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"this morning, as I was finishing up work on a video about a new mini Pi cluster, I got a cheerful email from YouTube saying my video on LibreELEC on the Pi 5 was removed because it promoted:

Dangerous or Harmful Content Content that describes how to get unauthorized or free access to audio or audiovisual content, software, subscription services, or games that usually require payment isn’t allowed on YouTube.

I never described any of that stuff, only how to self-host your own media library.

This wasn’t my first rodeo—in October last year, I got a strike for showing people how to install Jellyfin!

In that case, I was happy to see my appeal granted within an hour of the strike being placed on the channel. (Nevermind the fact the video had been live for over two years at that point, with nary a problem!)

So I thought, this case will be similar:

  • The video’s been up for over a year, without issue
  • The video’s had over half a million views
  • The video doesn’t promote or highlight any tools used to circumvent copyright, get around paid subscriptions, or reproduce any content illegally

Slam-dunk, right? Well, not according to whomever reviewed my appeal. Apparently self-hosted open source media library management is harmful.

Who knew open source software could be so subversive?"

  • kudra@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1442·
    2 days ago

    Oh, it’s dangerous and harmful all right : to their business model.

    I think the big G is probably starting to get pretty nervous about self hosting. It absolutely is a threat to their existence. They are nothing without users.

    There’s a lot of us fed up with enshittification and every video that helps people break free of their capture is extremely dangerous to them. Seriously.

    • clang@lemmy.zip
      6·
      17 hours ago

      I agree with you and also YouTube’s real power is the network effect of literally everyone being there. I want so badly for something like Odysee to work but there’s just nothing there.

      • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
        28·
        1 day ago

        Yeah, this is definitely a broken corporate system issue rather than a nefarious plot. Google takes down, demonitizes, and issues trikes for all kinds of bogus shit, their system is so incapable of nuance that “nuance” isn’t even the right word anymore. There’s no evil scheme to silence self hosting, just a horrible, miserably dysfunctional content moderation system that regularly trashes peoples livelihoods if it comes anywhere near prohibited topics.

        If the mistake causes a big enough problem they cares about, like bad publicity via a large channel complaining, they’ll probably fix it after a whole protracted mess of a situation. But if it doesn’t cause a problem for them it doesn’t get fixed. They just really suck at handling the scale of content they host.

        And I might empathize that it’s a hard thing to do, if they weren’t an effective monopoly and a horrible company.

      • piefood@feddit.onlineEnglish
        6·
        1 day ago

        I’ve downloaded all of the videos for a few channels. I know they will eventually get taken down, so I want to have backups ready for when that happens.

      • voracitude@lemmy.world
        8·
        1 day ago

        I know people who host content from YouTube on their servers, just in case it ever gets taken down from YouTube. Team FourStar had big problems with that, despite all their content being squarely under Fair Use, so I can’t say I blame anyone for taking the precaution. It would be a social tragedy to lose public copies of DBZ Abridged.

      • spechter@lemmy.ml
        12·
        1 day ago

        Yes, I use jellyfin exclusively as a frontend for local mirrors of a handful YouTube channels.

          • spechter@lemmy.ml
            4·
            10 hours ago

            I use pinchflat and TubeArchivist to fetch content from YouTube.

            While TubeArchivist is great on it’s own when you fetch individual videos or channels that have their content organized in playlists, it has only a web UI which is OK on phone, but unusable on TV.

            There is an add-on to synchronize TubeArchivist and jellyfin, but it doesn’t translate too well between how TA and JF organize their data.

            I use Pinchflat exclusively to download channels whose content’s order does not necessarily matter. It nicely provides all the metadata to JF and even integrates sponsorblock as chapters into JF.

            I have each of these services running as a docker container.