Debian donation for Peertube development | Hacker News Reader

Debian donation for Peertube development

bits.debian.org

345 pointsedward125 comments

10,000 euros isn't a lot of money. I'm going to interpret the enthusiastic upvoting of this post as being more about what it implies when steady and serious collectives like the Debian project start signalling that something is important. There needs to be better software infrastructure and it needs to be open source (and, indeed, free).

It is hard not to like Debian. It is wonderful to see that focused, principled, good-for-everyone organisations can still carry on even in 2020. Maybe not everyone believes in freedom but Debian has standards.

Yeah, not to rain too much on Peertube’s parade but in my locale (Sweden) that is about one month’s worth of salary for a developer. And in other locales such as Silicon Valley it’s even less (maybe 1-2 weeks of salary?). Then again in some locales that kind of money would go a much longer way of course.

I live in Sweden too. Is that true? I thought it was more around 4k EUR. Or am I being lowballed here...

10k for the average developer (in Europe) sounds a bit too high, 4k a bit too low, but closer to what I would expect.

A lot of Europe is the balkans and the east where I'd be surprised if the average employer cost for a decent developer exceeds 2k/month.

True, I should have said most of Western/Northern Europe, I guess.

Edit: Actually, Europe is so diverse that any blanket statement is mostly worthless.

Oh I meant in terms of cost for the employer. As they have to pay additional taxes on top of the salary. E.g. the so called “employer’s fee” and pension fees (tjänstepension) and stuff like that.

BTW, if you want to go into details, feel free to shoot me an email.

The additional mandatory fees are around 30% https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbetsgivaravgifter_i_Sverig...

So with 4 kEUR gross salary you end up at 5.2 kEUR cash costs. Then there are also non-cash costs, like 5 weeks of paid holidays (or did unions actually achieve the 6th one? It's 30 years I lived in Sweden...)

And you might need an office, equipment, and what not. So the cost can easily be 6-7 kEUR even if the developer sees only 4 kEUR on their payslip.

A few might earn (significantly) more. But that's more likely in corporations higher levels than for open source related development work.

Yes. An employer must also take into account the average sick time per employee and year, since it pays for sick pay day 2 - 14 when the employee is sick. That is an another contribution to the 2x ballpark number.

In Germany you pay/get 13 - 14 monthly salaries per year. In Finland 12.65. Don't know the figure for Sweden, but I'm pretty sure it's > 12.

Please, there are no additional costs for the employer. On paper yes, but from where do you think those "additional costs" are paid? Right, from the value an employee creates.

and their salaries?

Employees salaries? They're paid because employees create some value for an employer. Where do you think money for salaries comes from anyway?

I had a friend who owned a company at the time. His sole criteria for hiring was that net salary + taxes + health insurance + all additional costs (yes, even those "paid by employer") must be <= the money employee earns him.

In Sweden, what you get paid isn't really your full salary. Sweden has a hidden tax system called "arbetsgivaravgift" which only the employer can see. It's hidden and not labeled as a tax because it tricks people into believing you're paying less taxes than you actually do.

So when you think you're paying ~32% income tax, in reality it's closer to 50%.

> It's hidden and not labeled as a tax because it tricks people into believing you're paying less taxes than you actually do.

That's some conspiracy bullshit. The first Google hit for "arbetsgivaravgift" gives the site of the Swedish IRS-equivalent, where it's both clearly marked as a tax and the exact percentage is given.

But the employee does not see it on their pay slip, unlike the regular taxes and pension. So when people (aka employees) talk about taxes it is rarely mentioned. In that regard it is a hidden tax.

My boss told me he when thinking about our pay he considers the expense to the company to be about 2x what we get paid (pre-tax). So that's the "arbetsgivaravgift" (we got the same thing here in Norway) and pensions on top of our salary.

It's not paid by the worker, it's paid by the employer. There no more need to have it on the pay slip than any other per-employee expenses.

Let's say I'm the king of Sweden, and I take back the power from that annoying parliament. I want to appease my people and show that I will rule in favor of the average Joe and against the big evil corporation. So I cut the personal income tax rate by 10%, and I raise the arbetsgivaravgift rate by 10%.

