Self-hosting your own media considered harmful - I just received my second community guidelines violation for my video demonstrating the use of LibreELEC on a Raspberry Pi 5, for 4K video playback

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/self-hosting-your-own-media-considered-harmful

YouTube pulled a popular tutorial video from tech creator Jeff Geerling this week, claiming his guide to installing LibreELEC on a Raspberry Pi 5 violated policies against “harmful content.” The video, which showed viewers how to set up their own home media servers, had been live for over a year and racked up more than 500,000 views. YouTube’s automated systems flagged the content for allegedly teaching people “how to get unauthorized or free access to audio or audiovisual content.”

Geerling says his tutorial covered only legal self-hosting of media people already own – no piracy tools or copyright workarounds. He said he goes out of his way to avoid mentioning popular piracy software in his videos. It’s the second time YouTube has pulled a self-hosting content video from Geerling. Last October, YouTube removed his Jellyfin tutorial, though that decision was quickly reversed after appeal. This time, his appeal was denied.

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Buelldozer@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
This kind of crap is driving popular creators, like Geerling, to move to other places. YT / Alphabet has lost the plot.

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- JasonDJ@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Yep. Most of my favorite creators are on Nebula now.
  
  The ones that aren’t get watched on SmartTube or in Brave Browser.
  
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  - Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Hypocritical Lemmy… Preaching (F) OSS and then using Brave… LoL!
    
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  - glimse@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I love Nebula. I go there to watch Nebula Exclusives but it’s not great for browsing or discovering new channels…I found everyone I subscribe to on YouTube first
    
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  - brachiosaurus@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    Nebula
    
    Closed source, centralized and not even free…
    
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- finitebanjo@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I tried a couple of other platforms but I keep running into a moderation issue where the other platforms market to the sort of people who would be permanently banned from YouTube.
  
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db2@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Sue YouTube. They won’t change meaningfully until forced to.

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- partial_accumen@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Sue for defamation that Youtube are alleging he is promoting criminal activity of piracy.
  
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  - Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I mean maybe if YT said that? The only thing they said is that it’s “harmful” somehow. And they won’t elaborate anymore than that.
    
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  - FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    YouTube didn’t publicly make that claim though, so they haven’t done any defamation.
    
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- YurkshireLad@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Like google, I’m sure Jeff has a near unlimited supply of money to pay lawyers.
  
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  - wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    But being a pushover is not the answer, so…
    
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- fodor@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I think what you mean to say is that we should be pressuring public officials to try to bust up Google’s monopoly on many things. And we are doing that, and it is showing some progress. But there is much more work to be done.
  
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Duamerthrax@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

“how to get unauthorized or** free access to audio or audiovisual content**.”

In the future, public domain media will be banned for harming corporate profits.

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- MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  In the 1970s/80s, the corporations just taxed blank media - because it was obviously used to pirate their warez.
  
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  - Wispy2891@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    70s? My country every year still steals from everyone millions of euro “because that phone can be used to watch pirated content”
    
    We pay 7 euro on each smartphone, 7.50 on each USB drive, up to 18 euro on each internal drive (sata or name, but under 160gb is free) and products are castrated with regional firmware because if it’s just a TV then it’s 4 euro tax, but if it allows recording it’s the 5% of MSRP
    
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  - Duamerthrax@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Pretty sure you also had to pay royalties fees for radio/Internet radio regardless of where or not you played their music.
    
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- rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Yeah, people who thought Google wasn’t openly strangling the free (as in libre) stuff because they weren’t that evil - these people just have bad memory. In year 2012 it clearly felt that corps, Google and Facebook and MS and Apple and everyone, are on the move to capture it all without a way out. They kinda made the illusion of being softer later.
  
  So the question is - how do we even advertise legal but unpleasant for them things, avoiding their censorship.
  
  The devices are sold together with the operating system (often unchangeable) and packaged applications and means of installing software, right from the markets.
  
  I mean, I have a solution. It’s counterintuitive and seems unconnected, and too direct, but I guarantee you it’ll work.
  
