Bye YouTube, Hello PeerTube [video]
diode.zone
diode.zone
The reason you can watch videos at 1080p wherever you are in the world buffer free is because the system is ridiculously optimized, cached locally, and so on. Do you want to go back to 180p because one of the two guys hosting that five year old video with 50k views you liked just went offline?
Cartels don't use drug mules because they're such a fantastic feat of logistics but because hiring a freight train is somewhat problematic
But often ISPs will willingly host the content for free since it saves them money as well. Steam and netflix have caches inside ISP datacenters.
What's illegal movies?
The inefficiency of torrents on near-symmetric internet connections is pretty minor. If a 1GiB movie is on Netflix, each user has to download 1GiB of data over your internet connection. If it's in a torrent, each user has to download 1GiB of data and also upload 1GiB of data. The efficiency difference is only a factor of 2. And the 1GiB of upload bandwidth was, in many cases, idle anyway.
(Well, there's also the fact that the users are paying the cost of distributing the movie, rather than Netflix paying part of it. So you'd think that information that benefits the people who receive it, like Linux, porn, and sewing and soapmaking tutorials, rather than the people who produce it, like advertising, would tend to be distributed by torrents. But, for a commercial setup, this is a minor consideration; even ordinary hosted servers pay relatively little for bandwidth, and Netflix probably pays nothing in most cases. I suspect Micah Scott ended up paying about 10% of the cost of me watching this video, not counting the value of my time.)
Realistically I should be aiming to replace Google's revenue for my eyeball traffic, because that covers all of the costs as well. Still seems very doable.
It would be nice if Patreon partnered up with them and handled the transactions.
That's like 1-2 dollars worth of 'penny' donations per day. I'm not sure i would be willing to pay that, esp. if for videos that i'm only mildly interested in, and would not have gone to watch if it weren't free.
I doubt I skim through even 10 video a day. I think people like myself are more likely the norm than the exception.
A common "digital fallacy" people make is assuming 'everyone' uses a site like they use it. Most people don't.
Ads are a revenue stream mostly for the platform e.g. YouTube itself. You can have a look at this[1] or any other "how my YouTube channel makes money" video to see that's the case.
In-video ads, on the other hand, are indeed a significant revenue stream for creators, but those have nothing to do with the platform and everything to do with the single creator.
For smaller Youtubers (LTT is a very large channel) the gap between AdSense and in-video tends to be wider. I don't have hard data on this but it's the result of talking to several youtubers in person. If someone has the data, it would be cool to share it here.
I would much rather the old internet come back where "content creator" was never a word that existed, or could exist.
Why does money have to touch everything? Why do I continue to make comments on HN? It's certainly not because I hope to monitize this. It's fun and you share your ideas.
Acting like removing the ability for creators to get money from ads is going to eliminate all creators is silly, so yes it's a hard sell for existing creators, and if forced upon it'll remove a lot of the profit driven creators, and I view that as a good thing.
Sure, content creation is a job whether they're compensated or not. I'm not saying that we deserve free content, I'm saying that there will always be people bored enough to create content they want to share.
Image macros are created daily but nobody is creating them with the expectation of compensation. (There are social media accounts who compile them so they can gain followers / post ads, but the original creators aren't)
People write blogs knowing they get 20 views per month. That's the voices I want to hear. Not from someone who reads a book about how to get $5k in passive income per month by churning blog posts and growing a mailing list!
The number #1 post on the front page about blogs has this comment
"As a minor counterpoint: I've come to dread blogs and newsletters because so many of them are written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to."
Just replace blogs and newsletter with YouTube channels and that's my sentiment.
There are many Youtubers whose content I like, but if I had to pay monthly fee (or pay per view) for their videos I wouldn't watch them. I think this was pretty much confirmed with the Youtube Red experiment. Many of the channels I follow got picked up for the program, but I have no desire to pay for the shows they produced for Youtube.
And how the ads work on Youtube makes it completely unwatchable without AdBlocking and I am not paying for the Youtube Premium to remove ads because A) it won't remove the ads and sponsorships that are embedded in the videos and B) I don't want to give Youtube as a platform any cut.
You're willing to watch the content, just not pay for it.
This is why concepts like PeerTube will never attract the majority of content, because it isn't free to make it, it isn't free to show it, it's only free to consume it.