Unless I also forbid renegotiating salaries, don't you think that after a short amount of time "gross" salaries (effectively salaries net of arbetsgivaravgift) will have adjusted and everything will be the same?

If the worker doesn't earn for all these costs "paid by employer", the company would soon go bust.

2x is a good ball park figure that's also true for Germany. Of course it's not strictly taxes, but material, hardware, rent... if you as an employee have a gross sum of 50k, the employer should calculate with up to 100k. If it's less, even better.

> That's some conspiracy bullshit.

It's not a conspiracy at all. The US does it too with the employer portion of FICA. This is 15.3% for most employees.

Hiding this tax that directly impacts what your cash paycheck will be is certainly political. But conspiracy? Not at all. It's like any other social nudging - keeping it out of sight and out of mind is absolutely on purpose and not really arguable. What is arguable is if it's justified.

> That's some conspiracy bullshit.

No it's not.

It's not really hidden though, and there is nothing preventing from it being displayed on payslips, it usually just isn't.

It is still a cost.

Yes... one that is paid from the value the employee creates.

The point here isn't how valuable the employee is, it's how much of a developer's time this donation buys.

In this context are you saying that paying tax is a donation by the taxpayer/employee to the government?

No. What I'm saying is that if you want to know how much developer time Debian's donation buys, you need to look at how much it costs Peertube to buy developer time, which includes all taxes Peertube must pay on employment, not just how much of that money shows up on the developer's paystub.

Yes, it is a cost which is paid solely by employees. Where do you think money for paying that cost comes from?

I never said anything about that. Just arguing against your false claim "there are no additional costs for the employer". If you mean something else, say that instead.

No, I meant what I said. People think those are "additional costs" just because their payslip says "additional costs". To the employer, it's a simple math of "employee costs me X" compared to "employee earns me Y". All successful companies have Y > X. All bankrupt companies have Y < X.

Sweden's great at obfuscating how high effective income tax actually is; payroll tax ("arbetsgivaravgift") and social fees are charged on the employer's side and never seen on your payslip (and are, depending on income, almost comparable to income tax).

That's not even accounting for non-salary costs.

~7-8k EUR effective cost for 1 person-month sounds about right to me.

If you work in Stockholm you could easily get closer to 5k or even above that if you have some experience. If you work somewhere else the figure could be smaller.

> 10,000 euros isn't a lot of money.

Yet, it would pay for 100TB+/month of bandwidth for 10–20 years at current market rates (which are bound to only go down). That should be ample for Debconf's streaming needs, without offloading the bandwidth cost onto its viewers and incurring significant complexity in the process.

I have unlimited 10Mbps (~3TB/month if my math is correct) connection that's costing me nothing to fully utilize. Where do I sign up to help debian?

What I'm saying is, "offloading the bandwidth cost" is bullshit because there is no cost.

Seed the Debian image torrents: https://www.debian.org/CD/torrent-cd/

> I have unlimited 10Mbps (~3TB/month if my math is correct) connection that's costing me nothing to fully utilize. Where do I sign up to help debian?

https://www.debian.org/mirror/ftpmirror

> What I'm saying is, "offloading the bandwidth cost" is bullshit because there is no cost.

There is "no cost" if you use a P2P distribution technology. If you want to distribute hundreds of megabytes to each of a million users using some centralized cloud provider, prepare to open your wallet.

It's not a fortune but ignoring the actual money: * It's publicity for peertube, here and other places * It could get a good chunk of useful development done if used correctly * It's an endorsement from a trusted body that might help build awareness and momentum

I realised at the last second my last comment was about peertube too :). I have no stake but I'd love YouTube alternatives.

Another benefit that comes to mind is having experienced stakeholders guiding a newer organization through growing pains in good faith.

This is so heart warming.

Thanks to Debian and wow - Framasoft (who I'd never heard of) has a page that is so on point!! Amazing.

Someone doing something to stop the book burning (comment deletion in the billions) and censorship at youtube.

I wish there was more of this.

> Someone doing something to stop the book burning (comment deletion in the billions) and censorship at youtube.

