DeGoogle Yourself

I’ve been using Nebula for years.

It depends, first check the creators there to see if you are already watching them on YouTube.

There is no algorithm, that for me is a plus but for some people it is a downside.

Some creators add a little extra in their videos that is not in the YouTube version, others add companion videos to the main one that is only on Nebula.

It's a good platform, but it absolutely does not cover the same breadth of content as YouTube. To me, Nebula feels a bit more like old-school discovery channel before it got all crappy. I pay for Nebula, but I still watch 99% of my online video on YouTube. Of the range of different types of content I watch on YouTube, I'd say Nebula covers about 5% of it. It is pretty nice for when a creator is dealing with copyright bullshit on YouTube, but I can still watch the video on Nebula.

It is a good platform definitely worthwhile the money. Especially if you already know some YouTubers who are on Nebula. I just wish you could turn off all political content. I just don‘t believe that political journalism / creator economy / influencers mix well together. This is true for YouTube as well, but because Nebula has less content there are more often recommended.

No. Nebula is a Zionist platform. They kicked Second Thought because he wasn't pro-Israel enough.

Peertube is a decentralized alternative but currently there's not that much activity.

There's also DropOut.tv, which has many comedians from the former College Humor comedy group.

DropOut.tv doesn't really do educational content, but their funny stuff is unrivaled and very varied. Their game show, Game Changer is the best thing happening to streaming, right now.

There's even a (fan) DropOut bot here on Lemmy that creates dedicated threads for the dozen or so of us DropOut fans to discuss episodes when they drop.

And both DropOut and Nebula now have deep back catalogs. I few years ago I felt like I could run out of things to watch. Now I only ever rewatch favorite episodes. Most Game Changer episodes are good enough to watch twice, and then watch the "making of" video afterwards.

It's still not YouTube where it's impossible to watch anything. DropOut has a new high quality episode of a flagship show most week days.

Nebula is more like YouTube, where between all the different creators, there's usually more new content available in a given day than I could consume, if I wanted to.

Curiousity Stream is also an alternative to YouTube. The video quality feels lower across the board than Nebula or DropOut, but it also has some fun stuff, and any competition to YouTube is probably a good thing.

Nebula is a fantastic alternative to YouTube.

It seems like they pay their creators much better, which is enough reason alone, for some of us.

Nearly every video on Nebula has a nice little extra for Nebula viewers. Most are just a quick thank-you, but some are much more substantial.

Legal Eagle sometimes fully drops lawyer mode in post-video bits for Nebula subscribers. This amuses me because I wasn't sure he could before I joined Nebula. Haha.

Extra History and Extra Credits often have full extra videos on vaguely related topics, I think.

And Nebula is amazingly good for travel videos. Anyone who loves trains should at least try Nebula.

DropOut is my goto for humor, but Abolish Everything on Nebula also regularly provides a solid laugh. Also, DropOut and Nebula folks cameo across companies a bit. No non-compete agrrents there, I suspect.

Obviously, Nebula has much smaller set of content creators, than YouTube.

I appreciate that too though. Average video quality is way higher.

Define a valid alternative. As a consumer, is it a valid source for high quality, educational, and non-bigoted content? Yes. Is it a full replacement for YouTube? No. Primarily because Nebula is invite-only. You can't just sign up for an account with Nebula and start posting content. You first have to have an account somewhere else (almost certainly YouTube.) Then once you get a good enough following, if you pass a vibe check, you can get invited to Nebula. It's a "don't call us, we'll call you" situation.

There's also less community engagement on Nebula. There's no comment section under the videos. I can understand why they chose to not have comments. But from time to time I actually do like commenting on YouTube videos and often receive good replies, sometimes even from the video creators themselves.

Don't get me wrong, I love Nebula. I've been a paid subscriber there for several years. It's just not a one-to-one replacement for all aspects of YouTube. Like with any DeGoogling option, there are going to be some tradeoffs.

I’m a nebula subscriber, I like the idea and I will try to watch stuff on that over the same video on YouTube, but if I’m brutally honest I probably watch a good 20x as much YT as I do nebula. It just doesn’t have enough of the stuff I want to see, and a lot of what I try to watch on there just doesn’t do it for me.

YMMV.

No idea what Nebula is. There are lots of good Youtube front ends (I use newpipe) but all are unauthorized and all inherently are nearly useless without the video collection residing on Youtube servers. They in fact break quite often because of changes at the YT backend. So far they've managed to recover from the breakages, but that's not guaranteed to last. It's an unpleasant situation.