Yeah, I can watch someone pour molten metal on safety glass, that seems interesting, but I wouldn't pay for it. It isn't that interesting.
Ironically, when I go to Peertube, all the content there is objectively low quality with extremely poor production value, little to no editing, and clearly done with the lowest of budgets.
The content airing on Youtube from the top ~1000+ creators is easily as good or better than the majority of cable TV.
It's often extremely high quality content, frankly.
And yes there are some Youtubers whose I have subscribed to and their content is often great. However it is not consistently great enough to pay for it just like cable TV. And that is just the top 1% of the top 1%. Rest is at best mediocre and often just grabage.
We're talking about business models here, we're talking about a whole industry, and you should realize that your opinion is worse than useless, it's actively harming your ability to understand and predict
If PeerTube wants to be a 0.00001% write off for radical CopyLeftists and "Hackers" to put up some low effort, low value, "good" content then so be it but to even bring up Youtube in a conversation of yet-another-tiny-site is silly, because that concept is not competing with Youtube and could never compete with Youtube.
As for PeerTube I don't care. Sadly video is currently expensive to host and only Google has the pockets to operate a site like Youtube. I won't pay for it and the day my adblocker stops working is the day I stop watching it.
If we want good content und independence from YouTube, perhaps it is time to see, that it might cost us a tiny bit of money each month, to uphold our freedom. One rented server can easily support many users, each of those can chip in to finance renting the server. It can be done transparently, so that users always know what they are paying for and how much is covered already for the month. It is time to learn, that we need to support what we like financially, so that people can actually live from providing us with it. As long as we do not do so, people can only provide us with their creations by generating revenue in other ways.
What does the have to do with the licence of the PeerTube source code?
The same way we get good software from a ´community´ which is explicitly copyleft.
> Will the vast majority of creators use this even as a backup?
The best way to use platforms like Peertube and Odysee is by using it as a primary source, with Youtube and Vimeo essentially playing the role of CDN. Should the censors not like your video for $reasons they can block them 'till they turn ultraviolet but they can not deny anyone access to them. Make sure to advertise your alternative distribution channel(s), use the same channel names and video titles so they can be found through regular web search and you're set [1].
[1] that it, until censorship reaches the network layer
Video (movies) should be enjoyed on a big screen with a good screen.
These platforms should give creators a way to prohibit viewing on small screens, Linux, etc.
And as for blocking the most popular video playing platform out there - at least for large screens - the only question would be “why”
This is the answer to so much of what's wrong with the modern web. We need less business and to get more communities back into the center of the web... it should be even easier today since IaaS is so much cheaper, I think it's just a focus problem, nothing is relevant to the big sites that act as the lens to the web unless it's directly pumping money somewhere.
Nothing is free, if you don't pay for the product YOU are the product.
So of course content creators can chip in, eg. if they accept donations, and especially if (not on the two instances listed above) they are paid to advertise content and products. But users can chip in, too. Overall, hosting costs are cheap because:
- they're mutualized between artists - there's no tracking apparatus like Youtube hooked to a machine learning model to keep you addicted - there's no advertisement to serve or complex upload filter to make sure your public domain recordings bring money to the copyright cartel [0] - if a video becomes popular (eg. a cool livestream) a sufficient portion of people will seed it via WebTorrent (torrent + WebRTC + STUN), considerably reducing server load [1]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27004577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325 etc
[1] I've heard faithful reports from fellow sysadmins that their small VPS handled load for hundreds of simultaneous viewers on livestream thanks to a few people seeding (by just "viewing" the video in their browser with default settings) from a home fiber connection
From a purely-technical lens, that may not seem like a fatal flaw. When viewed through a whole-product lens, it is. PeerTube's anonymous, censor-proof nature is enough to attract a certain class of content that repels advertisers, but then what? Until the dark side of distributed technologies is addressed instead of touted as a feature, this doesn't have a chance of popular success.
I agree that deletionism is a big problem.
Those kind of abstract accusations do not belong in an encyclopedia article, and while there's a wealth of "citations" buried under the [5], none are anything other than news articles repeating the same accusation. It's baseless mudslinging that is the exact opposite of sticking to provable individual claims and facts, like a proper encyclopedia article should consist of.
Granted, it's not an insurmountable bar as it appears anyone with 500 edits can begin to participate. However, it shows a clear attempt to control the narrative to a specific one, and erecting barriers against changing that while officially endorsing the current one. It spans greater than just that, and seems common across other political articles on Wikipedia.