What kind of content is getting "censored" on YouTube?

It is hard to get a handle on what disappears; at least I haven't seen a straightforward breakdown.

Certainly things that talks about 911 not being an act of terrorism, Sandy Hook and other school shooting being a govt sponsored hoax, the Las Vegas shooting hoax, things relating to space being hoaxed, etc. I'm not going to provide an opinion on these things.

Whatever your perspective, the thing I would argue, is that if you want to be informed you need access to all the information and evidence, not a subset selected for you by the governing class.

It used to be a popular thing to say: "I hate what you're saying, but I'll fight for your right to say it". I agree with this. But we have been educated to think that so called 'hate speech' is a problem, whereas the real issue is the prolonged infantilisation of adults - in that we don't trust our own judgement, and would prefer an authority to do it for us.

Personally this sounds like exactly the type of content I want to have removed from platforms I frequent. Same as foreign election meddling ads on Facebook or Nazis and bots on Twitter that users urge the platforms to deal with in a better way.

If I look at the front page of some peertube instances it consists of Liveleak-like content, conspiracy theories and ISIS recruitment videos and I can see how that is not very appealing to the average user.

Well, you are saying it is a good thing that certain information is unavailable to you, and that you trust google, the government to do the job for you. I couldn't disagree more!

My response would be, don't you think you can judge for yourself what is ok, and to not watch things that are nonsense? Also, aren't you concerned that you could be manipulated as you may be trusting authorities who - out of self-interest - could fail to disclose information to you; ie that you will be unable to reach an informed opinion as you will be in ignorance?

Personally, I have zero trust in any other parties judging what is ok or not for me to know about. I am happy to judge for myself, without parental guidance.

> you are saying it is a good thing that certain information is unavailable to you, and that you trust google, the government to do the job for you.

That's not what I'm saying. Removing the information from YouTube isn't removing the information from the internet. They are just making use of their right to decide what they give space to on their platform. I can still go to a specific conspiracy theory website and read about it there if I'm feeling like it.

The "government" has nothing to do with that as we are talking about a company applying their own policies to their website not a government mandated take down of content.

But it does. Its public knowledge that google was partially funded by inqtel. The government subsidises corporations.

I think you and I must have different ideas on what governance is. You probably think education, corporations, government and media are separate. I don't. I think they are part of the same governance apparatus.

Hence you have a search company providing email, content, etc in google. And you have Bezos who supplies your online request and media. And Elon who supplies a car service (that he can shut down), space, and neural laces. Microsoft who provide the world's operating systems, family planning and viruses. Etc.

> "Removing the information from YouTube isn't removing the information from the internet."

What gets "flagged" or "removed" from Youtube, mostly also gets the same treatment at Facebook, Twitter, etc. Some extreme examples have seen people be deplatformed from a wide range of "internet" platforms, including their hosting. It's a sad road to go down, and each time we concede things such as removing content from Youtube because of "user safety" and "experience", we add legitimacy for the deplatforming, cancelling and exclusion of individuals with different or controversial opinions.

Yes - corporates, media, education AND government form the governance system we have.

I think it's important to realise that anybody can be influenced, even smart people who look at any information with healthy criticism.

Unfortunately, the human brain is not without its problems. One of those problems is that information that is repeated often will start to "feel" true, even if it is false. If you want to read about these kinds of biases, I'd recommend the book Thinking, fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman.

With platforms like YouTube, it's incredibly easy to get stuck in a filter bubble. Their recommendation algorithm is more than happy to keep recommending you conspiracy theories, because users seem to like those, and the algorithm doesn't care about the actual content.

And once you've watched 10 of those videos, the 11th will no longer sound as ridiculous as it would have if you had watched it without first being (perhaps subconsciously) influenced by those first 10 videos.

This is a real risk of algorithm-based recommendation platforms, and something that Google/Facebook are trying to address now because it has already caused real problems in society.

Yes. But do you mean to use conspiracy in a pejorative sense?

I think its pretty obvious that people 'breathe together' and formulate plans that work best for them. So with us, at the individual level, and so with those who have all the money and operate at the macro level. Are you saying that conspiracies don't happen? What is your method of finding the true ones?

