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Is this arguably anticompetitive and illegal?
Nobody can even state that it’s actually happening “for competitive browsers” as even Chrome users are reporting an unexplained lag/slowdown. At this point, it’s just wild speculation and bandwagoning.
You absolutely can tell what’s happening by reading the source code. They are using a listener and a delay for when
ontimeupdatepromise is not met, which timeouts the entire connection for 5 full seconds.I’m sorry but I don’t see how that check is browser-specific. Is that part happening on the browser side?
They don’t need to put incriminating “if Firefox” statements in their code – the initial page request would have included the user agent and it would be trivial to serve different JavaScript based on what it said.
Easy enough to test though. Load the page with a UA changer and see if it still shows up when Firefox pretends to be Chrome
The video in the linked article does just that. The page takes 5 seconds to load the video, the user changes the UA, they refresh the page and suddenly the video loads instantly. I would have liked to see them change the UA back to Firefox to prove it’s not some weird caching issue though
Yeah, and also Edge or an older version of Chrome etc just to be sure.
I guess his question is “is that happening?”
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I don’t know, nor am I speculating. The person I was replying to said they didn’t see a browser check in the code, which isn’t enough to dismiss it.
Well, at least I learned that javascript understands exponential notation. I never even bothered to try that lol
Can I have ublock block that? It seems simple enough to extract that code out.
It’s not wild speculation as there is compelling, if incomplete, evidence. And to describe everyone’s reaction as “bandwagoning” is ridiculous. Firefox and Mullvad are my daily drivers. This directly impacts me. The fediverse is going to have a disproportionate number of non-chrome users.
I also use FF solely and have no slowdowns on YT. I guess they like my copy of the browser.
I’ve duplicated it on 4 machines across 3 OS’s (windows 11, macOS, steamOS). Glad you got lucky. I’m sure you’re also familiar with A/B testing but if not I’m happy to explain it.
It is absolutely possible there is a reasonable explanation but for you to say 1) nothing is happening and 2) it’s “bandwagoning” is, again, ridiculous. Especially if your evidence is “well mine is fine,” which is not acceptable troubleshooting procedure.
Not all regions are served with the same scripts. That’s why the ad-block pop-up was shown for some users but not for others or at a later time for others. This also affected the update cycle of those anti-adblock scripts.
The reason for that is quite simple. New stuff is rolled out to only some users at first as some sort of beta testing procedure. If many people complain about functionality issues and all of those have the new version of the script, Google knows there is something wrong with it.
“works fine on my machine lol” is unhelpful and useless.
It’s very well known that Google makes heavy use of a/b testing. They did it with the adblock block and they’re doing it with this
“It happens all the time” and “they always do *” is also comically unhelpful and useless. I’m getting a pot/kettle vibe from those that seem to take offense at my comment.
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There’s been multiple posts pointing to some possibly “wait for ads to finish loading” type code. It’s quite possible that it’s just bugged in Firefox etc since browsers are horrendously inconsistent etc.
But that doesn’t make a cool headline so instead the “it’s Google being evil” story is the popular one.
it was already made public in the lawsuit some weeks ago that they are indeed slowing down youtube for firefox.
Link?
Source?
I’ve read a lot on this and never saw any conclusive claim here.
There were claims many years ago by Mozilla about this, and it had to do with slow APIs in Mozilla that YouTube was using…
There’s also been many known performance issues in a lot of the APIs/libraries Google/YouTube use on Mozilla for many years. And Mozilla just hasn’t been able to keep up.
I don’t see anything about this in recent history, because everything is just floods of people complaining about this round, with still no conclusive evidence that this is happening intentionally. YouTube is currently on a ad-block-blocker crusade and their code keeps changing and there’s nothing to conclusively indicate that this is malice and not just a bug in the way Mozilla performs.
So as much as everyone seems happy to burn the witch because of poor performance, I’m not ready to jump to that conclusion until there’s actually evidence of this being intentional. Especially when this smells a lot like a long standing different problem. “Someone said they are” is not going to convince me. Especially if you can’t even point to that someone saying that thing.
Where’s the proof? Note: I didn’t read the article
Then read it?
no thanks… I havent had any issues… been using firefox since v1.0
I don’t really understand what you’re trying to do lol
Ok
I mean you’re saying you want proof, don’t read the article, then say you don’t care because it works for you. Do you not understand why that’s a little perplexing?