It seems to me that describing Marjorie Taylor Greene as a "far-right conspiracy theorist" is just as encyclopedic and verifiable as describing Charles Manson as "an American criminal who led the Manson Family" or Jeffrey Dahmer as "an American serial killer and sex offender who committed the murder and dismemberment of 17 men and boys". Why do you disagree?
YouTube is an advertising business, Peertube is software. They are like day and night different.
Peertube is developed by a community of developers, governed by a french non-profit called Framasoft. Their primary mission is community governance, establishing a legal footprint, and promoting Peertube, in the same vain as Mozilla, the Drupal Foundation and many others.
According to the Peertube website, 90% of Framasoft's funding consists of donations. Since they don't sell a service, don't have to maintain infrastructure to enable hosting of videos, they don't require a complex organization and large investments.
Sharing the costs of a common good tends to work out on a small scale, and it's a valid alternative to private for-profit initiatives. Reeading tip: ERS's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
> PeerTube's anonymous, censor-proof nature is enough to attract a certain class of content that repels advertisers, but then what? Until the dark side of distributed technologies is addressed instead of touted as a feature, this doesn't have a chance of popular success.
Peertube isn't a single service that contains a "certain class of content that repels advertisers". It's software that allows anyone to set up their own server and hook it up in a federated network of servers.
It's a bit like online fora. Like, PHPbb and vBulletin are just sofware. Anyone can download a copy, install it on their own server, run their own forum and develop their own community. It used to be that there were fora about anything and everything ranging from gaming, knitting, books, history to the less savory topics and themes. Few would argue that these weren't successful in their heyday.
The biggest challenge federated networks face is this: discovery of content. That's what defines how much they will appeal to a large audience.
Centralized services like YouTube are popular because they've perfected the discovery of information relevant to their audience to a fine art. YouTube becoming an ad business is a paradox: they arrived at that point because that's the only viable business model to cover the cost of centralized hosting of billions of videos, and the bandwidth required to serve billions of viewers.
Federated networks don't suffer that problem because the costs of hosting content are shared across the nodes of the network. Peertube leverages WebTorrent as their file sharing protocol. The existence of individual nodes across the network is predicated by local economic conditions. Some nodes may disappear if they can't recoup their own operational costs. But distributed character of the network implies that its enduring success is predicated by the longevity of a majority of nodes.
Peertube is neither of those things. Publishing is pseudonymous, not anonymous: requires an account on the server you'd like to publish videos to, just like youtube and other video platforms. And it's only censorship-proof as much as it uses HTTPS/WebRTC to share content. I haven't seen any study of the Sybil-proofness of Webtorrent protocol, but Peertube certainly does not protect instance operator from DNS/IP censorship or from having their machines seized by law enforcement.
Peertube is based on a federated model (like email/www) where instances are "responsible" for the content/users they host, encouraging smaller, trusted communities. Search is currently being addressed via SepiaSearch (a dedicated search engine), and the joinpeertube.org/sepiasearch.org listings are seriously moderated (i once reported a white supremacist instance and it was delisted in under 24h).
Maybe you're talking about STUN servers? There's only 2 hardcoded STUN servers for the moment [0] indeed, but that's only for WebRTC discovery and will be easy to fix. It does not prevent server-side redundancy because every peertube instance runs its own tracker, from my understanding on the protocol (let me know if i've got that wrong), but taking those STUN servers down would indeed prevent p2p seeding, except for publicly-routable clients (not behind NAT).
that's still "generating revenue". maybe not profit, but servers and bandwidth cost non-trivial amounts of money and somebody has to pay for that. whether it's donations, or user-fees, or ads, or private benefactors, the revenue has to come from somewhere. but if a video service has no answer as to how it can sustain itself, it's questionable whether it's worth the effort of developing it or developing your audience on it.
It's even possible to streamline the experience for torrents like how Popcorntime has done. Users don't need to even be technical enough to understand what torrents are - the same way users don't need to understand tcp/ip to visit a website.
You can try to think of Peertube as Popcorn Time with user following and channels and comments... and interop with the rest of the Fediverse.
There's always some push for more quality but that doesn't mean the audience requires it. Youtube itself had horrible quality and outdated codecs for a long long time yet and that didn't stop it from getting popular. Video snobs are a bit of a niche that youtube has historically not catered for.