  Forbidding companies to do moderation or refuse to accept content without technical problems, or banned content (CP and such), and similar good justifications. As in - if your service is up, and there’s user content served from it, it shouldn’t be removed without legal substantiation. It doesn’t matter it’s free, that doesn’t mean you can do all you like. You are not a media outlet, you are a platform for many media, that’s how you work in fact, so yes, your actions do constitute censorship if you do moderation. If you can’t afford to keep it free with such rules, then start charging money for hosting, as it normally should have been.
  
  And, of course, this should include public offering status, the prices should be the same for all users.
  
  I mean, if we had this from the beginning, we’d probably still have the Web like in year 2003.
  
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GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Notably, Youtube does not consider exploiting children for profit harmful.

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- SpaceCadet@feddit.nl ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Harmful is just code for “threatens the bottom line of multibillion dollar companies”. There is no relation to anything that matters to real people.
  
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- moseschrute@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I made a very similar joke like this on Reddit, except it was about Waymo, and Reddit issues a warning against my account threatening a permanent ban.
  
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  - qevlarr@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Let them. Trust me, you’ll feel much better
    
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- JigglySackles@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Because there is profit in child exploitation.
  
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bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
They are so pissed that we dare own anything. Fuck corpos.

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outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Maybe stop relying on fucking youtube?

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- Zwrt@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Are you suggesting that a guide on how to leave youtube should be elsewhere?
  
  Thats like requiring to pass an exam to get access to the textbook.
  
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- itslola@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Who, Jeff? He made a whole video a while back about how he doesn’t rely on YouTube, and is also on Floatplane. However, he acknowledges that a lot of viewers can’t afford a subscription service, and YT has a massive reach, so he still uploads there, too.
  
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- isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Gotta preach where the choir is.
  
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SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Google should have been broken up years ago.

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drmoose@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
People are quick to burn Youtube here when its clearly the american copyright reach that causes this.

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- fodor@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  YouTube took down the video because of its own policies, not because of copyright law. So we should be blaming YouTube.
  
  I think it’s easy to see exactly why if you consider how YouTube treats small content creators. If I post a video and companies claim copyright on it, the video gets demonetized and I might lose my account. I can respond and contest the claim and maybe I can win but I still lost money in the meantime, and perhaps more significantly, the companies that made their copyright claims will never face a consequence for attempting to burn my channel. In other words, if I get things wrong a few times I’ll lose my channel and my income source, but if they get things wrong a million times, they face zero consequence.
  
  And you might be inclined to blame the media companies. But again, this is YouTube doing what YouTube wants to do of its own volition, and not something that’s required by law. If YouTube valued small-scale content creators and end users, it would create different policies.
  
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- MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Youtube (under Google)'s implementation of US copyright considerations is a huge problem above and beyond the abomination that is the copyright law itself.
  
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- Hack3900@lemy.lol ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I think it’s both, a dumb system enforced in a somehow dumber way
  
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nibbler@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
you say in the video that you use this setup to watch YouTube. I love watching YouTube with Kodi as it shows no ads. I guess they don’t love that.

I’m not saying that justifies the strike, but it might be connected

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- RhondaSandTits@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  I love watching YouTube with Kodi as it shows no ads. I guess they don’t love that.
  
  Image
  
  This scene from A Clockwork Orange is how I view Google’s attitude of entitlement when it comes to exposing people to ads.
  
  No sir, you don’t have the freedom to decide what gets displayed on your screens and even if you don’t block ads, you must not ignore them or put the volume on mute while they play.
  
  Are those ads promoting scams? Are those ads delivering malware to your computer? Stiff shit buddy! You must view the ads.
  
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- MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  The problem is that LibreELEC is piracy-adjacent. So you get these bogus take-downs because different people draw the line differently, and fighting a legal battle is 1000x as expensive as the outcome is worth to most people.
  
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  - l_isqof@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Using the Internet is piracy adjacent, by your hypothesis.
    
    That’s just bullshit.
    
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- REDACTED@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Didn’t they recently greenlight adblocker advertising?
  
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Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Perhaps this can a driver of sorts for Peertube.

It’s a good thing that I can’t stand video tutorials or reviews (with the exception of video games).

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- avidamoeba@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I think so. A relatively small subset of the video upload firehose at YouTube who produce rewatchable content is going to require a lot less resources to provide than doing a free-for-all upload-anything video. This might actually be feasible.
  
