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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

Still has the same problem as all these alternative social media networks and why they're not taking off: on one hand you've got YouTube/etc which works and has appealing content front-and-centre, and on the other you have technobabble like "federation" and "instances" while the actual content (if there is even any!) is relegated into some dark corner.

YouTube (and other mainstream providers) solves user stories. The user story is "I want to find and watch interesting videos" and they nail it.

The user story for this, judging by their homepage (https://joinpeertube.org), seems to be "I want a boring lecture on how bad Big Tech is"?

These services need to think in terms of the casual user if they want to actually take off and offer a viable alternative. Nobody is interested in a lecture against Big Tech and the intricacies of the client/server model and the concept of "instances" (or "platform" as they're called here) if they can go on YouTube.com and immediately start watching.

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> YouTube (and other mainstream providers) solves user stories. The user story is "I want to find and watch interesting videos" and they nail it.

You miss another user story: IT department wants to self host a video distribution platform on their intranet and users need to embed video in intranet CMS (blogs, wikis, kb, etc.) and they will watch those videos at home, at the office and in between places.

Thinking audience and monetization, is basically thinking "youtube clone", and that narrows outlooks on what peertube brings to the table.

> The user story for this, judging by their homepage (https://joinpeertube.org), seems to be "I want a boring lecture on how bad Big Tech is"?

Just pick a different paragraph then:

    What is PeerTube?
    PeerTube allows you to create your own video platform, in complete independence.

At some point, someone literate enough to understand how bad Big Tech is but still promoting Big Tech should be face it.

It is like smoking. People say "I know that smoking kill, I don’t want to be reminded all the time".

Well, as long as you are polluting and killing innocents by smoking in their vicinity, you are the asshole. You don’t seem to understand so people keep telling you (and, guess what, in the case of Peertube, they even tell you in a friendly way with cute mascots.)

"I want to find something to do other than smoking. I find I smoke the most when I"m bored."

"Have you considered attending this lecture about the dangers of smoking?"

Comparing using Youtube to smoking is why I can never take these conversations seriously.

And yet the comparison is apt. Both provide ephemeral positive signals to the brain at a cost that is detrimental to individuals' or society's health (not even talking about environment, which is a part of society's health).

> You miss another user story: IT department wants to self host a video distribution platform on their intranet and users need to embed video in intranet CMS (blogs, wikis, kb, etc.) and they will watch those videos at home, at the office and in between places.

It's not missed, that story doesn't exist.

In any place where IT can even think about self hosting video they likely control the user's entire tech stack and don't need a super flexible player, they can just use a video tag...

On the other hand a company like this is more likely to use a SaaS product because they would have done a cost benefit analysis and figured spinning up a server and allocating bandwidth which could include significant network stack upgrades would cost far too much money to self host video.

Also it's free to stick the video on YouTube as an unisted video and embed the player... There is also other platforms that can be paid for the exact same service...

> > You miss another user story: IT department wants to self host a video distribution platform on their intranet and users need to embed video in intranet CMS (blogs, wikis, kb, etc.) and they will watch those videos at home, at the office and in between places.

> It's not missed, that story doesn't exist.

Sure it does. We have been discussing it for weeks with colleagues and bed testing it. Next step is to consider using v5 or v6.

> In any place where IT can even think about self hosting video they likely control the user's entire tech stack and don't need a super flexible player, they can just use a video tag...

I had written a longer comment but if you equate slapping an mp4 URL in a video tag with what peertube brings then I frankly don't see the point. Not sure what controlling the user's entire tech stack even means then.

> On the other hand a company like this is more likely to use a SaaS product because they would have done a cost benefit analysis and figured spinning up a server and allocating bandwidth which could include significant network stack upgrades would cost far too much money to self host video.

Pretty sure peertube and its variable bitrate and resolution will use less bandwidth than a user's original mp4 file in a video tag would but okay.

edit:

> Also it's free to stick the video on YouTube as an unisted video and embed the player...

Yeah, right. What can go wrong uh...

> Not sure what controlling the user's entire tech stack even means then.

Hardware and software they are running as well as bandwidth available to them both at home offices as well as on site offices.