So yeah they were not the best video possible to create but they were the best for the internet at the time and still are. You can upload 8k HDR 60fps videos which are sized at multiple GB right now.
Once youtube has it, people are not going to tolerate 720p video from an alternative.
There are also people who get funded through sites like patreon, who might not care too much for youtube advertisement or YT freemium. Sometimes you even see youtube personalities switching to twitch or other platforms just in order to escape youtube and do legal activity which is just close to impossible on youtube. There is an endless stream of youtube videos complaing about youtube copyright system and how it makes their job close to impossible in some cases. Game reviews and movie reviews are two areas almost dominated by the issue of false copyright claims, which has forced some creators to abandon the platform as a revenue sources.
There is even float plane which was designed from the ground to solve the youtube problem, created by a company that fully relied on youtube for its existence. If your company existence is depended on a free service provided by someone else, you might want to reconsider how safe you should feel. PeerTube might serve a similar purpose.
On top of that we have scientists who might want to know that their research isn't taken down because of false copyright claims or fleeting politics. A company that has linked instruction videos in their books/teaching material might want to be sure that links still work 10 years from now. Activists might want to avoid the risk that their documentation doesn't go dark from a political requests or false claim. Police brutality victims might want to be sure that the copyrighted music playing in the background, placed there intentionally to get copyright claims, does not stop them from uploading videos.
There needs to be some kind of peer to peer rating system so you can find content suited to you (reinforce your bubble I suppose) because there is going to be no central filtering authority, but that's part of the point.
What is the incentive for anyone to run a Tor/i2p/IPFS/Torrent seed node?
This is difficult for normies to understand, but money isn't the only thing that incentivizes people to do things. There are many people for whom "Fuck YouTube" is the only incentive required to participate.
Work. Usually for a three letter agency of some sort -at least for the first two.
Waste? They'd be using storage that would otherwise most likely be sitting there, unused. Or in other words, wasted.
This could be an avenue for tech savvy sex workers who need an alternative to OnlyFans.
For exmaple Wikipedia, thausands of people write articles, for free, they got no money. Huge amount of open source developers publishing their work for everybody, free.
The incentive is to make content you like accessible to more people. Of course you can do it in your "garage" if you have huge hard drives and good connectivity, but you can also do it as a collective by setting up your own instance and mirroring other instances aligned with your values/interests.
There is exactly zero incentive for an instance to mirror public instances where people can upload terabytes of trash content. But there is strong incentives to replicate well-moderated instances with quality content, because the cost of that is very low (you can rent a VPS with 2TB HDD for ~20€/mo these days).
> Exacerbated by the fact that the entire thing mostly seems to attract people who get banned from anything else
I don't think that's the case. For now i've mostly seen established non-profits (eg. libre software/culture NGOs and workers cooperatives) who were disenchantized with Youtube. I've seen exactly one white supremacist instance, and it got delisted from "official" instances list in under 24h.
The trending page on PeerTube shows a list of videos with at most a few dozen views.
Is PeerTube supremely unpopular (seems to have been launched several years ago: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube), or am I missing something? Does it really have an order of magnitude more Github stars (https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube) than daily viewers?
...that's quite a lot even on YouTube, no? I always assumed the videos recommended for their sheer popularity were a "top 1%" sort of situation.
I agree with your interpretation overall, but there's other factors at play:
- Peertube isn't trying to force everyone to have an account like Youtube is
- the Peertube federation is much younger, and some would say it reached maturity for broader usage very recently (this year)
- view count does not account for people downloading the video directly using HTTPS direct connection and/or Webtorrent, only those using the default web client
For comparison, here [0] is the YT channel that has moved to PeerTube, and here [1] is a random musician's channel that I happen to follow. The second is many times larger, even though it is a single person's channel.
So I'm guessing as long as you post regularly you can get thousands of subscribers without much effort.
Another major problem that prevents creators from hosting on PeerTube is that there are no ads - many see direct-from-YouTube revenue driven by Premium views/Ad views generate a significant portion of their income. Even Linus Tech Tips, with their audience of gamers who mostly running an ad blocker, sees YouTube generate 26% of their profit[0], almost exactly as much as they get from sponsors spots in their videos. If everyone were to move to PT, we'd either need an intermediary for ads, or only creators with audiences that could afford to personally finance them (via Patreon or similar) would be able to survive and make a living off of running their channel.