The answer is that we require unfiltered information, and open communication with others. We need to personally engage in verifying claims. We can only confirm or deny whatever claims are made, if we have the information. If that is unavailable because of censorship we can only verify very little. This is where we are today.

As we can only verify very little, the problem is that we are not getting the information. Who is restricting information then? Is the world's leading, corporate-sponsored, search indexer (google), preventing the free flow of information? Well, yes it is. So we can say google is part of the problem, not the solution.

It's easy to look at the extreme examples and get widespread agreement, sure. The problem is in all the grey areas between benign, reasonable, controversial, factually-incorrect, manipulative and then "really bad" content.

And the argument becomes even more moot when you consider that no one is "forcing" people to watch content that they don't like, they simply ignore it and heck the platform can just hide content you ignore/report. At that point, we're conceding that we actually don't want people to see certain content because of certain reasons. And I think those reasons boil down to us collectively thinking that people can be manipulated/influenced, are unable to look at these videos objectively, and can fall for the lies contained within it.

> when you consider that no one is "forcing" people to watch content that they don't like, they simply ignore it

Throwing something into the recommendation algorithm over periods of time or showing you ads will likely have an influence on you even if you wouldn't usually look at the content or search for it.

Facebook itself already experimented with that in the early days of social media: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...

One can block the channels on a per-user basis. And you can "personalize" recommendations to users to exclude channels or videos that are similar to ones they've previously blocked/excluded. Heck you can have curated block-lists that people can subscribe to. You can allow users to disable any non-subscription feed mechanisms so that the only way to find content is through search or other discovery mechanisms that may be external to the platform. There are so many different ways to solve the user-experience issue without deplatforming.

The more you peel back the superficial layers, the more you find that this is just about control as we "don't want to let people make their own opinions by finding content that we don't like".

Edit. Grammar.

Blocklists don't solve the problem of dishonest or scammy ads. If they did we would have solved the spam problem by now. Someone still has to review all that stuff manually.

I love freedom and it is basically the first thing I think of when coming up with a list of "things I care about the most".

With that said, I'm trying to think about what would reddit/youtube/<insert any public viewable platform> look like in my utopian world of free speech.

Where would I draw the line for which can and can't be posted? Should media related to pornography, terrorism, or pedophilia be allowed or forbidden? How about gore, violence, or any other form of crime / morally wrong concept?

I've personally seen (without intending to) the video of the New Zealand Christchurch shooting. On seeing that video I have never been more disgusted in my entire life. I felt like I wanted to puke, hell I want to puke as I type this. Should that be allowed or forbidden?

In my view everything should be allowed, that is, there should be no form of censorship whatsoever. It is up to the individual, based on the value system that he/she has accumulated throughout his/her life, to decide whether what he/she is seeing/reading is acceptable or deplorable. But no one should be able to decide that for another individual.

It's not strict censorship per say, but more repression, but there are a lot of oddball youtube channels that are very popular that constantly get demonetized based on a somewhat arbitrary definitions of what is and isn't appropriate.

This is important, because a lot of these people are trying to make their livings creating videos on youtube, and start trying to avoid otherwise interesting topics so they don't get demonitized.

Some examples: StyroPyro (almost got banned for going replicating stuff from a turn of the century chemistry book), Cody's Lab, William Osman, the list goes on and on and on.

https://twitter.com/crabsandscience/status/10421364471872798... https://www.tubefilter.com/2017/11/06/codys-lab-content-stri... https://www.patreon.com/posts/sad-day-for-my-15167435

It seems the problem here isn't Youtube, though -- it's the ad networks.

As great and beneficial as shifting to a p2p distribution model outside of Google is, I'm not sure how it defeats this "censorship", as you go from "Advertisers don't want to pay for ad placements on x/y/z controversial topic and Google won't promote me!" to simply having no revenue model and no promotion.

You would need to start finding third party sponsors and ad networks, and some sort of promotion/content discovery platform, where I suspect you'd run into the same problems -- the people with the money (ad networks) aren't going to want to sponsor certain kinds of content.

