment by playing Xbox or watching a series on some streaming platform. My daily distraction at work is now working on my blog or posting on Bluesky instead of doomscrolling crap videos in my home feed and getting angry. I’ve enjoyed the break from politics, AI fear mongering and whatever the hell rich people are doing right now.
Overall, I’m feeling pretty good.
Love you guys.