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We Are Trying Out PeerTube

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242 pointstodsacerdoti137 comments

The problem for the Fediverse will always be domains, in my opinion. It sounds silly to the technical demographic, but to a normal person, it is a massive issue.

"Which server do I choose to get in bed with?"

It's not just a question of which server do you trust to be a good actor and to not shut down tomorrow. It's also a question of which domain name do you want associated with your user account?

Do you want alice@cucumbers.pizza? Or do you want alice@witches.bike?

I believe that gmail won email not because of security and good user experience. I think they won because it removed the complexity of this problem.

When I sign up for gmail, I can just be myself. I don't have to be myself + something else.

Consequently, this is the strength of P2P networks. Remove the domain question entirely. I _am_ just a long string of characters (which is like my essence), but people call me by my name. Just like in normal life.

>When I sign up for gmail, I can just be myself. I don't have to be myself + something else.

I don't understand this sentence. What is the "something else" here that Gmail uniquely lacks?

When someone asks your email, you say 'myemailhandle' and they will already ask if it's gmail. Way easier to speak and remember than if you have your own domain.

> What is the "something else" here that Gmail uniquely lacks?

The unique domain that I would otherwise have to associate myself with. "gmail" is so ubiquitous that it just doesn't mean anything anymore. It's just... the protocol.

Tell someone that your email is "alice@alice.website" and even _that_ is saying something significant about yourself that you may not want to say.

A big aspect of appearing "cool" is not letting on that you care so much. Social networks and messaging systems should allow people to be "cool" if they want to be.

What @gmail.com says to me, is that the user is okay with Google reading their email.

That's exactly why I said "It sounds silly to the technical demographic".

Many people on HN just straight up won't understand what I'm talking about.

To a normal person, "@gmail.com" doesn't say _anything_. Give someone a different domain and they will literally look at you funny.

Mine is firstname@firstname-lastname.domain, never had that problem. Plenty of email addresses require spelling out the part before the @ anyway, spelling the part after it out too poses no fundamental challenge to anyone I interacted with (who asked for my email address, that is).

It's not a problem, but it does send a signal--probably one that is a slight benefit as an adult in a technical line of work, but it might send a different signal for let's say, a teenager who is already struggling to fit in with peers. It may be a stereotype, but stereotypes exist regardless of how easy you or me think it is to register a domain. Sure someone could follow just a few simple steps found on the internet, but why does that person even care to?

Although, teenagers exchanging email addresses has fallen out of style recently in exchange for sharing Discord tags or Snapchat usernames/showing snapcodes.

It's nice to see someone else have this point of view. I have a personal domain but still run @gmail.com because I get the impression that having my own domain makes me look like a complete nerd to my friends.

Of course, I am, but no need to reinforce that.

I have the same sentiment, but I think using other appropriately-named providers has the same effect. Nobody bats an eye when you say @fastmail.com or @mailbox.org for example.

> having my own domain makes me look like a complete nerd to my friends.

...yes, of course; why else would you do it? ;)

I'm semi-kidding; there are very real practical benefits, but I really do run email through my own domain, at least in part, because it sends a message.

There are other reasons to keep your @gmail, such as being a precaution in case you lose your domain as well as to use it for into your DNS/registrar account since using your domain's email to manage the DNS or domain itself is a bad idea in case DNS breaks email deliverability.

"gmail" is so ubiquitous that it just doesn't mean anything anymore

That doesn’t explain how Gmail became ubiquitous. Back when it started, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL were very popular (among many others). Since it was not yet ubiquitous, Gmail’s ubiquity could not be an explanation for success.

Gmail succeeded back then because everyone was switching to it for the free storage space and to be the cool person with a new gmail address. This happened long enough for new internet users to start choosing gmail for their first email, eventually becoming the majority email provider.

I still remember when they showed a counter for how much free space you had, and it increased steadily. That was before they just made it a big (for the time) fixed number.

THIS!

Also, if someone asks me for my YT channel, I just say the channel name and they know where to look, youtube.com.

With peertube you have to: give your channel name, remember then it's NOT youtube, tall then the correct instance, hope they won't type peertube on google and try to search for you in the first instance that comes up.

How would you suggest we improve on this?

Maybe some kind of centralized lookup? Oh wait...

And how do you handle all the @pewdiepie@someotherinstance? The original creator has to create an account on all instances to avoid fakes, or give up on the platform?

In a P2P model, there's multiple ways of going about this.

