That is what YouTube thinks. Jeff Geerling, one of the most prominent voices in the open source tech and DIY community, has been hit with a community guidelines strike for a 2024 video explaining how to set up LibreELEC on a Raspberry Pi 5.
Explaining his situation, Jeff published a detailed blog outlining what happened and what he plans to do next.
What is YouTube Smoking?
Source: Jeff Geerling
Labeling the video as being "Harmful or dangerous content", YouTube has removed Jeff's video titled "I replaced my Apple TV—with a Raspberry Pi", and has rejected his appeal, leaving him with no clear explanation and a community guidelines strike.
And it gets worse. To avoid a permanent guidelines strike (2 strikes means channel removal) on his YouTube channel, Jeff had to take Policy Training (read Big Tech-approved thought correction).
This isn’t the first time this has happened to Jeff. Back in October 2024, his video on setting up Jellyfin on a NAS was taken down for the same reason. Luckily, that time, YouTube accepted his appeal.
After being published on my channel for over two years, YouTube put a strike on my channel for my video showing people how to set up Jellyfin on their NAS, for promoting "dangerous or harmful content" pic.twitter.com/xs6mbrOFv3
— Jeff Geerling (@geerlingguy) October 2, 2024
📋Jeff's removed LibreELEC video is currently available on archive.org for anyone interested in watching it.
It's scary seeing all this; we at It's FOSS also publish self-hosting content, and if posting such content on YouTube means that our channel gets those damned strikes, then we might have to hold back on posting such content.
If you ask me, YouTube has become too big and arrogant to listen to independent creators. If it were some rich multinational corporation in the same situation, they would let it pass.
Sure, people could move away to more liberal/open platforms like PeerTube, but the audience there is too fragmented and small to sustain creators financially. Things just aren’t quite there yet.
As for Jeff, he plans to keep going, slowly moving content to Floatplane while facing the harsh reality that YouTube’s reach and revenue still play a crucial role in enabling him to create new content.
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