Plain text is freedom

Almost all of these dissocial media platforms incoperate videos, as such the people who got used to using these platforms, when asked why they rely on a "platform" which hates them as a user and pisses on everything they consider good and righteous, lament either two of those things:

1. "But the platform of my choice has all the viewership I need, unlike the miniscule reach I would have on a personal website."
2. "But I only these platforms have enough storage space for all my videos."

I will focus on arguing against the second complain. My argument herein is that one shouldn't want to use videos as opposed to plain text as videos are a bad format for freedom and information flow.

All major video hosting platforms like Youtube and all the other of those criminal orginizations likewise have DRM implemented in their platforms. Downloading a video with the right tool is trivial, nevertheless it's a constant uphill battle by a few dedicated programmers against those media giants. This is not by accident, because a video is not a very free format in itself. It's not trivial to edit a video file to your liking. Besides the required software, that inherently needs to be a complex behemoth of code, you also require a powerful hardware setup. Plain text can be processed by a ZX Spectrum or Atari ST, video on the other hand requires a new computer even to play it in decent quality, more so to edit or produce it.

There is a great gap between de facto freedom and de jure freedom. Just because there is nobody stopping you from editing a video, doesn't mean you can actually do it. In theory you could edit out music out of a video, in theory you could change the person talking to look differently, in theory you could change a segment of the said script to say something else, in theory this, in theory that; the point is that editing a text file is inmeasurably more convenient, and actually grants you the freedoms that free as in freedom culture promises. It's de facto freedom, because you can actually excercise those freedoms reasonably without any limitations.

Plain text has many advantages over video, one of them being it being easier to parse for man and machine alike. For Youtube's transcripting feature to work, it requires plenty of elaborate AI tools which no mortal person can hope to run on their home computer. Meanwhile plain text can be searched through, indexed, and analysed with a single keyboard shortcut available in every text editor. If your computer can run vi, ed, grep, awk, sed, or perl, it can process a text file. A video cannot be processed as easily, robbing you of freedom once again.

The video format is the enemy, always has been, always will be. The solution doesn't lie in creating more alternative video platforms, rather than starting to write in plain text. Plain text frees the user from cancers like DRM and spyware, it's much less addicting, doesn't make you depdent on corposhit platforms, and most importantly is actually free as in freedom.