[jrockway]

I think the important thing is to have a mitigation strategy. Google was very smart in how they commoditized cloud offerings by inventing Kubernetes. You can explode your manifests into GCP, you can explode your manifests into AWS, and it mostly works the same. Obviously you can really screw yourself by not having offsite backups (backup your GCP database into AWS, or vice-versa), or by using their proprietary stuff (Cloud Spanner, AWS Aurora). But if you're careful, you're in control, and the cloud provider is just a commodity that you pick based on price and nothing else. As an application developer, that's a great place to be.

(Similarly, I use Gmail for my e-mail, but I control the MX records. So if I get kicked off for whatever reason, I can be back up and running in no time.)

YouTube creators, however, do not have this luxury. People watch YouTube videos because they happened to be on YouTube and YouTube suggested the video, not because the end user was looking for your videos specifically. Social networks and video sharing sites are appealing to creators because there is the chance that The Algorithm (I hate that term) will award them with eyeballs that they can then sell to advertisers for very little effort. That is something you can't just migrate off of, because there are no competitors. You might convince your Patreon supporters to follow you, but even that is uncertain. I have watched many streamers move off of Twitch because they got a better deal from a competitor, only to watch their viewership drop to nothing until they were able to move back to Twitch. If one of these video sharing sites shuts you down, your career is over. Google kills your GCP account, you can still be a software engineer.

So my TL;DR is that cloud computing is very different from being an independent creator. Computers are a dime a dozen, and it doesn't matter which ones you use. But video sharing platforms give you a free audience, and that is something that is very hard to build yourself.

[ISL]

Perhaps the mitigation strategy for youtubers is to find something like RSS for video?

"Like this video, subscribe, and don't forget to add this channel to your video-RSS feed. Link in the description below." ?

Edit: Looks like this functionality already exists: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6224202?hl=en

Looks like Vimeo does too: https://help.rasa.io/hc/en-us/articles/360045535193-How-to-c...

[sascha_sl]

Non-technical users want easy solutions, and they need to be invested enough in your content to pass whatever barrier you put there. Projects like Floatplane[1] only capture a tiny segment of your audience.

Personally, I'd try a simple app that OAuths from YouTube/Google accounts and collects an email, so you control content announcements, even in case YouTube fails. It also has the advantage of being independent from other social media platforms.

[1]: https://www.floatplane.com/

[dddddaviddddd]

> Similarly, I use Gmail for my e-mail, but I control the MX records. So if I get kicked off for whatever reason, I can be back up and running in no time.

I do the same, and also back up my email regularly with getmail so that it will be easy to transfer, either if Google arbitrarily locks my account, or if they just shut down Gmail for good.

I wish there was a good solution to similarly back up Google Photos -- only partial metadata is exposed via the API.

[trentdk]

Insightful, thanks.