If you move your content to PeerTube and want both an audience and to be paid, you'll need a combination of third party services and other social media, and will likely end up with similar problems re: advertisers cutting out "unacceptable content".
I do think it'd probably be better if the content provider was divested from this layer and focused on only providing media, but Peertube doesn't really solve these social/economic problems people complain about with Youtube.
I'm guessing that either there's some clause in the YouTube partner/adsense program saying you can't just redirect your viewers elsewhere or you can't upload videos with the sole purpose of saying "go here for more videos".
That said, I'd be interested to see the details of what GP was talking about, because I believe it exists, I just wonder what the exacts are.
https://twitter.com/linustech/status/1008752236027973632?lan...
And here is the wan show discussing it (thanks to a comment on HN): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKtJY6soCds&t=698s
Is it so hard to be on both? Something I like about YouTube compared to some other platforms is they never (to the best of my knowledge) engage in exclusives or impose exclusivity conditions. And even when they develop new features, I've rarely seen Google try to restrict those.
You can consume peertube content with any activitypub client that supports its types. In short, peertube is an accessible way for users to publish their videos to activitypub.
[1] https://github.com/owncast/owncast/tree/gek/activity-pub-1
However, i don't think every property is standardized yet, so having another implementation will be useful to specify everything for future implementations.
- you can subscribe to them from Mastodon or any fediverse client
- your friends on the Fediverse can "reshare" (reshare/boost) videos from their favorite content creator
There's also a "decentralized" (as in "selfhosted") search engine called SepiaSearch being developed for use with Peertube.
I can't say i'm fulfilled yet by the content available on Peertube (although there is some great quality content), but at least i'm happy i'm not being dragged into recommendation hell by a hostile machine learning model trying to maximize advertising revenues... and Peertube federation keeps growing with more and more non-profits running instances for specific interests and communities, and more and more content creators ditching the creator-hostile [0] platforms for Peertube.
[0] Some creators believe that tracking their viewers and serving them dubious advertisement is bad. Most creators agree that automated copyright strikes like Youtube is doing (completely ignoring copyright exemptions like fair use) is bad.
One reason of seeming more inpopular than it actually is, lies in that while there are many PeerTube instances, they are not all federating together. They are selective and some are not federating at all.
Also I am not sure if counting of views works all that well yet, and Likes require either signing up to individual instances, or spreading of video link via Mastodon to get liked (via ActivityPub integration).
Both the federation and the level of integration with other Fediverse apps is a work in progress and steadily improving.
That's because their “landing pages” (project advertisement websites) aren't instances. The home page of any instance (e.g. https://diode.zone/) will show you the content visible from that instance.
But, if you’re going to be called “join peertube” you need to have the sort of content that makes people want to join: copy about what peertube is + a list of instances isn’t that.
I know it's not an instance and blah-blah-blah, but those are technical details that (possible) users don't give a single F.
I host a peertube instance that currently mostly contains my own videos. If I want someone to watch it, I link to the channel or the video in question. I don't say "watch me on peertube". The fact that peertube is the software that runs the service is not something a regular user should care about.
Peertube is federated using the same protocol as Mastodon, but federation isn't completely open by default. I guess this is for the better, because there is a lot of content you wouldn't want on your own instance's main feed (most instance hosts don't want porn in the middle of a feed of mostly tech videos).
Also, the UI of peertube isn't that great when it comes to following channels on other instances. If federation breaks (which it usually does) you get a nondescript error saying that something failed.
That is a technically correct answer, but it misses the point: they're asking users to sign up before they even see the product. They're expecting that the premise of the site alone is enough to entice users to join, which is very optimistic. It would be better to immediately direct the user to content, and then provide reasons for why they should get an account. At a high level, that's what YouTube does.
Just consider publishing more content on the homepage would raise questions, like what content to prioritize/ban from the homepage? There's some editorial work to delist certain instances from the instance list, but personally i'm rather glad Peertube doesn't go much further trying to recreate the whole Youtube experience where a single actor decides on what you get to see.
Yeah, like I mentioned, PeerTube is currently targeted at those attracted to the premise alone. Most people don't notice things like you did, and they're not going to interpret the apparent lack of features as a plus. If it's going to gain mass-adoption, it really needs to work on first impressions.
