PeerTube: A ‘Censorship’ Resistent YouTube Alternative
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
Counter-argument one: things known by Google represents another dose of data into a single place which accumulates way too much of it already.
If I watch something on a peertube, many may know that my IP streamed that, but they don’t know who I am because they’re not an all knowing internet-scale privacy-violator. Best of all, google won’t know I watched it at all, so it won’t be another annoying data-point in the super-aggressive youtube bubble.
Why do you think that? It would be very easy for Google to observe who is viewing PeerTube videos and to link that back to those people's YouTube profiles. You may trust them not to, but if you do, it seems you're half way to thinking it's OK for them to know.
I'm not saying it can't be done, but I wouldn't assume they would go out of their way to monitor this, just like I wouldn't assume they're monitoring public IPs of torrents in the process of downloading.
Yes. It would be easy. But why would they?
Speaking in BT-terms... Peertube's might find this peeking annoying and start publishing "peerguardian" like lists to prevent Google-spying.
Is that worse than only Google being able to do it?
If you consider Google being able to track something as a negative, then Google+n would be at last +n negative.
I wonder if the barriers will largely be the costs of using it relative to existing centralized systems:
- uptime/accessibility over time of content : what how do users find content bookmarked two years ago if nodes are coming and going. Assuming there is a way to keep an updated bookmark list, what are the costs (effort, emotional etc) to the user to do that?
- costs of maintaining a node in the decentralized system. if my node maintains a catalog of 1000 or more videos what will be the operational costs (not just the storage and compute costs) to me of keeping this running.
These things are great to think of in context of of the recent HN post that discusses decentralized systems https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17361199
PS. I'm not saying that it's impossible to overcome those points - just that they're difficult and worth working through.
https://www.kisskissbankbank.com/en/projects/peertube-a-free...
My understanding is that if you download something via torrent, you are also uploading/distributing, and as I understand it, that makes your liability rather higher if the content happens to be illegal - you are not just in trouble for downloading/possessing said content, but you are also in trouble for distribution of said content.
I thought this was a big part of the rise of 'tube sites' for questionable content.
But for someone looking as something similar to youtube but locked down and only for friends and family it's a bit unclear whether this is appropriate (since so much is focused on sharing the content with other servers).
Also, for such a use case the torrent-functionality seems like a real downside but I can't find out if you can disable it serverside so that clients don't have to bother with it.
Neither (correct me if I'm wrong) allows for comments for instance, and have a cumbersome interface for youtube-like watching and discovering.
As for the torrenting, if videos are only available to members it shouldn't be a privacy problem. That being said, disabling it will probably be a possibility in v1.0.
The privacy problem wasn't my concern. But rather a bloated javascript client as well as the issue of accidentally seeding on a mobile connection wasting bandwidth and battery life. I see tons of potential issues but no possible gains at all when server bandwidth is not an issue.
If you don't mind that other instances might mirror your videos, you can run a regular instance and simply not follow any other instances. Only your local videos will show up on your instance, but your videos might show up on other people's instances (if they choose to follow you).
The server is always seeding the videos, so the torrenting part only really kicks in if you have multiple people watching the same video at the same time. If your browser can't use webrtc, it will stream the video like a regular video. I think there is no option to disable the torrent functionality yet, but there is a github issue for it.
These are private videos (though nothing necessarily embarrassing or inappropriate) and making them public must not be possible from a client point of view (other than downloading and manually uploading to a different service).
- As a business I will link to a youtube video but not a PT video because I know YT will stay up.
- Most YT's views are from recommendations and related videos.
PT can't compete against that. Just can't. Especially since YT will never recommend a PT video. This is why a single source wins. :(
As a business, it is shortsighted to prefer link to a YT video that can be removed or deleted just as easily as a PeerTube video. My YT playlists are littered with deleted or otherwise removed videos. The only way to ensure a video you link to never disappears is to rip it and host it yourself.
“Where it gets really, really exciting, is that when you respond to a video status on Mastodon, the message will be sent to the instance of PeerTube. Your response will thus be visible beneath the video, in the comment space. And yes, if another person at the other end of the world responds to your comment via their instance of PeerTube or Mastodon, you’ll see it as a response to your status in Mastodon. If tomorrow Diaspora (the Facebook alternative behind Framasphere) implements ActivityPub, it will work in the same way. We’ll have plenty of platforms that are capable of federating comments.
Free alternatives are criticized, often rightly, for not having added value compared to centralized platforms. With ActivityPub, we now have our first big advantage. Because on the centralized platforms, you’ll have a hard time viewing, under your YouTube video, the reactions of people who commented on Facebook, Twitter, etc. ”
source: https://medium.com/@chocobozzz/peertube-a-federated-video-st...