But I tend to think that a true web of trust model makes the most sense. There may be 250 pewdiepie's on the network, but I'll just follow the one that (1) is closest in my network (followed by my friends) and (2) has the most follows (AKA highest trust).

We already follow this logic of #1 and #2 today even on centralized networks. Web of trust just makes sense to people intuitively.

Who do I know that already knows you? How else can I determine that you're legit? I'm gonna snoop your profile and see what looks legit. Ah, looks like a lot of normal people follow you already.

Of course this isn't full proof. But it's not full proof on centralized networks either. We just need reasonable certainty.

When you set up your email account, did you register username@everyemailprovider.com?

One thing that would partially help would, at least, a global video search at peertube.com. With channel names you have a problem, as they would not be unique, BUT at least, you could return all users in all instances, and hope people check the avatar. That would make the process more transparent to users, as they would go to peertube.com and see everyone they follow.

BUT, there's a huge problem. When you have a big creator on the platform, like PewDiePie for example. Every instance would have someone creating a fake PewDiePie. So, either the original creator would go to another platform, or they would need to use bots to create they users on all possible instances. So... creator will not have any incentive on using Peertube, as there's no 100% way to know who's the original.

Sounds like a keys.pub integration is necessary for cryptographic identity attestation and verification, since Keybase was acquired by Zoom.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22995792

Unless all of this is completely transparent to the viewers and content creators, not gonna help.

Remember when Mastodon started, the fake IDs were already a problem: https://mashable.com/2017/04/06/you-cant-delete-your-mastodo...

Agree entirely. I would donate to Keys.pub and PeerTube to ratchet up the UX and make it transparent.

You shouldn’t need Youtube, Twitter, or some other centralized provider to attest to your identity; you should be able to, with centralized providers only announcing or caching that attestation (just as keybase provided for with proofs). Maybe there’s an easy way to tie this together with FIDO, U2F, etc. I need to do more research.

https://fidoalliance.org/how-fido-works/

Why wouldn't you just give them a direct-link to your "not-youtube" channel?

Just say it's your <instance name> channel instead of saying it's your Peertube channel. You don't necessarily need to explain what Peertube is each time.

Also, searching for your account on any Peertube instance should work fine.

That's why you don't give out your channel name, but your web site. And from there you can link people to whatever you want them to see without any worries about where it is hosted.

Observation of YouTubers: if they have a website, they rarely if ever link or mention it.

"Link is in the description."

The links I see see usually go off to things like a Bandcamp page or a print sales site not under their own domain. Or referral links.

How is @gmail.com different than any other @domain.com?

Do a social experiment. When you are at a store and they ask your email for your receipt, try giving then your email, and compare their expressions and the time they need to input it in the system if it's gmail or your own domain.

But the choice never was "gmail or your own domain". Pre-gmail it already was likely to be one of a few large providers, (and to a good degree still is). The argument sounds a bit like "gmail won because gmail won": For gmail to be the default assumption, they already have to have won.

> the choice never was "gmail or your own domain"

Before I had gmail, I used my ISP email address. While using my ISP email address, I set up an email server with a dynamic hostname -- homeip.net at the time. It 100% worked.

There absolutely was a choice. You just had to be technical to know it existed in the first place.

You misunderstand what I'm saying. There was no binary "gmail or own domain", because there always was "large mail provider or own domain", which turned into "large mail provider, large mail provider N+1 (gmail) or own domain"

Arguments from networks effects are basically "X won because X won".

The argument is that, at some critical point, X became the default choice, and stayed that way.

Why it was gmail was interesting at the time, but isn't anymore; now it's literally just "people pick gmail because it's gmail".

I don't understand the issue at all. Never in my life have I ever used @gmail.com email address, and never have I experienced even the slightest inconvenience caused by that decision.

Is this an american thing? At least in Norway, it’s not uncommon with personal domains, work emails, using your internet provider emails or using hotmail or icloud.

It seems strange to me that gmail would be the default anywhere.

It also means that if these get popular they will coalesce into an oligopoly. Those huge domains will then be pressured by the costs of hosting and the need to improve the protocol to monetize their users with ads or surveillance.

Congratulations, we reinvented Facebook.

Anything with any hierarchy in its namespace will follow this path. Only pure P2P has a chance of avoiding it, and pure P2P is very hard to build and scale.

It also faces a serious protocol ossification challenge with no good solution (yet). Federated protocols face it too, but less as there are fewer cats to herd.

