It's a great value prop for pirates who want easy access to illegal movies and trolls who want their inflammatory opinions to ruffle feathers forever, but it's a pretty lousy deal for everyone else.
Videos that you downloaded from other people aren't yours. You might own a copy, but that's no different from any other system of distribution. The difference between p2p and standard distribution is that the owner loses control.
However, a centralized near-monopoly grants itself certain power over the spread of information: if everyone uses it and it bans your video, the video may essentially be unknown—despite your intent. That is losing control, both for you personally and for us as a society: we lose control of our videos by using one big centralized platform, which lets it hide them from us.
An interpretation of PeerTube’s slogan could be that switching to it you take control of your videos by making them less liable to become hidden due to e.g. censorship—but also in that publishing something useful on it you by extension also bring viewers into the ecosystem and thus help society as a whole take that control back by reducing its dependency on a centralized source.
"The people who can destroy a thing, they control it." - Dune
Google owns it.
With peertube and the like, maybe you don't own it, but at least Google doesn't either.
Then why are they advertising with the slogan "take back control"???
It doesn't say "take control away from Youtube and Google", it says take back control of your videos. p2p is the ultimate destruction of control, that's the entire point of it. Saying that peertube gives you control is like saying that playing a slot machine gives you ROI.
With p2p, control is transferred away from Google to you and anyone else that chooses to host it. This is reasonable justification for using "take back control" to me.
I guess you'd also object to GPL being described as "more free" than MIT.
the owner retains control of distributing their voice without a major platform getting in the way
If you want to get off a platform, you can do that with a website. You don't need to give up editorial and retractive control forever (which you must do in order to use p2p, which is why this headline is so wrong) just to step off a platform.
(putting aside the fact that peertube is NOT A P2P distribution platform[1])
P2P is not different from any kind of distribution mechanism for digital content: the moment you put your content online, you've lost a good chunk of control over it since anyone can now download it a re-upload it elsewhere. This is automatic for p2p, but it also happen all the time on youtube, (or worse, porn tubes).
There is no way around it so far, and DRMs have largely failed preventing that. So any content creator must know this at this point: once you've published something online, you cannot reliably unpublish it.
Now, when you go through a centralized platform you also lose one more part of control: not only you cannot unpublish it, but you also cannot guarantee that it will remain published. This is the part of control you can get back by using peertube or other federated or distributed streaming system.
Yes, what is posted on the internet can not be taken back. That has always been and remains true.
No, I don't think piracy/trolls/whatever needs peertube, they do just fine without it now.
"Take back control" is geared towards hosts. You can run your own tube site. That's what the slogan is talking about.
Also, peertube is no more p2p than bitchute. It uses webRTC to offload server load onto clients for popular videos, that's it.
- YouTube can remove it
- people can store offline copies
On Peertube at least YouTube can't take it down which means you have more control over it.
What exactly do you think "control" means?
Of course some people could upload it again someplace else and there's pretty much nothing you can do about it. Not that different from traditional tape media and CD/DVD.
Not everyone else; it's a good deal for anyone who wants their content to be censorship-resistant, which is not just trolls and pirates.
> but it's a pretty lousy deal for everyone else
Is it really a lousy deal for anyone who doesn't agree with YouTube/Facebook/Twitter's moderation (political or otherwise)?
Or do you think that everyone the big platforms disagree with are 'trolls who want their inflammatory opinions'?
If you're worried about platform censorship, the solution that gives you more control is to self-host, not to completely resign all editorial power for the rest of eternity by handing your content over to a peer network.
p2p doesn't give you control of content, it takes away all control of content by ossifying it as-is.
Thanks for pointing this out! This is precisely what the Peertube project is about. It's *not* a P2P tube where discovery/notification is unmediated between peers. Peertube is a software for selfhosting your own "tube", which supports federation between hosts so your content can be discovered from elsewhere (with allow/deny lists supported).
The P2P bits of Peertube is only for video delivery, which is very clever. It was always possible to setup your own Youtube (eg. with MediaGoblin) but who had the hardware and connectivity to do that?! Especially since:
- if a video has a peak of popularity, a centralized setup has to send a separate stream to every viewer
- if people want to view a video from which your instance doesn't have good connectivity, it will be terrible user experience, unless you as a server operator setup a sort of CDN which is expensive and more complex than it has to be
Peertube has a very interesting hybrid federated/p2p design where the owner retains control on the published material (you can delete videos from your account), but both viewers and federated instances replicating your materials can help seed it to more people.
Peertube is intended for selfhosting for existing communities (non-profits, conferences, classrooms, etc) and it gives us the practical power to do it without requiring thousands of euros of monthly infrastructure bills.
Perhaps the existence of different options at the moment is necessary until there's (ever?) any consensus on a satisfying unified technology and sharing model for content.
(if this seems confusing, please consider: it's not a technological absolute that use of a peer-to-peer platform means that you have to share your content with everyone; it can be a choice if the technology caters for it)
It’s not a binary choice.
I run a self hosted instance and don’t share anything with anyone.
First because the list of videos you advertise on an instance/channel is dynamic, not an append-only log like on a blockchain. So you can properly delist a video from your Peertube channel and it will no longer appear to clients.
Second, because even if people still has the infohash somehow and continue to seed it, there needs to be a mechanism to find other peers when someone wants to download the content (how did they obtain the infohash?). It's technically possible (although becoming harder with peertube moving from Webtorrent to WebRTC+HLS) but not a supported use-case (you'd have to write another piece of software for that).
All in all, the situation is pretty similar to that of Youtube. Yes someone could have a copy of your cringy videos and decide to upload them elsewhere, but your followers would not automagically discover them. The same goes with Peertube, which is more federated than P2P in its design.