A new video streaming site called BitChute is being touted as the most promising alternative to YouTube. This year, increasing political censorship on YouTube has caused unease among its user base. Demonetisation and shadow banning has left popular uploaders with dwindling income and a bleak future.

Unlike YouTube, BitChute doesn’t rely on servers to store a huge amount of video data. Instead, BitChute uses a decentralized torrent based system, with users sharing streams from their own computers. The “Bit” part of the name is in honor of BitTorrent, and it’s the first torrent client that operates in an ordinary web browser.

Because BitChute avoids the huge overheads that YouTube is beholden to, it could be a very serious contender. In January 2017 they had 100 users. Now in August they have around 20,000. It may be inevitable that people migrate away from sites that are deemed to have a political…