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fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
JG can also be found on Floatplane.

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- propitiouspanda@lemmy.cafe ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  What about Peertube?
  
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  - fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I’m a fan of PeerTube, but it’s… rough. Discoverability is subpar and many instances are bandwidth constrained. Video streaming is still a bulk-hosting game unfortunately.
    
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oz1sej@feddit.dk ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The video is up again:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hFas54xFtg

But at some point, he shows he’s moving some files to LibreELEC, and he has a folder called “Chernobyl” - how can that possibly be legal, if the folder actually contains files with the HBO show of the same name? Just asking because I’m curious 😊

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- LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_(miniseries)
  
  It was released on DVD and Blu-ray, if he purchased the disc and ripped it to his media, and hasn’t shared those files with anyone, then it is legal, as an exception to copyright in the US, where Jeff and Google are both based.
  
  Jeff has stated on multiple occasions that he purchases and rips his media, and does not use piracy.
  
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  - Zenith@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Also like… you can legally just name your file wtf ever you want, I can make a folder full of pics of my dogs “Chernobyl” it’s not illegal to use a word to name a file
    
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  - oz1sej@feddit.dk ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Ah - didn’t know it had been released on physical media.
    
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  - Tiger666@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Ripping is illegal as well. DVD and BlueRay decoders are highly illegal.
    
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- Mio@feddit.nu ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  You don’t know the exact content of the files. He did not show those vidoeclips. I dont know if you can buy that or not. Sure it can be indication but in general you dont know as it varies between video to video if it is possible to buy.
  
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- oo1@lemmings.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  It is probably just a video he’s making about how to self-host a 3GW nuclear power station, so that you can self-host a hundred million raspberry pi cluster.
  
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TheGreenWizard@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Everyone who is capable of hosting a peertube instance should do so, even if it’s just to host your own content. I know, “it will never replace youtube” but if as many people as possible use it and share bandwidth between each other we will at least have SOMETHING in terms of a youtube alternative.

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Jimmycakes@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Because self hosting is getting cheaper and easier while average internet upload speeds are crazy high for the home user. Of course Google is scared.

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- Deello@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Cries in single digit upload speeds
  
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  - AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Just use another unit. It’s an easy fix.
    
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  - Jimmycakes@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Single digit??? Let me guess spectrum?
    
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dhork@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I think ripping DVDs is still technically illegal, even though CSS has long since been broken. It is still illegal to circumvent encryption in a copy protection scheme, even if it’s for your own personal use and the encryption scheme has been pwned.

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- isgleas@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Iirc, you are entitled to have/create a backup of your physical media, as long as it is for your personal use.
  
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  - dhork@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    But if I remember from back in the day, the DMCA doesn’t have any exception for that. This is why CD ripping was legal, while DVD ripping was not. It had nothing to do with fair use or backups, but rather that DVDs have encryption, and CDs do not. Circumventing that encryption for any reason was illegal.
    
    I don’t think it has changed, but it’s been a hot minute since the Cypherpunks all wore DeCSS T-Shirts…
    
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- Anafabula@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Depends on the country
  
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  - psud@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    And beyond the law it depends also on enforcement
    
    The US doesn’t give a right to break Bluray copy protection and make a personal backup or access it on a device that otherwise couldn’t play it. But the only enforcement is on people sharing copies, no one is prosecuted for format shifting their collection to play over their LAN
    
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Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Was it YouTube or someone else that reported him? I think YouTube is fully automated so it blocked him and is ignoring appeal because of the previous complaint.

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who@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The use of “self-hosting” is a little confusing here. To be clear, he wasn’t self-hosting the video. It was on YouTubek, and the guidelines and procedures in question are Google’s.

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- gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  The use of “self-hosting” is a little confusing here.
  
  Not really, no. The video topic was about self-hosting your own media server, so the title is perfectly clear
  
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- JcbAzPx@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  You’re being downvoted for being factually wrong about the title. It’s not targeted negativity.
  
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  - sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    To add on, the video is about self hosting, it was not self hosted itself.
    
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- MehBlah@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Its just confusing to you.
  
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