Then why did you ask for proof lol
Don’t worry, there isn’t proof in the article either. There’s a snippet of code out of context, and a video that, while it shows a loading delay, doesn’t show the code being executed.
Ya. This whole thing is very silly, and it’s really sad how little critical thinking is going on here.
How short are our attention spans that we make judgments based on things we didn’t read?
Get off TikTok It’s breaking your brain
You can literally see it for yourself. Download Firefox, download Chrome. It will literally take you 5 minutes to test this out
Been using Firefox since v1
So Alphabet:
-
is the developer the most used browser (chrome) and its open source skeleton (chromium) on which most of all of the other browsers are based on (edge, brave etc)
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has the most used video platform online, with no close second (unless you count porn, but i’d still argue its not close)
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has the biggest share of devices relying on its platform worldwide (android)
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has the most used search engine worldwide.
Alphabet has to be split up. Alphabet alone is deciding what shape internet will take in the future.
is the developer the most used browser (chrome) and its open source skeleton (chromium) on which most of all of the other browsers are based on (edge, brave etc)
Which was branched from Apple’s open Webkit base, but let’s all also forget about that.
They take the IP of others, spin it a bit and then block everyone. Burn them down.
Acting like Apple didn’t do the same thing with khtml to make WebKit.
The inevitable fate of any useful software that’s not GPL.
When will people learn???
Edit: Ironically, KHTML was originally LGPL. So modifications to KHTML were required to be open source by the license, but Chrome itself isn’t required to be open source (at least as far as I understand it, I am not an expert here). Nevertheless, if it were stronger GPL, then it probably wouldn’t have been impossible to write features like DRM in chrome. So I would have been a bit of an idiot to say that KHTML isn’t GPL (because LGPL is a weaker version of GPL), but in effect, the outcome is the same - all because of that big fat L at the beginning.
They didn’t do anything of the sort. We don’t need to endlessly recite the history of everything developed. If you want to call attention to it go right ahead but they didn’t give Apple a pass.
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They totally do though. You can ONLY use webkit on any iOS device. Chrome, Firefox, etc. they all are forced to use webkit on iOS. Neither Google or Apple are treating the web nicely, but at least you have a choice to use a different browser. Apple makes that effectively impossible.
Also you can’t really use Apple TV properly without an Apple device. Same with iCloud. Actually really any service they make only works properly with their full stack.
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I want Firefox (with its engine, not webkit) on my phone. With Apple that’s not possible
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All of those are meaningless peanuts versus
- Owns the biggest (borderline only) web ad service in the world
My long bet: The EU will force Google Search + Ads, to separate from Youtube within a decade.
God bless the EU. Actually protecting its consumers
-
It’s fucking incredible watching Google change from a fairly well-liked company into essentially fucking Comcast. Fucking incredible.
Unchecked capitalism is a real motherfucker ain’t it?
See also checked capitalism.
Change from? I doubt they will stop being a fairly well hliked company in my lifetime
Well I’ve gone from being entirely indifferent to strongly disliking Google. I am actively and somewhat successfully in the process of de-googling. I encourage my friends to do the same, with some success. I think the writing is on the wall. Google seems to have no desire to maintain any sort of goodwill or positive feeling amongst the general public, whom it clearly views as a naturally occurring resource rather than a customer base. Nobody can predict the future but I don’t have a good feeling about the future of the company. Perhaps they will be able to diversify, but their recent actions show both that they deeply misunderstand their product and also that they lack good ideas about how to progress and evolve as an organisation. Fuck Google. All my homies hate Google.
The hardest part of ‘de-googling’ is the stranglehold it has on email. Between them and microsoft, I’ve only seen a few companies (small to medium size) that don’t use one of those two as the email. It’s mind-boggling. If either of them ever got testy, they could bring entire sectors down just by using the information stored in emails on.
Again? I remember they did this years ago when releasing Chrome.
Incidentally, I dropped Youtube’s web app like a rock when they started messing with adblockers and today they emailed me to say they’re cutting down features in my account because “I don’t have enough of a history”.
I swear, these decaying tech firms just don’t get the value of not appearing to be flailing in desperation.
hey’re cutting down features in my account because “I don’t have enough of a history”.
any idea what this actually means?