In general, when that happens the comment is removed on the host platform, then a deletion request is sent to the federated platforms. There is no guarantee that other platforms will delete the content (although if they don't, they are generally considered malicious and should be reported), much like deleted forum posts can be viewed through WebArchive.
I consider it an advantage to not have those comments. Context matters. Signal to noise ratio on Facebook is close to 0 for most things that are open to everyone. Specialized subreddits have a good SNR. HN can too. Probably closed Facebook groups do as well.
And context matters. The discussion about a Blender tutorial will be different if posted to a group of beginners than if a group of professionals were to comment on it. If I want to help people learn Blender I can seek out beginners and help them in their groups, but when I am not looking to spend time helping beginners I’d rather not have every comment by every person wondering about every little detail show up.
PeerTube could do the same; hide content you don't want to see below your videos or maybe whitelist certain places to allow commenting from them.
Critical analysis of media is my jam, this kind of content is niche compared to the stuff that pulls a billion views on YT.
I'll happily comb through PT but I doubt it can fill my bottomless hunger for this kind of content.
Good, because it's not a competitor. It's an alternative, and there's plenty of space for alternatives to exist. Not everything has to be a direct competition; It's ok for YouTube to exist, and it's ok for PeerTube to exist too.
* Reddit deciding to erase/ban subreddits with any drug theme, among others.
* Newspapers delete their comments sections, not just going forward, but forever in the past.
* Image hosters decide to ban hotlinking or go subscription-only. Since I drive a 200X car, this is a pain when many of the guides posted onto forums are basically useless.
With Youtube demonetizing videos (often useful but low-volume How-to videos that nobody would subscribe to), that's another nail in the coffin for them continuing to host video that can't earn them revenue.
So you never stumbled upon a news or blog post (or playlist) containing an embedded video thats now "no longer available due to copyright issues", "switched to private", "not available for your country", "deleted by the user", ...?
Happens about once a week to me. Thats why I started to "backup" my playlists with youtube-dl.
I have some on youtube, but it's just a hobby and I don't monetise it, but because of that I have a feeling that it's being scored lower in the youtube ranks.
However I have not seen any dedicated let's play peertube hubs and most only have a tiny allotment of upload space. There is one with unlimited, https://peertube.social/, however I'm not confident that it will stay that way and I'm not sure how happy they would be if I started uploading terrabytes of video.
Does anyone know of hubs specifically for this sort of content?
Not sure he still has slots open though
Seems to be a bit french though for the moment and I'm not that well spoken in french :)
That brings another thing to mind, I tend to output stuff from Kdenlive with CRF 12 which results in quite high bitrate for 1080p (~25 mbit). Youtube just eats up the video files and transcodes them to all kinds of resolutions, but it also trashes the quality.
I wonder how peertube deals with that. Guess I can set up a local instance and test a bit first :)
I'm soon starting to create videos for my startup and peertube is certainly what I am thinking about, besides just hosting the mp4 files directly.
Self hosted, designed for RasPi/non-cloud DCs w Docker, now running on AWS. Tools are all CLI static gen, to serve from CDN. I self host a “video platforms compared” video and other demos, with VideoJS player. Contact info in profile if you wanna chat more... my goal is hands-off SDK.
Moderation is necessary, otherwise you'll attract "undesirables" that will most likely scare away regular users.
It's censorship resistant because each instance is an island and yet every island is connected. As long as someone is willing to host your content, people on the fediverse can consume it one way or another.
You can also host them on a PeerTube instance run by someone you trust (several non-profits already maintain one).
We haven't even discussed whether the money that the for profit platform pays the content creators that drive traffic to its advertising engine is proportionate or fair. There's no discussion of this anywhere, really, since the for profit platform is so powerful that some people are literally afraid to criticize them in public. And let's not even broach the subject of whether the for profit platform might be using its users' data for things other than advertising. That would be really beyond the pale conspiracy theory type paranoia.
But you're right. It's not censorship. Only the government can do that.
Maybe you missed the news, but Blender had all their videos blocked for several days.
I understand that doesn't help current creators but the problem YouTube competitors have right now seems to be a cycle of trying to match features, run out of money, shut down
My theory is any site with a chance of toppling YouTube needs to avoid trying to topple YouTube directly and rather recreate its rise to the top
Vimeo was around first and focused on 1080/HD content, and had actual enforcement of community guidelines that accounts should only be uploading content they made or took part in. YouTube (pre-Google) was gaining massive popularity with South Park and other TV content chopped into 12 minute segments to get past then-current restrictions for length. Vimeo was a better experience for community, but YouTube was a better experience for audience desires.
(I work for Google Cloud but opinions are sure my own)
It's like trying to compete with Amazon on price and delivery speed, you're going to run out of money before you make a dent.
Look at Twitch for example, it's keeping its head in the game by starting out so different YouTube is now trying to keep up with it
Scared of IS propaganda? Deal with the root issues that cause it instead.