I suspect the best way "around" this is to find sponsors and leverage models like Patreon and paypal donations to finance "untouchable" content. I think it encourages better content than adsense financed videos on top of that.

> It seems the problem here isn't Youtube, though -- it's the ad networks.

> As great and beneficial as shifting to a p2p distribution model outside of Google is, I'm not sure how it defeats this "censorship", as you go from "Advertisers don't want to pay for ad placements on x/y/z controversial topic and Google won't promote me!" to simply having no revenue model and no promotion.

I don’t think the problem commented on above is just demonetization and shadowbanning, it’s completely removing comments and channels as well.

But I agree re: sponsors and donations, Peertube already has a “Support” button right next to the like and dislike thumbs, that can be clicked to show donation links, including to Liberapay, and crypto addresses.

Actually looking back at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24857606 I realize the problem commented on there definitely was about demonetization and shadowbanning. Sorry.

YouTube's ban on “hacking techniques” threatens to shut down infosec YouTube:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20350306

Blender is testing PeerTube after YouTube blocks their videos worldwide:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17347560

YouTube bans content “showing users how to bypass secure computer systems”:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20346865

and those are just the top results from HN.

Several years old example: a local forum for mothers were discussing an acute breast feeding problem one of them had (stuck milk), and one of them uploaded a video showing how to massage the milk out of a breast.

That was quickly banned as inappropriate. Probably because you could see a nipple. I think she uploaded it to Vimeo instead when they found out.

That example certainly taught me to think of Youtube more as a cache than as a storage, if that makes any sense.

It also came across as oppressive. The fear of the nipple winning over basic human issues.

"Inside LGBTQ Vloggers’ Class-Action ‘Censorship’ Suit Against YouTube"[1]:

> YouTubers claim the internet platform is targeting videos not because of their content, but because of the sexual identity of their creators

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/lgbtq-...

I've noticed a lot of self-censorship in an effort to appease "the algorithm", or their perception thereof.

Things like being afraid to say certain common phrases like "mental illness" because they believe it will lead to their video being demonetized.

Then there are the comments. Try leaving a comment in Mandarin that I'm told means "communist bandits". It looks like the comment succeeds, but reloading reveals it has been censored. Silent censorship to appease the CCP.

Not just content - the software ecosystem around YouTube is being censored. youtube-dl has been taken down from Github today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911

That's SO cool! While everybody is busy wasting their life on a super centralized internet, it's heartwarming to know that there are still ideas, people and money that goes towards interesting, free and perhaps even a bit idealistic projects.

And we are talking about tiny numbers: 10,000 €. But they can go a long way.

Support free software, people!

10000€ is not that tiny though. Not only is it about 15% of what PeerTube was trying to raise, it's also about 10 months of full-time salary for a lot of developers around the world, especially where free software is the most important.

Are there other associations similar to Framasoft? In Europe or across the globe.

Framasoft is a French association.

Yeah, that's why I asked, I generally prefer EU orgs for data protection reasons (GDPR).

Like Framasoft? Not that I know of. There are local versions in Europe. A lot smaller is https://disroot.org from the Netherlands.

There are floss projects that are growing: - Nextcloud (German) - Mastodon (German) - Element/Matrix (UK and French) - Pixelfed (Canada) - Small Tech (Ireland)

I heard about:

https://nlnet.nl/

"It spawned the world-renowned NLnet Labs, and supported great open source projects like Jitsi, ARPA2, WireGuard, NoScript, Tor Hidden Services, GPLv3, GNUnet, and webOD"

There's also Codeberg https://join.codeberg.org/ (Germany)

You could probably check the list of organizations supporting "Public Money - Public Code" campaign:

https://publiccode.eu/ (list at the bottom of the page).

A couple observations:

1. Peertube and other fediverse software are examples of living AGPL projects. In recent weeks there was some discussion on this license, and people claiming "no one would want to contribute".

My thinking is that AGPL today is where GPL was, I dunno, 20 years ago in terms of attitude of the industry (not friendly) and significance to the user (actual suppression of user-hostile behavior... of course as much as this software is practically usable). I'm no free software fundamentalist myself, but I recognize this. The shift is related to the changes in how software is distributed.