>It also means that if these get popular they will coalesce into an oligopoly.

That's true of pretty much any system, though: The Iron Law of Oligarchy[0] always applies.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy

Eh. The Fediverse actually try hard already to avoid this. Fpr instance by blocking signups to popular instances an redirecting people elsewhere.

I fail to see what the problem is here. So you end up with a couple big free providers that serve ads (like Gmail, Yahoo!, Outlook, etc.) and some smaller premium providers (like Fastmail, G-Suite, ProtonMail, etc.) and if someone really wants to they can even host their own. Also, if someone had a neat idea for a new Fediverse business they can launch it and interoperate with all the existing ones (like starting a new email service).

How is that anything like reinventing a monolithic social network like Facebook?

Consider how Facebook got started. It didn't appear out of thin air and immediately dominate the market, it was a competitor fighting against LiveJournal, MySpace etc and it managed to achieve monolithic control through becoming the defacto standard.

As a separate analogy, consider a server for a MMO. MMO servers live and die based off the usercount, and lower count servers are considered less desirable for other incoming users. So what ends up happening is that players congregate around the server that has the most users, which in turn drives up costs for said server requiring them to take in more money (through donations or ads or subscriptions) and soon they become the standard for other servers to follow.

Even if other servers end up hosting, few reach the same numbers because most new users are instead redirected or drawn to existing servers with a high user count. So we're back to stage 1 where the fediverse hasn't really solved anything at all. Said competitor may then choose to instead jump off the fediverse and take their users with them (because you become associated with certain other negative groups which are bad for your image), the fediverse starves because your average user doesn't care and then we have Facebook again.

Why do MMO players gravitate towards the server with the most players? I don't play MMOs but I'm guessing it's because they can only play with users on the same server as them. Federated services don't have this limitation.

As a counter example, if the behavior you described really did happen in federated systems then why hasn't it happened to email?

GMail won because I had to keep deleting email from my old provider, Google was pretending to "not be evil", and they offered me an ever-increasing amount of storage. Then I told my friends about it. Eventually, everyone used it because everyone who should've known better (myself included) recommended it to them.

I don't doubt that Google pre IPO probably believed in their motto. It's the investor influence that has gradually steered Google into lucrative but ethically questionable domains.

Not everyone recommended it to the masses. Some cautioned against it from the get-go - and Google was a problematic company with too much power already when GMail was being rolled out.

Hi! I'm one of the co-authors of ActivityPub, and I agree with you. I wrote a very out-of-date writeup about bridging ActivityPub and P2P networks some time ago: https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot5-boston/blob/master/f...

I think you'll find it agrees with your assessments. DNS and SSL Certificate Authorities centralize an otherwise sensible decentralized system.

It's out of date because work has continued. Here's some hints as to how we can improve the situation:

- Decrease importance of server you're on by allowing easy account migration. One easy way to do this is to use mutable data to represent your activitypub profile in a content-addressed store... you can look at mutable links in IPFS as an example (the work that we're doing on Datashards is also relevant). (ActivityPub actually does support other URI types that are not https so this is no problem...) Don't like the server you're on? Update your actor profile to point its inbox URI at another place.

- Support hosting over more p2p, easily self-hostable, NAT-punching and secure systems where you know you have a secure connection because the name of the server is actually the fingerprint of the key. That's actually what tor .onion servers and I2P servers are. There's no reason you can't run ActivityPub over such servers, and some people do, but it isn't widely supported because...

- ... because of the way we've chosen to do names. The right answer isn't webfinger (which isn't in the ActivityPub spec but is what's popularly deployed), it's petnames: https://github.com/cwebber/rebooting-the-web-of-trust-spring...

- And now you need a way to handle anti-abuse in a system that doesn't assume that domain names and instances are all too important. OcapPub outlines some of that (sadly unfinished, but the core ideas are there) https://gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub/blob/master/README.org

- On top of all that, maybe add store and forward messaging to support nodes being offline. This can be done and we have plans but I need to write them in a more visible place.

So in short, as one of the main authors of the biggest fediverse specs out there, not only do I agree, work is happening.

Hello! Thanks so much for the reply. This is exactly why I post critiques. I want to spur conversation.

Everything I'm reading in your comment and in the links you shared, I agree with. I think the main difference is in our choice of tools.

For the network mapping (for trust and petnames), I believe that a graph structure is required. Having this at a foundational layer is important for scalability and mathematical simplicity imo.

