PeerTube: A decentralized video hosting network, based on free software
joinpeertube.org
joinpeertube.org
Sounds like PeerTube is vulnerable to a sorts of denial of service attack from bad actors that would join and then limit the bandwidth to extreme amounts.
Hasn’t this been solved already in other P2P protocols? Couldn’t they have built upon an existing protocol that protected them against this?
It is using already using existing protocol.
Regardless, Peertube seems awesome, and I hope we keep seeing more and more services built on ActivityPub.
In no way it defines how you access media. That is defined by the use of WebRTC, which is supported by a growing number of browsers, and anyway provides a fallback to direct streaming (HTTP), so that any browser can interact.
Ah, that's awesome. That definitely assuages my fears somewhat.
> [ActivityPub] In no way it defines how you access media.
ActivityStreams (which ActivityPub builds on) does define an attachment property for messages [1]. Is this not a standard mechanism for clients to access ActivityPub media (via the attachment's type and url)?
[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-attach...
Here with PeerTube the client interface doesn't interact with AP to watch videos or get them. It just requests the list directly to the server.
I'm having trouble finding any complete WebRTC implementations outside of browsers, do you have any examples?
Also, I believe that part reason for the success of Hacker News and Reddit is largely their extremely simple, non-intrusive and non-animated interfaces - making flashy front-ends for distributed-net apps is a lost cause. Bittorrent took off because the tech was right; not because of a animated web interface that could correctly scale to mobile.
So, how come decentralised apps can end up with worse UX than their centralised equivalents? My theory is:
* Harder tech means that more resources get focused on the decentralisation bit
* Harder to find UI/UX designers who understand the decentralisation requirements (although this is changing thanks to blockchain hype)
* Decentralised early users tend to be geeky and push the product in a geeky direction
But the key thing is that pre-decentralisation we probably had a 1:3 ratio of backend to frontend work. Then in Matrix it’s like 1:1, and the dilution on the frontend notices.
That said, this can be fixed, and obviously it’s critical to Riot to fix it. We’ve contracted a proper UI/UX designer at last a few weeks ago and are hunting for more frontend devs.
And evidence it can work: a good example of a decentralised project with decent UX is Mastodon.
Also, thanks for drawing attention to my ignorance when it came to the protocol aspect: can see key players ARE built on proper protocols.
It's not flawless but implementing something similar in WebTorrent might be possible and mitigate this form of attacks.
Small devices behind crappy connections is most people streaming video ime.
That's a very, very good news.
Framasoft is one of the oldest, most trustworthy and passionate FOSS actor I've met in my life.
They are basically the reason I became a computer scientist.
> Guifi.net is a free, open and neutral, mostly wireless telecommunicationscommunity network, with over 33,000 active nodes and about 46,000 km of wireless links (as of April 2017). The majority of these nodes are located in Catalonia and the Valencian Community, in Spain. but the network is growing in other parts of the world. The network is self-organized and operated by the users using unlicensed wireless links and open optical fibre links.
> The nodes of the network are contributed by individuals, companies and administrations that freely connect to an open network of telecommunications and extend the network wherever the infrastructure and content might not otherwise be accessible. Nodes join the network following the self-provision model since the whole structure is explicitly open to facilitate understanding how it is structured, so that everyone can create new sections as required. That results in an network infrastructure commons that provides abundant connectivity.
First, they were just a portal (https://framasoft.org/) listing good FOSS you could download for windows and a forum to help each other.
It was the best, most stable and reliable source for that kind of info at the time, and lead a lot of people gaining trust in FOSS, trying out Linux, or like me, dig more and start programming.
Eventually they got to write informative and engaged blog posts. They always took the time to explain why and what, and I'm very grateful for that. It's transparent attitude I respect. Because of this they got echoed by framous voices such as Tristan Nitot (from Mozilla at the time) and Sebsauvage (pretty much the most famous nerd blog in the country).
Among their projects, they made the "portable" versions of free software quite popular, to the extend of creating a USB key where you could store your fav stuff (OOo, Firefox, vlc, etc) and carry a decent working environment anywhere you went, with a launcher on the systray.
Then they got involved politically, especially against the DADVSI law in France. They also teamed up with "la quadrature du net", a quite tenacious group trying to defend the free Web (that teamed up with wikimedia :)). The impressive feat here is the fact they are a small team, with very low budget, but yet managed to involve the "Conseil d'Etat" and the "Conseil constutionnel". I like the fact they did it every time in a formal, respectful manner. In politics, it's quite hard to do.
The last accomplishment of framasoft is to be alive. It's all about the constant work they've done, again and again, as they didn't have major actors to help them or a big source of income.
Today they host a load of open source web services to offer alternative to google agenda, google doc, dropbox, twitter, etc. In total 27 ranging from doodle clones to pastebins. The service are not as good as the original ones, but they work damn well and are free, using open formats.
I make sure I donate to them once in a while even if I don't go to their site that much anymore. But I do use their agenda, syncing it on thunderbird and my android phone.
