I’m adding a new social media platform after the holidays. Actually I’ve already set it up, just haven’t used it yet. But let me backtrack a bit first…
A big project this month was the Christmas Songs page. Not only did I want to provide a good variety of songs and styles, but I also wanted to avoid YouTube. As you may (or may not) know, the reason I started this site was to have a hub where I could share with my family and friends as I gave up various Big Tech social media platforms. During this time I’ve also sought out alternative platforms where I could meet friends and socialize online as I was used to doing. So in my search for Christmas songs I have discovered some really wonderful video sharing sites!
As is posted at the top of each of my vlogs, I put links to the sites on which I’m sharing my videos; I have not only gotten to know and enjoy the company of others who use these platforms but they have filled that YouTube gap. These are Savior Connect, GabTV, and Rumble. What you see here on my blog are embedded videos from another site; not only does this enable me to introduce my readers to the other great video platforms that are out there, but also saves a ton of space and bandwidth on my server.
(I have hosted owly.net on the same server for 20 years now. I love this hosting service for a lot of reasons, and pay for the maximum amount of server space and bandwidth that was offered at the time I started hosting this Word Press site there. Since my blog is self-hosted, all of my files and other Word Press flotsam and jetsam are on ICDSoft. So I like to keep file sizes at a minimum, and also embed my videos from other video sharing sites rather than keeping them on my owly.net server.)
Though I haven’t been posting a lot of vlogs lately – my Advent/Christmas studies and posts take a lot of my time this month – I’m sure I’ll be back up to speed with 1-2 videos per week after December. So after seeing a whole lot of sites while looking up Christmas songs, and being quite impressed by almost all of them (who needs YouTube?), I decided to start an account on Odysee as well.
Odysee is a video sharing platform that’s run on the LBRY network, and it is decentralized. (That’s a GOOD thing!) The other 3 platforms on which I host my vlogs are all centralized, and I needed an alternative. There are others, but at this point in time I believe I have enough :). I’m not sure whether I will continue to embed my vlogs here from Rumble, as I have been doing, or try Odysee; in the end it won’t matter to you, unless it doesn’t work. (Some had trouble, for example, watching those that were embedded from Gab.tv.) But that’s why I list the options, sharing my channels on each of the platforms in case you can’t watch a video when you click on it…in the end, that’s all that matters is that the videos on this blog play when you want them to, right? (And that won’t change. In fact when you come here to watch my videos you won’t notice anything different!)
I’m totally enjoying lots of video sites and videos that don’t involve Google’s YouTube. And in my quest to disengage from Big Tech I’ve successfully left them all and am now working on Google. I stopped using their search engine long ago, and left YouTube at the start of this year. I have moved my telephone/texting services to another provider away from Voice, and am laboriously moving my Google Drive and Google Photos elsewhere too. As those are the only services I use of theirs, anything that requires data from me (that I have any control over) will be gone, and I will consider myself independent of Big Tech. (Then we will work on some other things…another story…) But there are many MANY sites, and more decentralized options all the time, that can get rid of all of the problems and issues that “the big guys” are causing their users (whether said users are aware of it or not!).
If you’re following the Christmas Songs I’ve been posting then you’ve already “visited” Odysee. But take a look around, you might like what you see!
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