So yes just directly serving whatever bitrate video would be equivalent to YouTube 1080p internally as the only option is just fine since even if it's less bandwidth I don't think any of my users would want to be watching 360p video.

And at the same time I don't need to allocate too much bandwidth for on my own server that since I can easily offload that to a CDN.

If I need to serve a large repository of videos I wouldn't self host, I would pay a SaaS since storage costs alone would be absurd, having to then also store not only the high bitrate masters but also every intermediate format...

> If I need to serve a large repository of videos I wouldn't self host, I would pay a SaaS since storage costs alone would be absurd, having to then also store not only the high bitrate masters but also every intermediate format...

I can hear that. Maybe in a year we will have to face the facts that we reached capacity and underestimated our needs if it's too much successful. For now, we want/need/must self-host on premise so at some point maybe we will have to say "we can't do it, either we offload or we shut down the service".

> > Also it's free to stick the video on YouTube as an unisted video and embed the player... Yeah, right. What can go wrong uh...

Naturally a lot, but for a company that won't pay the actually low rates a SaaS provider charges for this, this would work just fine... Also why I mentioned that there are SaaS providers that do offer that which is a little more reliable. I believe one if them is the new up and coming one called Microsoft that most companies already have some sort of business agreement with.

Well, MS, Amazon and Youtube/Google are big no-no for that company at the moment (and for the foreseeable future).

Thing is it's not about any SaaS provider rates, it's about ethical concerns but then we hit bandwidth cost problems. We'll see how it turns out.

I'm down for idealogical reason, in that case fo ahead.

It's fun doing it yourself, it's just not good business in general.

Honestly if any business is already paying for M365 of G Workspaces there is absolutely no reason to deploy your own video infra, you likely are already paying for video infra.

I get so tired of hearing about tech stacks. Tech stack discussions are 90% developers spinning their wheels and 10% money. Its really closer to 80/20, but most developers cannot get out of their own heads enough to reach a 20% discussion about money and business expenses.

In this instance tech stack has nothing to do with developers but rather what software and hardware is deployed to end users.

An example:

HP ProBook + Win 11 + Microsoft 365 each allocated x amount of bandwidth allowed to burst to Y amount

It can get significantly more in depth than that and it's 90% cost driven unlike choosing which DB you will be using as a developer...

In the current scenario with companies cost-cutting, I would say money is 30% or 40%.

Who says Peertube needs to take off to be good? I like, prefer, and use the fediverse in its current state personally.

On one side, I want to say "well, I would like them to kill YouTube, and have all our videos through federation"

Oh the other side, I miss the era of low volume content of passionate people. I didn't live such an era for the internet, but I did for smartphones. Back in 2009, you didn't need "have 25 people test your app" requirements, because people pushing apps cared about their apps. You didn't need to go through a dozen of apps before finding one with a usable amount of ads. Heck, runtime permissions weren't required because developers were reasonable in their usage of permissions

I'm not much a fan of videos, so I don't really know whether the same happened with youtube. But the way I consume the few youtube videos I watch is just to "follow" people [1], there is way too much meaningless content in youtube to even glimpse at what there is, and those algorithms really don't favor high-quality content, just baiting ones. So I feel the fediverse wouldn't have to grow much for me to replace YouTube.

[1] I also look at tournesol.app recommendations, but they are /waay/ too oriented towards their very own microcosm, and even though I'd like to contribute it takes quite a lot of time. That being said, I recommend taking a look at tournesol.app because there is real democracy research behind it

>Who says Peertube needs to take off to be good?

The fact that it's a video-watching site and that means it needs people to upload videos onto it.

> >Who says Peertube needs to take off to be good?

> The fact that it's a video-watching site and that means it needs people to upload videos onto it.

It's not a video watching Website. It's a video serving platform in the fediverse. You can use it to host videos independently. It's not necessarily meant as a platform with a single entry point for users to find any kind of video like YouTube. It's more comparable to WordPress maybe

You realize this can be run by individuals and groups with their own videos that aren't actually looking for third party uploads.

It's frustrating how people only take the capitalist / startup founder point of view when evaluating open source. It's like people can't grasp the idea that somebody could be pursuing a project without having the greatest possible user base / profit as their primary goal.

You hit the nail on the head. Hacker News ironically tends to be pretty hostile towards open-source.