> Please don't install PeerTube for production on a small device behind a low bandwidth connection (example: a Raspberry PI behind your ADSL link) because it could slow down the fediverse.
Why not simply decentralize the content index and let other people worry about storage for videos? When I go to Youtube, I'm there because it's a platform where I can find a large variety of entertainment without putting any effort into it, not because Google is hosting them. I'm picturing the backend here being a decentralized database of video metadata (including where and how it is hosted), and some sort of frontend where every video in the index can be viewed through a unified player.
If we're trying to give oppressed people the ability to host their controversial content, just have them host it behind Tor or over the bittorrent network and then add it to the index. Otherwise we could just let people link to videos on other video hosting sites or on their own personal websites.
The major feature I used for discovery is long gone - it was the ability to add video responses, which allowed me to not only find small, niche channels with great stuff but also built a sense of community. I don't get why did they remove this,but ever since they did the site just never felt the same.
I mainly use it for videos I'm not interested in instead of ones that I've already seen (albeit it a while ago).
It's the old exploration vs exploitation tradeoff. Most recommendation algorithms are highly optimized for exploitation and not exploration.
(PeerTube and WebTorrent don't fully solve this problem either, but that's because the core problem is political/economic rather than technical.)
Video storage would be out of scope for the index, and for good reason; other projects do it better than a completely new project not focused on decentralized file storage could be expected to.
The solution to the bandwidth problem would in fact be to just support existing storage solutions like bittorrent, ipfs, etc. So long as the video player supports it and the upload process is not complicated for non-technical users, problem solved.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Adaptive_Streaming_ove...
Content always ends up gated, restricted, metered, monitored, censored and moderated; and at some point, this will run afoul of all but the most casual users.
Right now a lot of major video creators are looking to leave YouTube because YouTube is marking their videos as ineligible for monetization. That's the market you want to capture if you want to succeed as a YouTube alternative. Sites like d.tube and steemit.com and bitchute.com are offering this. Getting major video producers with a following on YouTube to use your alternative platform is how you get enough viewers to achieve critical mass. They won't come if they can't get paid.
Now there's a problem here, because the average YouTube channel suffering from demonetization is a right-wing political channel, and attracting too many of them is a great way to make no one else want to come to your platform. These aren't the only video producers who are suffering from demonetization; the most egregious case I know of is science education channel CodysLab[1], which has been barred from uploading new videos a couple times on account of violating youtube's content guidelines for microwaving crickets to show that crickets are too small to be hurt by microwave radiation, and using black powder explosives.
A federated network might be better able to handle this problem, giving the right-wing creators a platform on some instances, but not on others. But if peertube offers no monetization options, then it will never compete with YouTube.
The bigger problem is network effects. If you don't post your videos on youtube, no one will ever see them.
Citation needed.
Perhaps that's a feature and not a bug. After all, judging by the last US election such people are in a slight minority anyway.
And why is YouTube whacking those channels specifically - because left wing social justice types systematically try to wipe out conservative thought wherever they find it. It's a private sector form of the behavior communist countries always see. Do you want those people following you to the next place you host your videos? Or would you rather leave them to sit and stew in their nicely whitewashed PC groupthink?
I think the real issue with your idea is that revenue streams from ads aren't that large, and anyway, advertisers are extremely sensitive to being targeted by witch hunts, which is why you see left wingers engage in so many of them against advertisers. I'd leave video authors to arrange for their own sponsorships; they can surely do it if the right messaging framework is in place.
So while some small percent of Reddit’s average users moved over, a very large percent of its witches did. Sometimes the witchcraft was nothing worse than questioning Reddit’s political consensus. Other times, it was harassment, hate groups, and creepy porn.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centrali...
When one platform (youtube) starts banning/demonetizing certain people, and you create a new platform that guarantees free expression, that new platform is going to get swarmed by the people who were banned by the incumbent platform. If YouTube's methid of selecting people be banned/demonetized is reasonably in line with what the average viewer dislikes (no necessarily what they would want banned), then when the new platform gets flooded with content from those banned from YouTube, the average viewer will find little to like on the platform.
Many people made their living off of YouTube ad revenue. Still do. You might be right that it's not the best source of income for the typical producer.
However, right now, a lot of producers are angry at YouTube for their changes to their ad policy. Now's the time to drive a large number of big content producers off of YouTube and onto your new platform, because they are actively searching for a new one. But they're motivated by the loss of their ad revenue, so they're not going to be interested in a platform that doesn't pay out ad revenue at all, that doesn't address their concerns.
Of late I have began to think this is too much power for a company to hold. I trust Youtube to not fuck up so bad that all videos are gone, but I would sleep a bit sounder at night if it was decentralised.
If you don't want a solution and just want to talk about it that's fine. But his comment was productive and useful.
I use youtube-dl almost daily to archive interesting videos locally.
But it isn't, due to the lack of coordination or standards. That's why protocols get established in the first place; without them, valuable stuff tends to get lost.