2. Many discussions of PeerTube viability seem to assume the "content creator" system created, to a large extent intentionally, by YouTube. This system changed over the years, but relies on people pumping out similarly-formatted videos in regular intervals. The people are driven by hope of accomplishing scale where they can support themselves with Patreon and maybe YT ads (though I hear these are less lucrative and important nowadays).

On PeerTube there is no scale as of now, so the realistic model of usage, I imagine, would be more like early YouTube. Funny and interesting videos (not quasi-TV shows), one-off tutorials, archiving, short animation etc., without hoping for making it a full-time job.

3. Lately YouTube have begun constantly pestering (at least when you have some cookie-deleting scheme?) to accept their all-Google terms, and to log in, every every time. I think it started in the late summer, used to be way more lenient. I'm assuming at least the terms thing is related to GDPR: to that extent I'm okay with reminding me what I'm doing to myself by exposing myself to Google. This may be a nudge to start using PeerTube in some capacity, certainly pushed me to peruse archive.org more.

Here are the three problems with video;

1) Governments take pornography seriously. Therefore making a video sharing site always draws attention, as they'll get abused.

2) Along with pornography are videos that are racist, teach about bomb making, conspiracies, are anti-government. These also draw the ire of government.

3) The monetary value of videos is all over the place. Most videos aren't worth anything, except to the creator. Old films and t.v. shows aren't really worth anything financially. New releases do make money for companies, but fade away quickly. There are millions of films, shows, etc. I think this needs to be addressed. If someone shares an old music video, how much should they really be fined? How much is it really worth? The music company would say they lost millions. A consumer would say that they can buy the song for pennies, so the song is only worth pennies. We need a justice system, and judges that can really asses the actual value of things. This is the discussion that hasn't happened yet, but I feel is coming.

> teach about bomb making

Really? I remember there was a lot of hoopla around "the anarchist cookbook" - but was it actually ever taken down anywhere?

I remember using dead tree lexicons as an example in a short class on technology and society - most of them have a lot of information on black powder. I used it to compare and contrast what a simple online search will turn up.

IMO, PeerTube will never become popular due to its decentralized nature.

Why ? What are the premises that leads to your conclusion ?

Not OP, but having tried PeerTube just to see what it was about, just the usability is a pain. There's a lot of foreign language content that clogged up my front page and I'm not even in Europe for some elementary locale checking to try and match content. Then of course, decentralised streaming in this way is incredibly slow and has the same pitfalls as torrents: If there aren't any/enough peers you're screwed or just generally going to have a really bad time.

Having no peers with the content you are looking for is the worst problem. Unpopular videos will just disappear.

In short, if I challenge my mother to "Go to PeerTube and watch the video of a Panda falling over", she would not be able to do it.

Google "peertube", click the first link, put "panda falling over" in the search field - how is that different from YouTube? (Including the first step - lots of older people Google YouTube to go to YouTube)

The problem is the next step because there is no video of a panda falling over, but that's not related to the peertube implementation or UX.

I did that, and the "first link" is "join peer tube", with no search field.

Even when I eventually find peertube.ch (Which I guess is right, because there are a ton of links on joinpeertube to other "instances") there's no videos with pandas at all there, though I don't actually know if this example was intended to be possible.

I do not think my parents would pass this test, even if the video existed.

Fair enough. I'm using ddg and the first link is to https://peer.tube/

Centralised platforms have utterly failed us though, and have become a way to manage information centrally - someone decides what you can or can't see/read/know about.

Decentralised is really the only option for an informed humanity. In the long run, this has to be the answer.

> Decentralised is really the only option for an informed humanity. In the long run, this has to be the answer.

that implies that "an informed humanity" is something that society wants. I really doubt that.

'Society' is not a real thing, even if people treat it as one. Society does not like or dislike, cannot be informed or uninformed. It is just a collective term. Like government. Its a figment in people's imagination, a term, or an idea - brought to life only because we in aggregate believe it to be true and act as if it is. Personally, I don't consider these ideas to have substance in the way they are presented.