Offering free and open alternatives is often met with the criticism of "this will never take off and it's not really an alternative because it doesn't do what the multi-billion dollar corporate competitor does to a tee."

If you dig deep enough, you'll see that "open-source" is actually the preferred term for HN because it is business-friendly: I can use this open-source, depolitized piece of code to make money and not give any to anyone. It's why the term "open source" exists when "Libre" also defines it, but as an anti-business sound to it.

You hit the nail on the head. Hacker News ironically tends to be pretty hostile towards open-source.

It's actually much better than it used to be. Since it's roots are in startup culture, there has always been an under-current favoring capitalistic stances. Those currents have weakened over time though. At one point things like dark patterns for user engagement were given a more neutral response than you would see nowadays.

It would have been highly amusing if HN had been around when Linus launched Linux and we could go back and read commentary from all the pragmatists about what a huge waste of time and effort it was across the whole spectrum of casual dismissal to a sense of outrage that anyone would have the hubris to take on major companies already providing far superior platforms.

Hackernews really does seem to be heavily capitalist, and anti-opensource when it comes to the comments section at least.

> Who says Peertube needs to take off to be good?

All those who don't remember we are in Eternal September.

Taking control of your digital life will always be unappealing because it means you have to do the drudge work. There is no possible escape from massive corporations.

That’s not true. A nonprofit/coop could in theory run single peertube instance.

Then you're beholden to it, and it will not be as lenient as Google is in some legal grey areas, because it cannot afford any legal liability.

For example, it would ban Louis Rossmann after just one cease-and-desist from Apple, because it couldn't afford to withstand a SLAPP lawsuit from Apple. (A SLAPP lawsuit is when you sue someone who hasn't done anything wrong, because you're a big company who can afford to bankrupt them with legal fees)

It's totally viable to create an entity in a jurisdiction where lawsuits are not automatically ruinous and stick to your principles.

On top of that, a small entity would not be as lenient about Google in terms of customer support or taking advantage of your personal data.

Ah yes. Let me just register a public Peertube instance in checks notes Malaysia.

Peertube takes under twenty minutes to set up. It's really, really not hard.

It's quite sad that Peertube is not on Sandstorm [1], where it becomes a one click install.

[1] https://apps.sandstorm.io/

And where will you set it up?

And what will you do when that company sends you a letter saying illegal stuff came from your server?

They never say they want to replace YouTube, they just want to be there as an alternative for nerds

Yep, efforts to replace Youtube (and the rest of BigTech) should be spend on building better search and cataloging of videos across all the Web instead of focusing all effort on one specific hosting technology that nobody uses. I'd be much more inclined to use a service or software that improves on Youtube by including other sources of videos, then one that tries to replace Youtube with their own set of (drastically inferior) videos.

Miro[1] tried that a long while ago, but I haven't really seen much else going that direction since then.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miro_(video_software)

Okay but what service exists that doesn't exhibit the same problems as youtube, ie the necessity of hyper-growth to satisfy investors, ads everywhere, total surveillance of its users ? Because a search engine that indexes only services like that won't really solve the problem _if_ the problem is to respect users' and community's freedom and privacy.

It's doesn't really matter what the service is doing when you aren't using the service in the first place. Right now I can use `yt-dlp`, download videos from Youtube and watch them in a video player of my choice. I never have to interact with the Youtube platform directly for this, it just acts as dumb server that hosts `.mp4` files. Same is true for a lot of other services.

The missing part is a good way to discover those videos in the first place. Subscriptions and recommendations are not something your average Web browser or search engine provides, yet are really important for discovering content. That's the kind of features I'd like to see implemented in a service independent manner. RSS went that direction, but not far enough, as it generally depend on the service itself to provide that information, instead generating it automatically from information found via webscraping.

You don't care about most users, and you don't care about creators, that's alright, but please don't behave as if they didn't matter. You are not representative of useful population if you use yt-dlp to bypass issues. It's nice that you can do it, but it's a shitty situation that you have to do it to evade pervasive surveillance and the madness capitalism brings us into.

