How SodiumNodes turned into the biggest middle finger towards YouTube

If you’ve known me for at least a year, you might think I’m a content creator in the Craftsman community, and that might have been true in the past; today…that’s only partially true.

You might even be asking yourself what SodiumNodes is. Well, in that case, SodiumNodes is a cloud services company that mainly focuses on Minecraft hosting.

But that’s not what we’ll be going over today. Instead, I will be talking about why SodiumNodes exists and how it helped me quit working hard on YouTube just to get nothing back.

To start, we have to look at why my channel existed in the first place. I started YouTube content creation back in 2019 with a passion for computers and helping people. In fact, my first YouTube channel, Compy The Computer, was created for tech tutorials. Although the channel doesn’t exist anymore, its name was inherited from my first ever website.

Even getting an occasional 50 views felt incredibly motivating.

After a while, around June or July 2020, I was introduced to Minecraft by my real-life friends. At the time—and even now—I used to hate violent games, mostly because my parents never let me play them. After discovering that Minecraft wasn’t violent at all, I had a second thought and started playing it. I really enjoyed its creativity, as it suited my passion and character.

One more year passed, and I finally created my YouTube channel called Villager Boy. Unfortunately, I ended up installing a virus, which gained access to my channel, and it started uploading these strange videos about cracked software and Fortnite. My YouTube channel got banned in April 2022.

I created a new channel on the 15th of April, 2022, but started uploading consistently in around November or December 2022.

From there, it was all smooth sailing; I would upload once every week, or every two weeks when I was busy. Seeing my videos actually get attention was incredibly motivating and I was slowly building my own community.

However, one day, out of the blue, this channel ended up getting banned as well at the start of 2025. To this day, they still haven’t given me a good reason why.

I was completely devastated that I lost all this hard work and progress. YouTube completely broke me.

I had 180+ videos, and they all went up into flames after one afternoon. I tried appealing but they rejected it. I can’t even recover the videos because my channel wasn’t a brand channel, and that’s what killed me even more.

It gets worse: I was about to reach 1000 subscribers, sitting at over 800, and I was preparing a video for that milestone.

Years of progress, uploads, and subscribers disappeared instantly.

I did create a third channel, but I didn’t upload anywhere as consistently. In fact, to this day I refuse to upload consistently. When I get motivated, I do upload a video, but for the rest, my channel is abandoned.

Although this has left me a permanent scar, and I won’t forget about it, things started getting better once I created SodiumNodes. From this point, I started earning real money and gaining real experience with web development: languages like JavaScript and PHP, and frameworks like Next.js and Laravel. I had a blast, but I still wouldn’t give up my channel for a business. My community is invaluable. Precious. Gold.

Today, I have a middle ground between my community and SodiumNodes. I still play Craftsman, but I mostly meet my community on my blog, or at least the people who are left.

Finally, SodiumNodes becomes a massive middle finger towards YouTube because it gives me a chance to engage with my community while running a business, without being dependent on a giant, narcissistic company that is only good if you want to be used.

I’m also happy that YouTube can’t take down this post, as it’s on my own website, not on their power-tripping platform. I still can’t believe I wanted to turn YouTube into my job. It seems like they only care about creators with at least 10K subscribers.

I hope you enjoyed this post. Let me know your thoughts in the comments section!