Some of these suggested videos may be fun to watch but Youtube has become really bad over the years to discover interesting, not well-known content. Now they're trying to maximize ad revenue, and the recommended videos have suffered as a consequence, only pushing top-popularity content pushed by "content creation industry" with very little quality.
...so they're not interesting to you. I see several news and music-related videos that I might watch. Like I said, YouTube presents you with a set of videos you may be interested in, and even if you're not, it also gives you tools for finding videos yourself (e.g., through tags & categories). The moment you start watching videos, it starts refining recommendations and funneling you towards more content.
By contrast, PeerTube's homepage is pretty bare. I don't even know what the interface would look like if I did sign up.
Try PeerTube. Here's a cat video. Posted 1 week ago, 38 views, duration 10 seconds.
https://peertube.tv/w/tsvCimhEaLSTZD16B3gqBQ
Even as the only watcher, and with gigabit Internet both ways at my end, it stuttered, then stalled completely.
For short videos, you'd be better off putting them on a shared hosting site as .mp4 files.
Peer to peer video hosting is just not a good idea for bandwidth reasons.
I have 600 down and it was still choppy on the first load.
Downloading that video with wget took me 0.4 seconds.
Connecting to peertube.tv (peertube.tv)|77.168.118.55|:443... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 1058937 (1.0M) [video/mp4] Saving to: ‘de5a56e4-036c-4536-b1a6-4ac45b872516-576.mp4’
de5a56e4-036c-4536- 100%[===================>] 1.01M 2.79MB/s in 0.4s
But clients do seed videos by default. You can opt-out of that in the video settings, and if your browser doesn't support WebRTC it will not seed anyway (simply download video over HTTPS).
Instances like https://tilvids.com/ or https://video.ploud.fr/ have better bandwidth.
It's both. PeerTube instances federate with each other, but the video player uses P2P to spread the load between viewers.
So you could have a peertube.au instance dedicated to seeding content from other instances on an opt-in basis (instance following other instances, and giving them a certain disk quota).
Peertube, on the other hand, encourages distribution of content in a peer-to-peer manner. As a person, you can use your favorite Webtorrent [0] client to help seed content from far away servers to your neighbors. As an instance operator, you can opt-in to seeding for another instance (with a disk quota limit) from your own network, helping videos published on the other side of the world reach your local audience.
Example: take three hypothetical FLOSS-oriented instances floss.fr (France) floss.cn (China) and floss.ml (Mali). If those instances all "follow" one another, with sufficient disk quotas, all videos will be replicated across the 3 servers, and video streaming will be smooth from those 3 locations (and neighboring regions).
In all cases, even when initial streaming is slow, Webtorrent scales well because most clients (unless they opt-out) will seed videos via Webtorrent protocol (WebRTC + STUN) so as a video becomes more popular it becomes easier/faster to access without placing the infrastructure/economic burden on the Peertube instance. Clever stuff.
[0] There is a reference Webtorrent client, but libtorrent recently started implementing Webtorrent support so that should become more broadly available "soon".
It's just like you create a blog: you need to find a host for it and most websites don't allow you to just start uploading content.
A growing number of non-profits are starting to embrace it and for that usecase Peertube is perfect. If there's no peertube instance for your community/usecase, you could start one with a few friends/neighbors.
How did this even make it to the front page?
How do people believe this is even remotely true?
I have so many options to host videos, least of which is just housing itself on my own damn server!
I don't know if the complaint here is that no one else will do it for me for free, or that no one else will just hand me viewers for free.
Devil's advocate: Which paid video-website with community created content the size similar to Youtube may I join?
That's where the "de-facto" monopoly claim comes from, I guess.
I think if you add "...that people actually visit and watch", it's more accurate. Sure, I can host my own videos or put them on Vimeo or PeerTube - but YouTube is going to get me more eyeballs more quickly (assuming I play the promo games.)
Peertube is precisely about hosting videos on your "own damn server". Except Peertube is designed in a way that fellow instance operators can seed your content, and that clients viewing a specific videos will also seed it. This means your server can now serve video to more remote places, and will be more resilient to view peaks (a very small VPS with limited bandwidth can handle hundreds of parallel views).
If you don't go the Peertube way, you are usually giving up on serving video to remote areas where you don't have good connectivity to, and crossing your fingers so that your videos don't become too popular. Or you end up building your own mirroring/CDN infrastructure like media.ccc.de and others do, but by then the costs and complexity are much higher than operating a Peertube instance.