YouTube doesn't want you to see their videos outside YouTube. They let you do it at the moment because it's more profitable this way, but you'll always be fighting against them. Why not propel a platform you don't have to fight against ? One that serves your needs because it is a digital commons ? yt-dlp and any other means of accessing content can be built with the platform instead of against.

You behave as if you were totally independent from platforms, but it's wrong: as a user you depend on them. You depend on developers maintaining it and making it better, on admins running it, on business people allowing you to freeride. It doesn't make sense to live in a society where we are adversaries by default, it's such a waste of time and energy.

> Why not propel a platform you don't have to fight against?

That does not exist and fundamentally can't exist. A platform is by definition a thing I have no control over. Somebody else runs the thing and they can do with it as they please. And even if a platform is nice to use today, it sooner or later will get enshittified.

The only actual solution is to move as much data to the client and let them decide how to handle it. Especially when it comes to metadata, that shouldn't be that difficult. There is no reason why something like channel subscription can't be handled locally.

I think it's possible to use peertube to create a service that does what you describe.

Maybe the way forward is peertube provides the technology, and someone else focuses on how best to use that technology to fulfil that user story.

Any volunteer?

I think Peertube has a bit of a benefit here in that if they can get the SEO right folks don't really need to use the federation guff to find videos, they should just be able to find them via a regular old search engine

I'm not sure I agree on the content being hidden in a dark corner, there's a fair few examples of instances and content on the homepage. It'd be nice if the "Discover more" button showed more examples rather than dumping you into a search engine but it's not terrible.

The regular old search engine controlled by a company that would lose billions if Peertube took off?

No, it's true that YouTube's advantage is the same as Spotify's advantage: Discovery. It has an actually damn good recommendation engine. It fairly regularly shows me videos with less than 10000 views that are spot on. I'd love to use Peertube over Youtube, but I have to actually know of something cool on Peertube first, and finding it by searching is pretty hopeless.

I said a regular old search engine, not the. There's more than one search engine.

As for the implication that Google may boost YouTube or deboost Peertube in search results, good news! There's already a lawsuit in progress there with Rumble, so hopefully we'll see if they are doing that at some point in the (relatively speaking for this kind of thing) near future :)

https://casetext.com/case/rumble-inc-v-google-llc-5

Latest update I could find on this:

https://twitter.com/chrispavlovski/status/172704434443016627...

Also, switching costs are high when big tech has the first mover advantage. The Digital Markets Act might stir things up. Meta being designated as gatekeepers are the only reason they're considering connecting Threads to the fediverse.

Imagine if YouTube was a PeerTube compatible instance in the fediverse that displayed videos from other PeerTube instances. We wouldn't have to "switch platforms".

The interoperability that Doctorow preaches needs to be implemented by law. Or else the status quo will remain.

Youtube could disappear or, more realistically, become heavily censored (internally or externally) at any time for a variety of reasons. The true value of this project and other federated or fully distributed and open source alternatives is to have a freedom friendly alternative should the need present itself.

Most end users don’t care about the “what if?” They care about the right now. What does this offer today?

Maybe I’m being unfair and this isn’t targeted at end users but professionals. Is that the case? Then the landing page makes a lot more sense.

This app is pointed at the people who do care, and not to end users, end users aren't running servers or video platforms.

The story on peertubes site isn't directed at the "i want to find and watch interesting video" crowd, it's for the "i want to run a site where people can watch videos, but i hate big monopolies" crowd

It's a short analysis, youtube is centralized and acts as a hub, it's amazing to feel you have access to everything but it quickly devolves into mediocre content.

There's good content on peertube, surely not as much, but this era is overcooked with too much content, it's nice to have less.

My main issue is how to get a large view of what is available because you end up on isolated islands and you're never sure what is there.

Last time I looked at peertube it had worse problems than that. The content was mostly neo-nazis and conspiracy theories, incels and other stuff that wasn’t on YouTube because it would get banned. I’m not interested in that. Has it got any better?

All that stuff and worse is on Youtube too, and probably in higher quantity. It doesn't get banned - not reliably. The algorithm is just good at hiding it from you.

Youtube is really good at surfacing videos you want to see. Peertube isn't. That's why you see stuff you hate, not because of censorship or the lack of it.

Maybe, I don’t know, I don’t go looking for that stuff. Most of the stuff I watch there is video games, retro tech or hiking. I was kinda hoping for some recommendations for interesting stuff on peertube.

