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Comment by musicale | Hacker News Reader

It's astonishing how much effort Google and other companies spend fighting their users.

PeerTube is decentralized video sharing software that works with a federated protocol but not enough people choose to host their content on PeerTube. The problem isn't Google or the law on copyrighted content and who can make copies of it. The problem is people choose centralized content hosts like YouTube and all that it entails because it is more convenient than running and federating PeerTube nodes.

Does Peertube address all of the moderation / illegal content problems enumerated here, as they relate especially to video? https://telegra.ph/why-not-matrix-08-07

You have your facts correct and your conclusion backwards.

Great feedback.

I remember an interesting project in 2009 from Opera called Opera Unite. Its goal was to turn the browser into a server so that you can share back out into the web. They had a few demos "apps" built in but sadly it never went anywhere. It's interesting to imagine how the structure of the web would have evolved if that idea took off. Here's their original post about it: https://dev.opera.com/blog/taking-the-web-into-our-own-hands...

I remember this. It was a very good idea.

PeerTube is a useful form of decentralization. Each video is stored on its home site, but playout is distributed by making the browsers of people watching it share the streaming load. So if your video on your tiny PeerTube-connected site goes viral, your tiny site will not overload. All the viewers become redistribution nodes. At least in theory, this scales. The highest view count I can find on PeerTube is around 5K recent, not concurrent, views.

I put technical videos on Hardlimit on PeerTube, because Google's ads are annoying and I don't need "discovery" or "followers". The videos are linked from discussions and papers. This works fine, but is not the usual use case, where people are seeking fame, fortune, or at least attention.

Do you have any recommendations for scaling out PeerTube?

It's a non-problem at the current user count.

Google is offering download feature for paying users with a click.

Asking you to pay them for the service and the creators that created the video isn't really fighting you is it?

It's only "fighting" freeloaders.

By "download feature", do you mean download into private storage of the Youtube app of a smart phone (so that the video can be viewed when the phone is not connected) or do you mean download a video file that can be played in the player of the user's choice?

(I'm asking because I've never been a paying user of Youtube.)

The former

This is fair, and yes it's 100% "download into an encrypted area on a closed platform device and self-destruct for no reason after 30 days," not "download it so that you have the video and can reliably play it offline or re-encode into a different format."

YouTube itself is the lamest entity to be wasting time fighting youtube-dl because I doubt most creators want that protection. I can see why say, NBC.com or whoever doesn't want to be sued by the content owners for letting people download a show. But YouTube? The site that shows videos to anyone without a subscription? Interesting choice of where to focus your attention, Google.

And archivists. And people who prefer a different video player app or unsupported device.

They also charge for picture-in-picture mode on your $1k phone that you bought from them.

The bigger problem is the way they use that as an avenue to sell you more shit and "learn" more deeply about you. Hard pass. Let people watch what they want and stop trying to build a profile, maybe then they'll consider paying you. As it stands, there's just no prayer of doing that if you're linking your credit card to all that.

Though I never have used Youtube premium, Louis Rossmann talks a lot about this. If I remember correctly it was something about not actually getting a file when downloading, instead having something you're forced to watch in the app and something not working right without internet access/location restrictions.

More like a "download into Google video locker that can only be played with the Youtube app, can't easily be format-shifted/clipped/transcoded/etc. and tracks you whenever you play it," right?

So much effort that downgrades the experience for paying users.

I imagine Tivo-style ad-skipping isn't a feature either.

They already sent me the fucking content when I watch it. Having a download button that just saves it to my disk means they save money delivering it to me if I watch a second time.

Let us not forget that the viewers are the product. The “users” are somewhat comprised of the people buying premium and mostly comprised of the advertisers buying ads for eyeballs to see.

Google doesn’t make money from ads if you download a video outside of their player.

I pay for YouTube premium and can download a video to my phone in the app. It’s not perfect but it works.

I am glad for all the paying people who care less about their privacy to the extent they can justify that. You matter, seriously. I'm being 100% genuine. I don't think the world (economically) would continue to turn if everyone was like me unfortunately. It would be a tradgedy of the uncommons

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