What features are they cutting down?
Is this a free account?
I had the same email, it’s creator-related features. So if you don’t produce content it shouldn’t affect anything
I received the same notification on my artist account. I can’t remember everything, but it was something like daily upload limits for videos and shorts and other creator related stuff. I don’t think there’s anything related to just basic usage features.
They take away the ability to include links in video descriptions. That’s still not related to watching videos, but it seems like a legit eff you to small content creators.
Oh yeah I forgot about that. That’s definitely a big issue. I think you can’t also pin comments.
they turn off video recommendations if your watch history isn’t on
This is a plus for me. I don’t want them to recommend me anything. I don’t trust them not to recommend me stuff that’s going to piss me off.
Their recommendations engine seems to stuck on “50 more of exactly the last thing you watched, plus a dash of right-wing conspiracy nonsense.”
Once I made the mistake of looking up how to change the oil on my Kawasaki Vulcan without being in incognito. Now half of my recommendations are how to perform maintenance on motorcycles that I’ll never own. And ads for Harley Davidson. A company whose business model is converting gasoline into noise.
I just use youtube-dl now and have it go to my NAS. It’s not easier then going to the website, per se. But now the video lives on my storage and it won’t go away after a corporation’s billionth DMCA claim that hour.
Genuinely wish I had done this a decade ago on my favorite articles. Link rot is getting worse and worse and YouTube is the absolute worst.
Turns out when you stop using it the recommendations become more and more unhinged and take on a slight pleading tone.
It’s weird and kinda satisfying to watch, honestly.
For me it’s "oh? You really like this creator? Be careful not to binge their backlog all at once! I think you’ve had enough. Let me hide the rest of their content for you so you’re not tempted
Hey, how about this news show where the guys stand instead of sitting, and wear normal clothes? They still awkwardly read off a teleprompter and have a very shallow understanding of the topics, but come on, you should watch them again. I know their shrill, forced, voices make you cringe and exit the video as fast as you can, but let me put that up next on auto play for you again
All I have left to say about Google and Youtube in particular is that Youtubes ads have become so problematic, both in amount and quality (like seriously, people get banned for using innocuous words in videos targeted at adult audiences, yet completely fucked up ads are squarely targeted at children) and at this point, it’s time for YouTube to die.
A new platform needs to come along.
Which will be hard since Google has such a stranglehold on the datacenter and backbone level that they have an absolute advantage when it comes to bandwidth and storage costs. Which is the main cost for video platforms like YouTube.
The only thing stopping a viable replacement for YouTube is the servers, google essentially has an infinite amount of server space, you would have to match them on that, decentralization would help bare the load, but there will become a time when even those servers will need to dramatically expand their server count.
It’s not just storage capacity either. Google uses custom silicon just to keep up with all the transcoding.
https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/new-era-video-infrastructure/
At the time that article was released (April 2021), users were uploading over 500 hours of video per minute.
Yeah, I don’t think people understand quite how astronomical an undertaking it is to replace this shit. People like to quote things like AWS, but AWS is a) expensive and b) general purpose. As such, it might be able to solve the problem, but not nearly as efficiently. It would cost you proportionally WAY MORE than Google is paying to keep YT alive, so that gives you an extra giant hurdle on top of the other complexity.
Web hosting with low latency is hard. Huge data storage is hard. Transcodinf is hard. Constant uptime is hard. Search is hard. Recommendations are hard. Making it profitable is hard. Starting an ad service that isn’t googles is hard. Convincing content creators to move there is hard. Convincing consumers to look there is hard. Sure, any of these problems have remotely comparable analogs. But you have to solve all of them simultaneously to get anywhere near competing with YouTube. And since Google owns the whole “stack”, it’s much cheaper for them then it’ll be for you.
Kick probably makes a decent comparison here. But they’re A) solving a subset of the problem B) fighting against a company that has extremely clear problems (arguably much worse than YouTube) C) is in a tech savvy-er demographic D) is funded by mega-casinos with tons of money and a vested interest in the product E) fighting in a market with less inertia so viewers and creators can move easier F) fighting twitch instead if YT which is smaller and younger.
And they’re still not really all that much competition.