Especially retro tech, I think a lot of it is fan funded (I do fund some myself). It's probably not a ton of money you get from YouTube unless you're Adrian Black.

Niche youtubers you already support, but especially retro tech, are probably prime candidates for putting their stuff on Peertube too.

Really depends on which servers you follow.

Wah, there is no Incel content on YouTube? What about Pearl Davis, or the flood of shorts extracted from this podcast I just cant remember right now?

Personally, I much prefer a uncensored platform over arbitrary censorship by big tech. Without censorship, I can at least decide for myself if I want to watch it.

In fact, I find it quite concerning that people like you seem to actively advocate for voluntary censorship.

They're not "advocating for voluntary censorship", they're simply pointing out that the Peertube (and the Fediverse in general) needs to avoid being the dredges of the internet.

> they're simply pointing out that the Peertube (and the Fediverse in general) needs to avoid being the dredges of the internet.

I don't think that's quite right. It just needs to make sure there's plenty available in addition to the dredges of the internet. Sometimes the dredges are useful to be able to sift through, but that can't be the only thing on offer and ideally users would be able to filter that stuff out when it isn't wanted.

I would agree with this take in general, yes. We are more or less saying the same thing though I appreciate the nuance injection. :)

I've never understood this concern with online platforms. It really shouldn't matter what content people publish if discover ability is user-driven.

A Twitter alternative could be full of neo-nazis, butbif my feed is only populated with people I follow them I would never know or care.

The problem is getting to critical mass: every service has to start somewhere but if I join and only see uninteresting stuff, I probably won’t stick around long enough for you to follow me, etc. Niche services have that bootstrapping problem where they need early users but also don’t grow if their primary adopters are people who were banned elsewhere (e.g. Gab) or are very tightly ideological (Truth Social has a whole political movement pushing it but is still failing to catch on because even most Republicans don’t want shouting 100% of the time).

Discovery is a challenge for sure. I just wonder how far a service could get with an entirely user-driven discovery, follows, search, etc.

Platforms get into the business of censorship when they attempt to currate content (handpicked or algorithmic). Engagement is obviously much lower if you aren't running an algorithm designed to hook everyone on doom scrolling, but plenty of people still happily use an RSS reader and just go away when their list of new posts is empty.

But where did those people go away to? My memory is that we moved from web rings and blog rolls to social media sites which increasingly made certain that you’d never lack for new content. Even if you’re not doomscrolling, this feels like humanity’s equivalent to moths chasing the brightest light around.

That's my recollection as well, and I take the same lesson from it with regards to human nature.

There is still a comparatively small bit active community of webrings, blog rolls, etc today. What I'm less certain of is whether the driver really consumers chasing the brightest light or platforms taking advantage of basic psych tricks to drive addictive behavior (or both).

I’d definitely say both. The social networks combined easier / more polished experiences to get a lot of people over but then they really ramped up the social tricks to get people to stay longer and look at more ads.

Sure, but you may never have found yourself on Twitter to begin with if it was full of neo Nazis. It’s like showing up to an important meeting in the wrong attire - how you present matters.

The issue isn’t hiding it away - be it by user or other - it’s that it hampers growth in general when you’re all of a sudden the platform of the deranged. It’s fair to question whether it’s seeing actual use outside of those communities.

(It might be telling that we’ve spent this many comments discussing it rather than pointing out e.g GNOME/Blender/etc use it - it’s not like it’s all bad)

Peertube is a software, not a service. If you find hateful content, it's not because of peertube, it's because whoever is hosting it (and how you got there)

I’m not gonna argue with that. But I’m not going to use the software unless it hosts something I’m interested in.

And how would PeerTube avoid that, without actively censoring particular content? Ask nicely? Pray? Hope?

There are multiple PeerTube instances. You can pick or start a censorship free one.

That's impossible. When you let people host their own content some Nazis will host Nazi content, and there's nothing you can do about it because you are not the one hosting it. I guess we should ban HTTP so there can't be Nazi websites.

By censoring?

You are the second person to imply that OP was saying we need censoring, when the comment could be read very differently.

We can do better than jumping to that conclusion. ;P

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