I don’t think Facebook owns YouTube :)
At the end of the day, they go hand in hand, those ads need to be served.
Sadly peertube seems to have to buffer from the beginning to play from this position.
That's weird. What browser are you running? Is it downloading video directly from the server or is it doing WebRTC P2P download?
The former (direct download) is intended as fallback mode and i believe it uses HLS chunking which may or may not be well supported by your browser.
Why would any creator spend all that time and money making content to give away for free? Do you give away your daily work for free? They can easily use something like Patreon or one of the many pay-only tube sites if they're giving up on ads and asking for donations/subscriptions/etc.
I mean, I'm not against the idea, it just seems to fundamentally misunderstand why creators choose youtube. If Youtube paid $0/1000 views... the majority of the top 1000 creators would be gone overnight.
I understand the point of big budget video creation, but that's not most creators, just like most companies aren't Google and shouldn't be trying to solve their problems that are a 1000th the size with Google-scale solutions.
Simply, there is a place for small budget videos. I'd even argue that the majority should be small budget, and that advertising and budget inflation have on average been more bad for YouTube than good.
Most creators/uploaders do not monetize their works. This is just the tiny minority that Youtube highlights to keep their business flowing. A lot of content is produced by amateurs and non-profits, and Youtube does them a huge disservice by displaying ads (which they don't benefit from), tracking their viewers, recommending bad-quality/outrageous content (eg. conspiracy videos), and copyright-striking their videos even when it is clear no law was violated (eg. fair use).
> Why would any creator spend all that time and money making content to give away for free? Do you give away your daily work for free?
I definitely would not give my work for free for companies to profit from, but i'm happy to engage in free labor for non-profits and for my peers. This is a well-known paradox in the libre culture/software, especially with non-copyleft licenses (eg. MIT) which enable a for-profit to siphon of volunteer work without ever contributing something back in return. See also: OpenSSL maintainership "scandal" back in the day.
> If Youtube paid $0/1000 views... the majority of the top 1000 creators would be gone overnight.
Would that be such a loss? Looks like these channels are just outrage/advertisement machine with very little content creation going on... at least form an outsider's perspective.
Well, creators can still point to their Patreon (or Liberapay) without problems. I see many creators relying more on Sponsorships and other income streams as significant (apparently YT doesn't pay that much unless you're incredibly popular).
Dave from EEVBlog is extremely transparent on YT income, worth checking out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU3FAIaAF0I
It seems LBRY gets around this with micropayments. Could be an interesting avenue for PeerTube. Maybe you could "charge micropayment credits" and those would be redistributed to creators according to your likes/dislikes/subscriptions.
Have a contact form where people can request an account. Create accounts for trusted peers. I'm unaware if Peertube has a "moderate first" setting but it should not be hard to implement... it's just not the assumed usecase of Peertube so far.
> Friendly Reminder: the sharing system used for this video implies that some technical information about your system (such as a public IP address) can be sent to other peers.
GitHub issue upon which this banner was decided upon[1]
However, this concern is mitigated because Peertube uses open standards, so it's very easy to use various proxying services for privacy concerns. It's unlikely that any such 3rd party clients will ever get blocked.
Comparing to Youtube: a single malevolent company tracks everyone's actions for nefarious purposes, purposefully changes internal "protocol" regularly to break 3rd party clients (youtube-dl, Newpipe) and blocks scrapers and other archival systems.
Overall, Peertube has much more privacy-friendly capabilities than Youtube ever will have.
PeerTube uses BitTorrent under the hood.
With libtorrent starting to support Webtorrent, we should "soon" see a new generation of torrent clients who can bridge the gap between those two protocols.
Peertube reuses an established social networking protocol, adding Bittorrent-like P2P video seeding on top (using Webtorrent protocol, not Bittorrent), taking the best of both worlds in a "low(er)-effort" manner.
twitter . or fb or mastodon or whatever. social and video are orthogonal problems to solve (utube didnt start as a social network)
Many of the popular centralized platforms we have today became popular due to integration with standard 3rd-party tooling such as email, RSS... Now that youtube has shut down RSS feeds, i need an account an API key to simply download videos from my favorite artists... or i can parse the website like youtube-dl but then i need to upgrade my code (or dependencies) every few weeks because Google intentionally broke it to prevent 3rd party clients from existing at all.