I think with everything that’s going on, self hosting will become kind of like a smartphone, everyone has a server. Then the creators host files, and you transcode them on your hardware
Not gonna happen
The delay also does not trigger just once; it is reportedly triggered every time YouTube links are opened in a new tab.
This part got me yesterday as I was listening to music. I loaded a new video in a tab and the other tab waited 5 seconds. I thought I had paused it or something but nope, every time you load a new tab it delays all the other tabs by 5 seconds.
This is the exact reason I don’t trust anything hosted online. If it’s something I want to enjoy more than once, I download it.
Companies hosting things online tend to become authoritarian dictators in all but name, which is their right as they own the services and hardware. But it almost always makes the end user experience shitty and overly complicated, or filled with spyware, or requires you give away your rights to privacy or lawsuit, etc…
So if there’s a song or something that I like online, I’m downloading that and keeping it on my computer to listen to whenever I feel like it. I don’t have the time or energy to play games with these greedy ass corporations.
And the ironic part is, that while they would absolutely froth the mouth about me doing this, they’re the ones that drove me to it. It feels like an emotionally abusive relationship, are they keep making our just a man some gaslighting me, then getting angry when I fight back or tell them no.
I would at least partially challenge they own the service and hardware if only because they are using taxpayer funded internet infrastructure.
Hm.
I think you probably have a point there. Not sure about the details and nuance, 'cause I’m not that smart, but there is something there.
It’s pretty simple actually. Big companies took billions upon billions of dollars in federal subsidies and grants handed out to them via taxation of the public, then when they got just about done building the thing they spent all our money on, they erected a nice shiny gate at the front and charged us admission. But not before
bribingdonating tocriminalspoliticians to ensure zero competition or risk to their non-investment. It’s rampant capitalism defined.It’s definitely nuanced and like I said it’s sort of an “ehhh kinda” statement haha so your pause is warranted
Oh, dang, that was civil and anticlimactic of us. Um…
I mean:
How dare you! This is the internet. You’re supposed to immediately call me Hitler for…reasons. This slight shall not stand. Expect a strongly worded letter from my emissary forthwith. Good day!
GOOD DAY
It it legal? I remember when China’s tech giants started infighting and the party ended up dividing them and phorbiding them to do so.
They where creating tech exclusive for their devices and internally block all other out.
I just figured if we aren’t doing it here there should be a reason. (Apple appart)
Edit:guys what I’m saying matters the orthographic mistakes can be easily attribute to my lack of interest in writing the proper queen’s English when any shit will do
I’m sorry to be the spelling guy but it’s “forbid” not “phorbid”
Do you have poor spelling fobia?
I’m sorry to be the spelling guy but it’s “phobia” not “fobia”
Woosh goes the joke over your head. ✈️
I think they got it and didn’t give a phuck.
I’m sorry to be the spelling guy but it’s “Whoosh” knot “Woosh”
Na, I understood the joke just fine. If you were here when I replied my joke to the joke, you would know that the post I replied to had negative votes until I made my joke. Then everyone else realized that they were making a joke and started giving them upvotes. Have a good day.
Keep phighting the good phight ✊
iwouldfightforyou.jpg
Hahaha ce la vi
If it’s happening it’s not doing so for everyone. I use Firefox and I have never seen this delay.
I haven’t experienced it either, but Google also typically rolls out changes in waves. They rarely just push to prod and call it a day. They push changes in waves, so they can pull the update or make adjustments if the early waves have issues.
They do it so we gaslight the people that have it and then it’s too late to do anything when everyone has it lol
Same.
The anti-adblock warnings only lasted a few days for me too, not seen them for a couple of weeks now.
I’d seen it in my Firefox/Win10 + uBlockO setup. I just used yt-dlp and then a uBlock “quick fixes” update sorted it.
Really? I switched from Edge to Firefox recently and YouTube slowed to the point it takes minutes to load the home page and several refreshes. Actually, most Google pages, but YouTube is the one I really use these days.
The videos themselves load fine, and of course every other website loads fine at the same time, but YouTube is nearly unusable if you can’t even get to the video in the first place.
I suspect this is less of a slowdown and more of a “we’re trying to detect adblockers and in Chrome we can do most of this check on the application level which is fast, while on Firefox we have to do it the extra slow way and we CBA to optimize any of it because the delay is to our advantage.”
