The Blender Foundation recently posted an update titled “YouTube Blocks Blender Videos worldwide”, and it details policy changes at YouTube that directly affects the nonprofit foundation in a profoundly negative manner.

Since a few days all Blender videos on the OFFICIAL BLENDER CHANNEL have been blocked worldwide without explanation. We are working with YouTube to resolve the issue, but the support has been less than stellar. In the meantime you can find most of the videos on cloud.blender.org.

This move by YouTube is more than likely to raise a few eyebrows. Ton Roosendaal, Chairman of the Blender Foundation and creator of Blender, goes on to explain the messy details.

Last night we received a contract from Google. You can read it here. It’s six pages of legal talk, but the gist of the agreement appears to be about Blender Foundation accepting to monetize content on its Youtube channel.

However, BF already has an ad-free Youtube account since 2008. We have monetizing disabled, but it looks like Google is going to change this policy. For example, we now see a new section on our channel settings page: “Monetization enabled”.

As a result, Blender has set up a PeerTube instance to investigate the federated video hosting platform and whether it may be a viable alternative for them.

This is an exciting move in that a major player in the Free Software ecosystem is exploring decentralized media; any videos that they upload to PeerTube can be directly accessed through fediverse platforms such as Mastodon and Pleroma, and all PeerTube instances can federate with one another.

We sincerely hope to see Blender Foundation continue this trend, as the fediverse might be a very positive community for the project to be a part of.

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