The reality, is that 'society' is made up of individuals. Individuals are substantially real. Individuals need to choose for themselves whether they want to be informed or not, according to their conscience.

Individuals should also step out of other people's business, ie stop trying to manage 'society'! But that's another story.

I'm not sure it's due to the technical setup of the platforms. But rather that they're all built in SV and/or are controlled by monopolies that are the problem.

Myself and a few people are actually working on a video site with freedom of speech values and grandma level usability, feel free to follow along (https://project49476.com/).

Even in the best case scenario where everyone starts using different instances of Peertube, won't it end like 2012 Reddit full of racist and paedophile instances?

You need a minimum amount of moderation to remove the least desirable groups of people from posting content.

> won't it end like 2012 Reddit full of racist and paedophile instances?

Not if police intervenes, at least for the pedos there exist established international relations between agencies that works efficiently - there is a reason why you won't see pedo content on the clearnet for long.

This is a difficult question - which is why this line is always provided as a justification for greater authoritarianism.

I would ask, where is the crime here? Is it that you saw something terrible, or that something terrible occurred? Should we be focused on the prevention of immoral acts, or the representation of those immoral acts on video?

Does your not knowing about certain immoral acts make it better or worse in reality for those suffering by them? If the reality is that there are racists and pedophiles, is better to address the issue openly, or behind closed doors?

In my opinion, it is better to enshrine freedom of speech, and to address issues openly. Having things 'managed' privately may mean that it is ok, as long as no one finds out about it. Its definitely a difficult one, but I am not for hiding reality.

Make no mistake, all these alternative platforms do is optimize for a certain type of content and bury/hide some other kind of content. This will always be the case as long as there is an algorithmic feed and search—users will manipulate the system to try to get at the top.

Yes, technically it's not illegal to allow those kind of fringe statements but by doing so you implicitly allow that content to rise to the top and it can make your site unsafe for racial minorities and children.

What is the evidence that a small group of companies has the superiority wisdom to determine who aught to be allowed to speak to the masses?

We elect government democratically, and through that create laws and police. If the internet is full of criminals flaunting laws then the problem is right there in the lack of laws and police, not in the lack of control from a small group of companies.

>won't it end like 2012 Reddit full of racist and paedophile instances?

There is only one Reddit instance. Subreddits may have quasi-independent moderation (Reddit admins can always intervene if not doing so would cause bigger PR problems than they're willing to ignore or deal with in other ways) but there's no real way for one subreddit to disassociate with other subreddits.

PeerTube (or Mastodon or PixelFed or Lemmy) instances can disassociate from other instances that have incompatible moderation practices, though. Either through allowlisting or denylisting depending on the operators' risk models.

Using Mastodon as a case study: Gab tried to pivot to ActivityPub-based software (I think Mastodon) and yet they were denied the ability to federate with most instances because it's a deeply toxic community.

Moderation and centralization are quite disconnected.

ActivityPub is federated and has moderation pretty much built in by design.

It doesn't have to be popular in order to be successful, or worthwhile.

Some day, we're going to have services with 6 billion users. I don't think that will be a good day.

As a consultant I have frequently been in a situation where each member of 'my' team was only outnumbered about 6:1 by the customer. That can be directly managed. As a business owner, I can afford to have a personal relationship with a few percent of my customers. I can cherry pick. As a medium application developer, each of my employees might represent 1000 users, and even zone defense starts to crumble. I have to start treating them as numbers, and that causes new types of problems.

I see the sorts of compromises we often have to make at hundreds of thousands of users, and I'm grateful that most of the verticals I'm interested in wouldn't ever have 600 million users, let alone ten times that much. There are verticals where form and function are tightly aligned, and I think those can scale much higher. Torrents and Discord, off the top of my head, I think resemble that remark. Infrastructure like nginx or Consul, maybe. Linux... well, it's 5 million lines of code so it might be 'failing' in that manner.

Reddit, on the other hand... I'm glad I'm not responsible for Reddit because I'd probably hate myself half as much as my users claim to.