Nope, in the article it shows a hard coded 5 second delay.
It’s a standard timeout function without any context. Most likely thing is that it tries to load an ad and if that doesn’t work in these 5 seconds, then the anti adblock popup is displayed. If you don’t use an adblock, the site loads instantly cause the ad is detected. If you use ublock, you see neither the ad nor the popup, so everything that’s left is a 5 seconds timeout.
While it definitely is shady coding, it’s an anti adblock “feature” caused by incompetent design and not an anti Firefox thing.
Not quite in practice. I can’t say what they are doing, but I can say, there are 3 main web addresses that must be enabled in a whitelist firewall to view YT. If these are white listed, videos will load and play but half the time the connection is terrible. However, I never see a warning message about an ad blocker. They know the difference somehow. I don’t need to run an ad blocker because I run the ultimate undesired web connection blocker. They simply manipulate my connection and it impacts things on my network even when I am no longer connected to the internet at the router by removing the wired connection. (hard booting my server/router/devices solves the problem)
It might be an anti Adblock feature caused by incompetent design, and it might be an anti Firefox thing. Or it might be something else altogether or some mixed version of the above. You don’t know, neither does anyone else.
Exactly, no one knows, but here we are on the 7th article saying Google is slowing down Firefox on purpose. That’s the least likely option by far. That would get them into multiple anti consumer and anti monopoly lawsuits while probably breaching their contract with FF at the same time. Alphabets board of advisors isn’t run by Elon musk, they know pretty much what they can get away with and wouldn’t be stupid enough to try something this big while they are already beeing monitored by the EU.
The articles clearly say that the cause is unclear and that it’s an ongoing controversy. If you had read the one for this thread you’d see that. They were very transparent about that.
You are the one here saying it’s definitely one way and not another.
it’s an anti adblock “feature” caused by incompetent design and not an anti Firefox thing.
If thats the case then they still are not able to do it even with the delay cuz they havent blocked me yet
I’m honestly not willing to give them that much benefit of the doubt at this stage. But I also acknowledge we don’t have concrete evidence of deliberate sabotage.
TBF I’ve seen a rare behavior in FF that makes some websites load slowly for no good reason (not an adblock thing). Anticompetitive either way but Google could be exploiting this bug.
I think you give them too much credit. From what I’ve seen, it’s just a setTimeout call for 5 seconds if you’re on Firefox, which is similar to what all those shady cookie popups from TrustArc do if you click “Reject all”.
This happens all the time to me on Android. Sites, especially Google searches, sometimes take 30 seconds to 2 minutes to load. It’s frustrating when I’m in a rush.
Someone should investigate deeply. My combo of a whitelist firewall on an OpenWRT variant and Graphene often has a bandwidth issue that is clearly software related only after watching something from YT. I can stop the apps manually and close everything related to browsing and the connection issue still exists. I can disconnect the internet from my router and the problem still persists. However, if I shutdown all 3 devices for a few minutes and bring them up fresh, the network connection is flawless. Something is running in memory, and I believe it is related to YT, but I lack the skills to break it down further. I like to run an AI server and it is simply useless if anything on the network has connected to YT since booting.
I’ve also noticed when family is watching YT premium (not something I use) and I am downloading a LLM from HF, the internet bandwidth of our network more than doubles on my wired connection. In between the streaming packets from YT the speed on the download jumps massively. If family is watching YT, I can actually download a LLM faster. That just seems odd to me that those are connected.
Maybe your ISP has some sort of agreement with yt?
Does that seem legitimate to you? There are many more implications below the surface with this. Yes, YT has little black boxes that cache content locally with ISPs that also means they are likely filtering all data. I don’t like that part, but I can live with it.
The idea that something is running on my device that seems to be hidden, but where I can stop the behavior by flushing the memory; that is extremely alarming. If I understand it correctly they have direct memory access for streaming video through h.264. Whatever they are doing is causing me to drop connections and impacting my WiFi signal stability even when offline doing tasks unrelated to YT. As soon as I reboot the problem is gone. I distrust them so much now that I do a hard reboot any time I watch YT. (It improves battery life as well.) This is criminal behavior if my speculative analysis is correct and they are running stuff like this in the background. I’m running a combo where I control every aspect of my network. This should not be happening in my circumstance.