Other than that, I think we agree on offline-first and multi-casting being requirements. And bonus points for keypair management through shamir's secret sharing and multi-device key management.

Can I contact/keep up with you directly somewhere to continue the conversation?

Thoughts on using something like ENS?

What's your AP username? I would like to follow you to keep up with these developments and maybe pitch in where I can. I did a quick googling but didn't find anything.

>When I sign up for gmail, I can just be myself. I don't have to be myself + something else.

Well, it's still you + gmail.com. It could be you + fastmail.com, it could be you + posteo.de, it could be you + <insert other e-mail provider>. You still chose gmail over another provider, like you could choose cucumbers.pizza over another provider in the case of the Fediverse.

The point was that GMail became so ubiquitus as to no longer be a part of the equation. I remember in 2009~ forms automatically adding @gmail.com.

Then this could not be the reason they won—initially it was not the “ubiquity of gmail” as it was just new to the market and could not be synonymous with email. They won by providing a good service for free with an ever-increasing capacity and iterating over features. Note that I’m not suggesting it was perfect or the best solution; plenty of questionable decisions made along the way (the way inbox was handled comes to mind)

That is the argument, that for a time it was in practice a default choice, just a bit before that the default choice was hotmail, at least in italy.

The problem (if we're assuming it was one) still existed in the initial days of Gmail. Point still stands.

...but gmail isn't that ubiquitous! A large majority of the emails I receive are from non-gmail addresses. True, most of these are related to where people work, but still, it drives decentralization, and I think most people understand that email ≠ gmail.

Many of those mails from non Google domains are still being processed by Gmail under the hood. Last I checked, I think Google was processing something like 2/3 of all email.

Really! I'm surprised, Exchange in particular seems to be pretty ubiquitous in the business world.

Not to mention, I do know a fair number of people with non-gmail personal addresses—iCloud, Outlook.com, Yahoo etc.

Hm, on second thought I just did a quick search and I think I was wrong and it's maybe more like in the range of 1/4 to 1/3. Also, am thinking there may not even be a way to measure this very easily outside of just random surveys or trying to gather data separately from major providers.

If i remember correctly gmail was offering unlimited storage and thats what won me over.

Did they at one point offer unlimited, or was it always just a really large amount (which in today's landscape isn't that large anymore).

They never exactly offered unlimited, it was just that the limit was constantly going up. You could watch your total storage ticking.

It was 1Gb initially, then on their 1st birthday 2Gb and slowly growing daily, which seemed practically unlimited compared to other email that were offering 100Mb at the most? A quick look at an article[1] at the time (who claimed it was "outrageous") show Hotmail were offering 250Mb and Yahoo had just launched 1Gb to catch up.

[1] https://www.searchenginejournal.com/gmail-rewards-users-with...

Yes, "it's still you + gmail.com". And some of us will refuse to use that address.

> I believe that gmail won email not because of security and good user experience. I think they won because it removed the complexity of this problem.

I can’t agree with that because Gmail was far from the first to provide this. Growing up all my friends and I had Hotmail addresses.

Gmail won because of unlimited storage and to a lesser extent a far superior UI. The invitation system also gave it a “cool” factor others never had.

And the "beta" tagline gave it something magical.

not having a .com and one standard domain does make it tough. I know when Mastadon first got hyped I went to sign up and it asked to pick a federated server. I have no idea which one I picked.

While I don't agree that "gmail" is "be myself", I do think the biggest missing piece from the Fediverse is an easy, straightforward way to handle "I already have a domain and an email at that domain, I want to use that domain for the fediverse, without hosting anyone else's content that might create liability or annoyance".

I have an email address. That unique identifier is also what I'd want to use for the fediverse. So how do I most easily do that?

(This isn't going to be a universal expectation; email at your own domain is not incredibly common. But it's also not exceedingly rare, especially among technical folks, or among folks with a personal "brand" and social media presence.)

I can’t agree with this enough. I’d love to hear more about how to accomplish what you’re asking in the current state of the fediverse. I’ve been reading into it but am not sure how to use my own instance as my “who I am” and “where I am from” while not allowing others to be from my “home” yet still safely connecting and conversing with others.

It’s marketed as easy, but once you start digging into the details, it quickly becomes more complex than I was expecting.

I’ve been looking into Mastadon, Pixelfed, and Matrix to use in this way, but it seems pointless since I don’t want to host my friends and family’s content, and they’re not going to sign up for some random odd sounding instance. I’m then left with an empty social network or communication tool that’s little more than a tech demo.