Some comedian had a bit years ago about how he wanted to be 'Bruce Campbell famous'. This is a guy who is a god in a niche. If he wants his ego stoked, he just needs to be in the right room, and he can make that room happen just by asking for it. Meanwhile he can go out to dinner at a nice restaurant and there is a reasonable expectation that he might get to eat in peace. I think I could deal with that level of success.

Like email?

Define popular.

There is a huge field between 'sustainable' and 'populist' and if we want choice and quality in the world we need to vote with our feet and dollars and ballots for alternative solutions that are big enough for people to not giggle at, but small enough that they can maintain some conceptual coherence.

We need an 'Apple' (a 10% competitor that has enough quality and mindshare to go on for years or decades) in lots of verticals if we want to keep a market place for new ideas. Better still if we had a 5% and a 10% alternative.

The 10% guy you have to watch and emulate. The 5% guy you can audit occasionally looking for ideas to cherry pick. The 85% still benefit from what the 15% are doing.

Does debian have a peertube instance of their own?

Nice gesture though. Even if they reached the stretch goal, I did my part and donated a few tenners. If you haven't yet, now's the time!

They have much more developing to do https://joinpeertube.org/roadmap

https://peertube.debian.social/

Thank you kindly. Lots of good videos there!

Video on the Internet is still broken.

Videos aren't that big, especially for 5 minute clips at a lower quality.

It shouldn't be this hard to share, copy, or post small video clips.

Anyone want to take bets that Google would eventually try to deprecate whatever API peertube needs because of some plausibly true "security reason" in the next few years?

I doubt it's ever gonna become a thing Google even notices.

duckduckgo

Not equivalent at all. DDG gathers the content they provide themselves. Video sites rely on users for content, which is why critical mass matters. Why get 100 views on peertube when you can 100000 views on Youtube?

> DDG gathers the content they provide themselves.

You know that DDG mostly relies on Bing for their search index right?

https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/?redir=1

There are a lot of legal content that is banned. I have seen videos banned on dermatologist's channel due to obscene skin rashes. Same anything that spills blood etc. When it comes to politically controversial any commercial company has to take side with ruling party and ban the videos. PeerTube is alluring to them. Critical mass is not an issue IMO

funny and depressing at the same time

Does peertube use Google API at all?

I think they probably meant a Chrome/browser API.

I'd take a bet against, because peertube transport can be essentially implemented in the same way as video calls. As long as Google Meet works in the browser, peertube can too. (I'm not saying it works that way right now)

Risky, WebRTC isn't quite P2P, the sending peer still has to sort of spend the resources to send to all participants. It's a full mesh but you'd want something more open. You'll also have to consider DDoS protections for streamers.

I'm not sure what you mean... why would webrtc spend any more resources than the current solution?

WebRTC in Videochats usually employs 1:1 P2P, meaning everyone builds a peer connection to everyone else. So for N people you have N connections carrying your traffic M, so the total bandwidth is NM.

For torrent P2P you get clusters of peers sharing data, you don't have to send data to every peer, the usual outcome is logarithmic, so you connect to log(N) peers for N participants with total bandwidth being log(N)M.

That's only because for video chats you need a full mesh in p2p. There's no requirement for that in webrtc itself which would be just the transport protocol in your case. You can also send only the selected chunks rather than stream the whole file.

But then you basically do what webtorrent already does, why reinvent it for no reason?

The whole premise of this thread is the speculation: "Google would eventually try to deprecate whatever API peertube needs". My answer to that is "basically do what webtorrent already does" (but using a different API)

Looks like it'll be pretty resilient in the basic case from an web/tech perspective. They fetch the video content using plain HTTP against a video file hosted on a URL, getting it in small chunks using HTTP range headers. That's as basic as you can get it.

Google is deprecating APIs left and right. For example, Google Music users were migrated over to YouTube Music as Google Music was deprecated. Google Music had an API you could develop against, YouTube Music lacks any such API, leaving people like me in the lurch.

What youtube APIs does peertube need? Does peertube need youtube? AFAIK it's its own service with no youtube dependency.

What a waste of money that could go to projects really worth it, and not a service with pirated anime, tv shows, lingerie models, and very bad LGBT or religious content.

Who even taught this could be a good idea?

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