Sometimes, less is more.
I would recommend trimming all your custom configuration from your router/firewall, one change at a time, until you can no longer reproduce the issue.
Or go the other way around: set up a barebones configuration, confirm the issue is resolved, and begin adding one customization at a time until it breaks.
How do your bufferbloat tests look?
https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat
It sounds like you have a lot of stateful inspection configured. YouTube’s heavy usage of QUIC (i.e. UDP transport) may not play well with your config.
And, incidentally, what does your hardware look like?
Frankly, even the most barebones router should be able to handle YouTube. I am running pfSense in an ESXi VM, with passthru Intel gigabit NICs, 2 GB reserved RAM, and 2 vCPU (shared, but with higher priority than other VMs) on a Dell desktop with a second-gen i7 that was shipped from the factory in 2012.
Yes, I am routing on decade-old hardware. And I have never seen anything like what you are describing.
YouTube should “just work.”
I am going to assume that if you’re running OpenWRT, then you are probably using a typical consumer router? Please correct me if I am wrong.
Have you by any chance tried backing up your OpenWRT config and going back to stock firmware?
I know, I know, OpenWRT is great. I have a consumer router that I flashed with it to use strictly as a wireless AP.
But consumer devices flashed with vanilla OpenWRT tend to have very, very little resources left over to handle fun configurations.
And I have a feeling some of the fun configuration might be contributing to your issues.
After further investigation, apparently one of my routers 2.4G antennae is either held low or more likely fried. Sometimes the firmware is switching the working antenna more rapidly, enough to cause server outputs to look stable but other times it sticks on transmit or receive and doesn’t toggle. Gradio is apparently not robust enough to compensate for the inconsistent connection.
It sucks because the router is from PCWRT and the dude updates and maintains the router and supplies a simplified interface. I’ve used it for years. It looks like LUCY has come a long way since I used it last. I have a couple of the same routers as the PCWRT router I was going to flash with OpenWRT, but the documentation for flashing this model is terrible. I guess I am going to need to figure out something going forward now. …so yeah, maybe not YT.
When your layer 1 problem turns into a layer 3 problem 😅
The worst part is that a Youtube Premium Subscription costs more than Netflix or other streaming providers here in Australia… And you’re basically paying for ad removal of a metric ton of low quality content (and their music service, which isn’t as good as others I found)
That being said, this might not be true (I’ve seen lots of BS online regarding browsers in the past)
And it doesn’t remove promotions by the content creators, so you’re still seeing lots of ads. Still, since my kids spend so much time on YouTube I think it’s worth reducing the amount of brain washing, but I’m definitely not happy about the pricing. It’s ridiculous when you compare it to other streaming services who also have to produce or license their content.
How about seeing YouTube adverts to then watch a video that’s entirely an advertisement for the company that’s sponsoring the YouTuber.
when the email came through for the price hike, I told my wife we should drop the family plan and use more advanced adblocking and invidous etc - apparently my demo didn’t pass the wife and children test… so guess who’s continuing to pay for YT Premium?
Can you ditch the wife and kids?
J/K
That’s actually my suggestion. Clearly the wife is nuts
I post videos a few times a year to share events with family. I just posted a few yesterday. I can’t in good faith continue to post to YT and encourage my family to use it as the platform declares war on their users.
But what else is there that allows me to post videos for free and my family can just watch them without having to install a new app, register for yet another service or configure some obscure plug in?
There’s other services, but they’re populated largely by the sort of people Youtube has kicked off entirely, which some people don’t like.
Hop on a peertube instance. There are ones made by normal people, eg. https://urbanists.video (this one probably won’t accept your registration, but just showcasing).
If you heavily compress your videos or if they’re not very long, you could also upload a .mp4 file to a file host or just your own website (johndoe.com/myvid.mp4). Then the browser would just download and play the .mp4 file.
Odysee fits the bill but be warned there are some conspiracy theorists nuts and nerds on there.
You could post the video to Dropbox or something? They might have to download the full video before playback, but i wouldn’t be surprised if some file sharing services are smart enough to stream video.
no there is no (good) option that doesn’t involve you signing up for an account. but that seems like a weird requirement; you were willing to sign up for youtube?