This is what I say every time; and combined with that, I want to be able to use different ActivityPub software all from my own domain. I don’t want to run Mastodon at foo.chrismorgan.info, publish blog posts via ActivityPub at bar.chrismorgan.info, handle videos at baz.chrismorgan.info, &c. I just want to be me@chrismorgan.info (I’ll settle for @me@chrismorgan.info if I must) everywhere.

To get a little philosophical, there's a kind of "lack of self" inherent in minimizing oneself into a normalized default like GMail. Someone with a common name ends up being "bob.jones.23@gmail.com" - and if you were the first "bob.jones", you will get no end of messages erroneously addressed to you and consequent exposure to the secrets of the others.

The irony is that because email is so broken as an open platform, this normalized default so prone to collision has become the legitimate one, and everything else is filtered out...just like what tends to happen in other domains of society. It's easy upfront, but we're finally getting past the initial adoption of these technologies, and overall quality of service - from initial UX to issues like these - is going to become an increasingly large factor.

You guys forget how big of a problem spam was before gmail. They won the AI arms race and basically eliminated spam as a major problem.

This is right on, along with the large amount of free storage.

also, Gmail invented the conversation format. People forget that all email prior was displayed by receive datetime desc only. finally, Gmail was the first to get Ajax right in a webmail setup, new mail just showed up without having to click a refresh or send/receive button.

It’s a shame that gmail ignored long-standing methods of threading email chains that other clients already had been doing for years, in lieu of their subject based 100 email limit conversations.

It’s also a shame that they also helped enforce top posting, especially considering how ludicrous it is in the context of threaded emails.

> Do you want alice@cucumbers.pizza? Or do you want alice@witches.bike?

I agree, it's hard to choose from so many awesome domains.

"La Cinémathèque Française" uses peertube to make available rare and exclusive movies from its collection:

https://www.cinematheque.fr/henri/

I mean good for them diversifying but it’s such a weird thing that of all the stuff to complain about on YT they go out of their way to mention having to tag videos as appropriate for children and/or for children.

Like surely that’s such a tiny thing. It seems like the author is trying to muster up some nondescript hate for YT when they were going to move for ideological reasons anyway.

Right, it's essentially ragging on a complete product. No one would say, come to peertube, where you have no idea what is meant for your child!

That actually sounds like good advertising to me. Allowing children to join ruins everything. Not because of the children but because parents cannot think rationally about their "safety" (as if you can be hurt over the 'net). They're neurologically hardwired to be biased and prioritize perceived safety over all other issues. This leads to crazy commercial policies re: children that effect everyone (and even worse laws).

I wish there were a checkbox in account settings somewhere by ticking which you would essentially say, "I do not record videos for kids, just stop asking me already".

There is. In Studio, go to Settings > Channel > Advanced settings and make a selection.

Fantastic! Thanks a lot for the tip.

The "appropriate for kids" thing has caused a lot of concern for youtubers due to how relatively heavy-handed it is.

Yeah, this. Tagging a video as for kids doesn't just stop certain types of ads running on it, it also disables many core YouTube features there too. For instance, you can't use the miniplayer, add it to a playlist, etc.

This puts creators of videos that might potentially appeal to kids in a bad situation, since either they tag it as such and watch their video get buried, or avoid doing so and hope YouTube or the FTC doesn't disagree with them.

YouTubers are beholden to YouTube, YouTube is beholden to advertisers.

When advertisers realized that a stupid percentage of their ad spend was going to four-year-olds watching six hours of unlicensed Disney characters in kinky scenarios it was the perfect storm for change.

Keeping perceived ad value up to advertisers is why creators even have the opp to monetize at the rate they do, so it’s really give and take.

Trouble with the FTC is much more responsible for this than advertisers.

Advertisers love to advertise to kids. This is in no way what the advertisers want.

It has more to do with these recent YT changes causing big issues with monetization and community-building. Less revenue, but also comments are now disabled for example. If you make content which could in any way be aimed for kids, or has kids appearing in the video (with some nuances) then you don't get comments which are huge for building a community. And if you get it wrong, the video or channel could be demonitized altogether based on YT's interpretation.

Essentially YT opted out of actually creating moderation tools and a team and instead just increased their ad revenue cut while placing further burden on independent creators who don't have millions in budgets to cushion this effect.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/13/20963459/youtube-google-...

