The thing I need that I currently use YouTube for is a place where I can store long, large videos (think around 2 hours). I want to be able to link to these videos, and disallow anyone who doesn’t have the link from seeing them. I have a lot of personal videos at this length and at a much shorter length that I want to be able to keep saved both for myself and to be able to share with various friends and acquaintances. YouTube has filled this need and still does, but I’m looking to move off of it. I’ve looked at some alternatives and few of them worked out for me because they don’t support long/large enough videos.
Maybe Odysee is able to meet that purpose, maybe not. However, maybe you can use Jitsi to ‘meet’ your friends instead of posting private videos for them. Not sure if that’s possible for you and your peeps, but it’s there.
Otherwise the best solution I know of would be to self host because unless the service has some strange way to pay for server time (like Odysee’s, which I don’t exactly understand or Youtube’s, which is selling identification tags of your mortal soul), you will always run into the same issues you’ve been having.
I haven’t personally set up a personal server ( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°), but I want to at some point. There are of course drawbacks in that you’ll have to set it up and maintain it yourself (with help from internet strangers), but at least you can do whatever you want with it.
https://cyberhost.uk/getting-started/#hardware
https://www.howtogeek.com/846979/heres-why-self-hosting-a-server-is-worth-the-effort/
Also, you can use freecycle to hopefully get a used computer tower that’s still capable of being a tiny server. You’ll possibly have to get yourself and older gpu to make it work though, which can be had on ebay. I would get anything greater than or equal too a 750 GT (NVidia) or R7 260 / 260X (AMD), or maybe something a bit newer so you don’t have to worry about it turning to dust when you first start using it.
Good luck!
P.S. A lot of the right-wing conspiracy crap on Odysee can be found in the “lifestyle” and “education” sections. There are still some great channels like Louis Rossman, 3Blue1Brown and ElectroBOOM. Just the ones I know of. I suppose Odysee isn’t the best for finding new channels…