Archiving a store of culture and almost infinite rare videos is definitely not a straightforward and easy solution. Yes, you can save few interesting videos locally. But, that's not the point of the original post.
I never understood the lazy people of the world who want someone ELSE to make everything better for them. The greater your concern, the more likely no-one else cares more about it than you.
Saving a copy of rare footage on Youtube is literally a couple clicks and letting it save in the background while you sit on your butt watching it.
The original post said, "(YouTube is) a store of culture almost. A wealth of information and video would be lost, like rare videos which are only on youtube."
So, they should just save ALL the videos on YouTube that they think represent the culture of our times. Got it. If they think there are few petabytes of videos that are worthy of archiving, they should buy storage for them all. If they don't do so, then they are lazy. They weren't talking about one video, mind you.
ps, this comment of mine is not as polite as I want my comments to be. But, when you're calling people lazy and sitting on their butt, I think it's okay to write a not-so-polite comment.
Oh I understand. I held back a bit too. You're being an extremist with your comments about taking charge, and Always! And no, I don't propose the OP download the whole of what he sees as "culture to be preserved" from YouTube. Why do you insist on taking a simple concept to such an extreme?
We can all try to change the world a little bit. I'd prefer the world to be certain ways. While I can't make it that way for everyone I can set an example and influence the small area around me. In a similar way, if someone thinks a set of videos should be preserved they can save some themself - that does not mean they become an archivist for the Smithsonian.
While I was being a bit snarky, the sitting on their butt comment was meant to point out that a person watching YouTube is literally doing that. Most things people want to change do take more effort than that.
I'm taking the time to write for the same reason - I don't like when people are such extremists in their thinking (all or nothing) so I'm hoping to change a small part of the world (you) in a tiny way. If you still think people can't be the change they want I'll offer you this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp7E973zozc
And no, I didn't save a copy for myself ;-) But I am doing my part to promote something I think has some value.
Also leaves us with no way to discover future "favorites"
The other is to come up with a collective solution, like a p2p solution.
I think the latter solution is about a million times as likely to work.
I don't know how YouTube deals with generating a representative preview image, but the result is certainly better.
However, this kind of things _does_ increase click rates for these videos. For a platform designed to get views, is that really a bad thing?
It's the exact same problem on YouTube with clickbait thumbnails and titles. It doesn't frustrate people off the entire platform, just the channels that are repeat offenders.
Edit: It appears like searching for "life hacks" is a good way to find videos with misleading thumbnails: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=life+hacks
It is possible to report videos with misleading thumbnails on YouTube, but those reports seem to be ignored, proven by those videos having millions of views.
YouTube now even allows uploaders to upload any preview image. The result are attention grabbing and sensationalising, but rarely outright misleading
After uploading a video, YouTube will present you with 3 choices for the thumbnail. These are single frames, chosen with some randomness from the video (to prevent people intentionally inserting click-bait frames at some fixed position).
However, some people are considered Trust Worthy by the Algorithm. Those can upload arbitrary click-baity images to be used as thumbnails for their videos.
Agencies will emerge to represent popular YouTubers who move to other platforms if there is sufficient advertiser demand for the (presumably sizable) audience drawn to the content.
In fact, it's probably better to decouple monetization from distribution, at least initially. It's another layer on top. We are just beginning to standardize social protocols, let's let them develop naturally.
I got a simple Linux host on a cpanel admined shared server a long time ago for a random purpose. But it’s been very useful just to host stuff rather than bother with whatever free service exists.
It’s not strong enough to host this or mastodon or other peer networks, but I think it would be worthwhile for me to pay to have this flexibility.
There's plenty of content creators that would love to go anywhere else, but all alternatives fail to attract viewers.
Youtube became a crap platform in the search for the $$. Things like recommended videos used to be related to the video you just watched but now its whatever fail army is. I would like to see a new platform where monetization via ads and UX abuse doesn't exist because the experience is just awful now.
Each server their own rules
0: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/FAQ.md#a...
Typical social media users will never get into fediverse as they still are using shortcut to google.com as their "internet connection".
But great that technology is moving forward.
Mastodon will need to find business model sooner or later as internet isn't free as in beer because beer costs money and you can't handle 100m users with donations.
As long as the members are part of several disparate groups, that's probably more of a good thing. Closer, tighter communities.
Also, I thought the bandwidth came from the users, since it's decentralized?
Cause I won't run a node of that if that means I'll need some petabytes of space and an awfully large bandwidth.
It is specified in the project README. Your server will only host/share its own videos:
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube#backend
As a server admin you may subscribe to other servers to have their videos presented on your server as well, but those remote servers would be in charge of seeding the content (each server is an actual Bittorrent tracker, it seems).
The subscription system is not ready just yet, it should be implemented in the coming weeks/month. If some people feel like contributing code… :-)
I had a good laugh at that. Does anyone really think this service is going to be competitive in terms of privacy to what a centralized provider can do?