The only reason you even have ad revenue is because the platform is in a state that allows the general public to use it.

Yes, these things are hassles but on youtube you have access to an audience of billions, youtube eats the entire infrastructure costs and manages virtually everything for you.

What do you get on peer tube, 500 views and laggy 480p videos, and no advertisement revenue at all?

I agree with you, and I have in mind a pretty decent solution worth exploring if I can generate the capital to throw at it. It involves separating the ad experience from the videos being consumed. You can still work out targeted deals, but the gist is that the advertiser generally has no control over which videos are seen before and after their ads and have no incentive to find out.

That's how it used to be, then people on social media such as Twitter started reporting things like "why is this Bounty ad next to a controversial figure like Pewdiepie". That's when companies paying for ads started to care and pulled funding.

Right, so the idea is to separate the two experiences, like I said.

You can't separate the two experiences. What the poster was saying is that it was already tried. They were already separated.

And then advertisers realized that having your ads displayed on video content that is damaging to your company's image is generally Really Really Bad for PR. No company is going to sign on for your platform if they can't control where and how their ads are shown.

Try thinking outside of the box before criticizing an approach you don't even understand. There is no reason why the ad needs to be displayed next to the video content and no reason it can't be displayed in a content-agnostic fashion.

I don't want to go into the details of my revenue model but it's sound and has undergone multiple refinements. I don't need you to explain PR to me. I've done my research. I've read Crystalizing Public Opinion by the man himself, Edward Bernays. I am going to venture out and say that I know more about this subject than you and you should reverse your thrusters.

You can say you know more about this subject than I do, and that might be right. But that doesn't mean you'll find success, especially with that attitude. Plus your idea of 'content-agnostic' ads don't work because by existing on the same page and site, it's viewed as an endorsement. If it's not because of the video itself, then it'll be because of the videos that your site hosts. That's why people have gone after advertisers whom had ads on sites such as Breitbart. The alternative is ads which are purely browser-based and if that's your revenue model, then you were already beaten there by Brave.

But no, I won't 'reverse my thrusters'. You want me to change my opinion, then prove me wrong. Otherwise all you have is your word, and words are meaningless.

> But that doesn't mean you'll find success, especially with that attitude.

Lol. You're the one with the negative attitude. You don't know anything about my model and you're just playing devil's advocate. I never claimed it would be successful, I just said it was pretty decent and was worth exploring.

You're being a serious negative nancy. I don't need to change your opinion, and I don't need to prove you wrong, because your statements are empty and deflective and there is no real substance or argument other than "it won't work because I can't imagine a platform other than the ones I have already seen".

And ironically you say my words are meaningless. I've been conservative with my speech, making no hard claims, and you're throwing out whatever spice you can think of. I'm talking from a position reached by years of research, and you're talking straight from your ass.

You can continue to be this way, it's not in my interest to convert you or explain my model any further. Now I suggest you end this over-critical tirade before you cross the line of civility and I have to report you. Good bye.

Look, at some level it's kinda irrational, but it also doesn't matter when the demands are made by the people that pay you. "Advertiser friendly content" is a real thing.

Although this has been attempted before and was eventually reversed (as other posters have pointed out), it is probably worth your time to investigate and possibly prototype. It may not be a model that dominates the market, but you might be able to find your niche.

Thank you.

One thing people don't understand is that while Clorox might not want their ads next to a video about guns, they still want their ads to reach me. If 100% of my consumed content involves guns, there is a compromise in some capacity which Clorox is willing to make. The aim of the model is to make it such that this compromise is fair and clearly separates sponsored content and consumed content so that there is no connection between the two. This is accomplished in many ways.

If this is something that interests you, I'm happy to discuss my model in a private setting.

Meanwhile, PeerTube doesn’t have monitization of any kind. And if they ever do, it will have to somehow contend with the same sort of advertising pressure that got Google, the world’s largest company, to forgo a good slice of revenue.

One of the keys to the revenue model, a version of which I am test-driving with a sister product I'm actively developing, is that the venture must be non-profit and have a strong charter.

There's a weird mix of regulation and Youtube action that mean no-one (parents, youtubers, regulators) are happy with the current result.

We want to protect children from predatory data harvesting, so we have laws like COPPA (in the US). YouTube's answer to COPPA was to just forbid children under 13 having their own account and launching Youtube Kids.