With a service like Peertube, i can hit the public API directly, and the API is the protocol. So there is technically very little difference between making a Mastodon or Peertube client, and that's why they can talk to one another. But that Mastodon can interact with Peertube is not only useful to users, it's an overall very good indicator that Peertube can be interfaced reasonably-well with other tools/systems because it's a website and websites are intended to be parsed, if only by a web browser.
So i don't really understand your point. Are you against social networking as part of a video platform, at all, and just want a raw content-addressed storage pool of videos (Bittorrent)? Do you personally not wish to use 3rd party integrations (like Mastodon comments)? If so, why is it a bad thing for others?
To break it down further - it's not much of a deal breaker to go to "coolvideoguy.com" instead of searching "cool video guy" in the youtube search bar.
A big part of what I consume on YouTube is on my TV, thanks to subscriptions to channels. Since there is no Android TV app for Peertube at the moment, the only way I would watch content from a Peertube channel would be on my computer. Which is not how I like consuming this content.
Slightly off-topic, but do you think having a computer you don't control running in your TV is such a great idea? It sounds like an IoT/security nightmare, unless you can flash a system you control on there.
This video is not very good however, there's something not very stimulating to the imagination about moving from youtube yet still using shallow buzzwords like "content creator", "monetise", "open source".
- every node needs to keep a complete history of the ledger so as the network grows only the biggest players can stay up... what does that say of Sybil/51% attacks?
- every video published has a public record, and i assume everyone paying to watch a video is also recorded publicly; no private communities
- their blockchain can only (according to odysee website) process 10K events per second... which they're proud of for some reason? that's a very low number compared to eg. Bittorrent DHT or Fediverse activity
- LBRY appears to favorize traditional "intellectual property" and pay-per-view model, not a donation-based economy of libre content
- LBRY relies on a "cryptocoin" to achieve their economic model, and their tech was not conceived to prevent speculation; i would even argue it's architectured for speculation, as it's based on Bitcoin without learning from any of Bitcoin's weaknesses/mistakes (from what i could read) ; Tribler/Taler sound like much more reliable solutions for such microtransactions
- LBRY is pushed by a for-profit company, whereas Peertube is developed by a bunch of volunteers, coordinated by the french libre culture/software non-profit Framasoft as part of their "Degooglize Internet" campaign [0]
Peertube should fare just fine with that. It's just important that instance operators consider the broader implications of running an instance:
- you should find an organizational/financial model to still be around in a decade
- you should find like-minded instance operators to seed one another's content across continents, to ease reachability
If those two aspects are taken care of, "long tail" delivery should really not be a problem for Peertube.
On mobile I'm not the kind "I need an app to access that service", but on TV, where I consume most of my YouTube content, I DO need an app. Because otherwise the UX will be an absolute nightmare.
Be sure to let us know how Newpipe fares on your "smart" TV :)
EDIT: It appears there's a lot more Android clients than i knew https://docs.joinpeertube.org/use-third-party-application
https://diode.zone/download/streaming-playlists/hls/videos/b...
Distributing videos requires good connectivity so it's not a surprise a smaller instance which is not seeded by other instances elsewhere have a hard time serving you. See also: https://docs.joinpeertube.org/admin-following-instances?id=i...
How do you get rid of the giant left column, other than zooming way in?
- clients viewing a video will seed (share) it along, so as a video becomes more popular it becomes more widely available
- other instances can seed one another's video to help them reach a broader audience (geographically speaking)
I have no clue about how this instance is operated but it's a fair bet that it's not replicated by other instances (yet), and that it's operating from a network location that doesn't have very good connectivity with you.
Not everyone has Youtube-level bandwidth, but even Youtube is very hard to access in many parts of the world. Peertube is designed in a decentralized manner so that people who enjoy your content can setup a local instance in their neighborhood to mirror (seed) your content.
How so? Just because something is not popular (yet?) doesn't mean it's lame. Also, view counts on a single instance are not representative of the entire federation.
Although i agree removing view counts would be good, because it produces bad incentives to artificially inflate your view count (which i've never witnessed on Peertube instances so far, but is possible).
Basically, it's user experience degradation until you're forced to sign up.
How about trying to just reach out and offer a service without killing my current experience?
I pay for other subscriptions so this isn't a money thing, but I won't for youtube on principle. They ruined that platform.
So yes, exploited by ads.