Children under 13 want to watch youtube, and the content they want isn't always on YTKids, so they watch using a parent's account. They do this because they also want the like and subscribe buttons. But because YT doesn't know if it's a child or adult watching they serve ads for horror films or gambling or alcohol. But they also try to guess if it's a child watching the video and they'll serve ads for toys.

Regulators were unhappy.

Youtube tried to say to the regulators "we comply with coppa and we definitely do not target children for ads", but they were going to the potential advertisers and saying "we have the largest child audience and we know how you can reach them".

Faced with further regulation Youtube bunted this onto the creators, and (weirdly, IMO) the regulators agreed and said that the creators (not Youtube) were responsible for ads placed against their content.

Now you have content that is clearly, unambiguously, aimed at children where the Youtuber has to say the word "fuck" three times a video so they can tick the "not for kids" box to get decent ad revenue. There's a bunch of content that was fine for kids that now has to include tediously edgy shit just to avoid that "aimed at kids" classification. Youtube has no idea who is watching videos so the ad serving is awful. The regulators don't talk to each other but are clearly unhappy that unsuitable ads are pushed at kids.

And parents are left not knowing if this content aimed at children actually is aimed at children or if it's going to include jokes about anal rape[1].

[1] On the off-chance that anyone from YouTube is reading this this is a real fucking example, but there's no way to tell you.

> And parents are left not knowing if this content aimed at children actually is aimed at children or if it's going to include jokes about anal rape[1].

> [1] On the off-chance that anyone from YouTube is reading this this is a real fucking example, but there's no way to tell you.

Well, in the 90s they sometimes put adult jokes/puns in cartoons so adults would get something out of it and watch alongside their kids. Your example reminded me of this from Animaniacs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xmAC9Qu908

It seems like PeerTube adoption is slower than Mastodon. Blender's instance[1] is the only other non-toy instance I know of. It's probably because video is much harder to work with, so fewer people do it in the first place.

[1] https://video.blender.org/

I can’t even get that to load, and that’s half the problem with all of the YouTube alternatives in general. Youtube is annoying in more ways than I can count, but it works, and I can watch videos in it.

N=1, but it loaded just fine for me on a T-Mobile LTE connection in rural Tennessee. Buck the Bunny started streaming immediately on my iPhone when clicked, the kids love it.

Same here, stopping every few seconds, then buffering, at some point about 15s in, it simply went black and that was it.

And I share your opinion on video playback alternatives - when a website serves me the video which isn't hosted on Youtube, I kind of groan inside, because of the bad experience of alternatives. Youtube just works, it loads fast and plays without interruptions.

I opened this to see what "non-toy instance" might refer to. It does have a lot of videos. But the highest view count is just shy of 700, and of the hundreds of videos, only maybe a half-dozen have three-digit view counts. It seems like new videos are averaging <10 views. The same videos on YouTube seem to be averaging 6k-10k and the equivalent to the 700 view video has over 7 million views on YouTube.

I don't know what the threshold for "toy" versus "non-toy" is in terms of seriousness, but I do know that I uploaded a video for a professor of mine 5 or 6 years ago, it's a 20 minute video of an unimportant speech he gave with bad audio and it is not SEOed at all (no real search terms attached to it) and it has more views than the highest viewcount video on the instance.

I see one of two possible interpretations: The first is that given that you choose to upload to both YouTube and a PeerTube instance, no one will watch the PeerTube instance. So PeerTube is just an emergency hedge against something going south on YouTube. Insurance is good, but the premiums in terms of time might be a little high.

The second is that it's possible some of those YouTube people wouldn't watch the videos on PeerTube even if they were removed from YouTube. That's a harder problem to solve.

I guess I don't intend to undermine the nobility of the effort, just a natural skeptic when it comes to the feasibility of it going anywhere.

Non-toy meaning a serious website, not something someone plays with in their time off.

First video played well (at reduced quality, 480p), with 6 peers. The other videos seemed to just have a single peer, and it seems like I had bad peering with that person/server, so everything was pretty much unplayable.

Would be cool if there were a way to add peers from the command line. Then I could add a server or two with better peering and maybe be able to watch stuff.

Is there a way with PeerTube to use Backblaze and Cloudflare as an object store and content server of last resort? Similar to how Amazon S3 supports serving objects as torrents but you can also retrieve it directly over HTTPS.

I think if you had a torrent with an HTTP seed, you could import it into PeerTube.

What about normal torrents?

Yeah, those work too.

https://peertube.ch/videos/watch/dcad56d9-9fe6-45bc-96aa-3d7... (1 min. long demonstration)

That's what PeerTube does already - it uses webseeds. You can pretty easily set it up so videos are served through a CDN.

Thank you!

Wow I had no idea about peertube. Is it viable? That’s really encouraging to hear about a competitor to YouTube

It's a question of if they're going to be able to successfully battle copyright and otherwise illegal content issues (if and when they get popular).

I don't believe the existence of their legalese dodging all liability will hold up in many countries for instances. As for user liability it's been shown that countries will battle those as well. Examples:

1) Usenet servers get routinely taken down and it becomes a game of wack-a-mole.

2) BitTorrent seed peers with illegal copyright content are routinely served DMCA notices.

I don’t think that’s an issue here, as PeerTube is a software package, not a hosting service (that I know of). I can use it to host Creative Commons videos, and you can use it to serve box office movies, but in either case PeerTube itself has no say in how you or I are using it.

It's a competitor to YouTube the same way Mastodon is a competitor to Twitter (though Mastodon is probably more popular). It's a similar service but federated.

One neat (or overcomplicating?) thing about PeerTube is that you can follow a PeerTube account with your Mastodon account. Posted videos show up as "toots" and I'm guessing that your replies turn into comments on the video.

Peertube is such a good project. I have used it and its good :) Its decentralized, unaffected by kids policy of youtube and much more. And the github support is pretty active.

What do you use it for?

Wow.

> When it comes to uploading videos, PeerTube is a joy to use and a lot more straightforward than YouTube with its bazillions of options and “is that for children??? is it OK to show to my 2 years old?” ridiculous regulatory checks.

So basically:

- Google doesn't have checks: "Wow, look how irresponsible Google is."

- Google does have checks: "Wow, look how annoying Google is."

Huh, yeah - it's almost like society is made up of millions of people with different pain points and priorities.

This is literally one checkbox. Taxes are ridiculous. This is just slightly less convenient.

This is probably a reference to Youtube's reaction of the COPPA lawsuit.

Basically, Youtube will hold you responsible if you upload something to Youtube without properly tagging if the content is rated for children or not.

However, they also said that anything that may be related to children (toys, kids' movies, etc.) should be tagged for children.

If you tag something as rated for children and it's not, Youtube will punish you. However, if you talk about a new Frozen movie or review Lego (toys) and use swears, that's children's content with adult language, and therefore punishable.

The FTC has published rules about this[0] but has in the past stated it intended to go after Youtubers who broke the rules.

These toggles also have an impact on how your videos are monetized and functionality [1].

So, an adult reviewing lego and calling it "fucking amazing" might be right in the middle between "FTC lawsuit" and "account banned by Youtube".

Of course this is all further complicated by the fact that other countries will have different legislation. A video marked as viewable for children by the Youtube rules may get you into legal trouble in another country.

I'm not necessarily against COPPA but the way the lawsuit was settled caused quite a stir on Youtube and threatened the income of quite a few people, which was made worse by the terrible UI Google has built into Youtube (you couldn't mark a set of videos as "for children", you had to go through each one, and every day a video was up was a day the FTC could send lawyers after you). If Google had handled this better by providing the necessary tools and clear information, this wouldn't have been a big issue at all.

[0]: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2019/11/... [1]: https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/12/13/21012611/youtube-copp...

Using qutebrowser, the result is about the same:

>The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported.

I really hope Chinese start to use this as YouTube is being blocked by the Government.

They absolutely have the capability to block this as well.

They have their own video hosting websites (Youku, QQ Video, Bilibili)

There has got to be some alternative to YouTube. First it was gun videos, then “hate speech”, then medical videos or anything that doesn’t tow their line with the virus, and now they are screwing with people (the Peak Prosperity guy) discussing peer reviewed literature.

There are. People just have to nourish them. With content, presence and donations. And rather than one big youtube alternative, it's probably better having many places focusing on types of video, eg. Twitch or Dlive with live streams, that provide better experience in that area than youtube. Bitchute is in an interesting place where that'll often be where banned people from youtube will be. With enough nourishment from people, the video makers might not even go to youtube in the first place. These alternatives can chew into youtube as small goblins rather than one big one.

Any alternative to youtube faces the same challenges that drove youtube to do what it does. More specifically if they are significantly more relaxed around X, all the really crazy people doing X (ie: why youtube banned X in the first place) will go there causing that platform to get a reputation for being only about X.

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