PeerTube is recognized as a digital public good by Digital Public Goods Alliance
digitalpublicgoods.net
digitalpublicgoods.net
For all that tools like PeerTube, Mastodon, etc are clunkier and more limited than things like YouTube, Bluesky, etc, I think that argument is increasingly going to be irrelevant to their value - we need to start ensuring our capacity to go from 0-1 on media distribution, not from 10-100 or 100+.
I don't understand why. I made an account recently in order to access a specific thing. I can confirm the app is 100% pure garbage. The home feed is garbage and navigation is awful (to keep you on the home feed). I uninstalled it after they were caught bypassing the permission system to spy on you, by binding localhost ports that web ads would access. The web app is no better garbage-wise (but it can't bind ports).
And it's the subcultures that you'd expect to be the most untied from corporate shackles, that are the ones most on Instagram. I don't get it.
You don’t have to take claimed pretenses seriously.
But then they fucked up. Several years ago.
It's very revealing about where they wish they could have taken the app already, where you don't follow anyone, just trust the algorithm to force-feed you content. Doing that too quickly would instantly kill it, so it's been years of boiling the frog.
The 'Snooze suggested content in feed for 30 days' thing is already bad enough, if they stopped letting you do that Instagram would be insufferable to use.
On Android you can't make a network service permissioned. And when you make a binder service permissioned it's up to the app itself to specify with what permission a caller needs in order to be able to use the service, or the service can choose to be unpermissioned. Either way apps on Android are free to host unpermissioned services that other apps on the system connect to. Chrome connecting to such a service did not have to bypass a permission since there was no permission protecting it.
Incognito mode is about not saving data or browser history to your computer. Sites can still identify you if you login or even just from your IP. It's not meant to make you anonymous. This is a common misconception which is why these modes show a big warning explaination when you enable them.
>they'd go to prison
That's for the courts to decide. The Facebook and Instagram apps may have already gotten consent from the user to share this information.
Unauthorized use of a computer is broadly illegal in many jurisdictions, including the USA federally. In Europe, misinformed consent is not consent. "Authorization" generally refers to a reasonable person's expectation of giving consent, and does not refer to any technical property such as Android permissions.
They removed it after it stopped working due to Chrome rolling out an update.
>Unauthorized use of a computer
This is not a real thing. It's not like websites need to get your permission before they can use your computer to run javascript.
>does not refer to any technical property such as Android permissions.
I only brought that up due to someone else thinking it was related. I agree that the permission system of android is totally unrelated.
Their value is going to stay limited if people don't want to actually use them.
Technically proficient people may overlook something being clunky if it suits their needs in other ways, but it's a harder sell for the average user. And really, it shouldn't be an issue. Good UX isn't trivial, but it's not especially complicated or budget-busting either.
It is what it is - but it's worth being clear-eyed about what it is.
It was probably hard enough to convince them to try once.
Search is still awful, in part because a few people don't seem to want it. It needs substantial improvement.
Many non open source apps do get critical mass but they eventually go bust. Emacs, git, Linux and I think even Mastodon have a slower uptake but do not seem to have such a high risk of collapse. While YouTube and Facebook et al seem to have an insurmountable moat and collection of users the reality is recent history is littered with boom to bust failures:
MySpace, Vine, Yahoo all the way back to GeoCities.
I would be patient and only worry if mastodon is actively dying.
For me it's the only social media app I have installed.
I have both Mastondon and Bluesky accounts and in my experience I find Bluesky is just simpler to use which attracted more of the types of accounts I wanted to follow. Nothing aggressive about that, just good UX resulting in a richer pool of accounts.
Nobody really wants to use instagram either—there's basically nothing positive to say about the app or service itself—it just has critical mass.
When Facebook took off, every Myspace page was so full of garbage that they barely loaded on most people's computers, and Facebook was slick and shiny and easy. The real name policy made it super easy to connect with people you met IRL. Even if it's now confusingly slow and FB Messenger can't display your recent chats in the correct order for some reason, it was the easiest most obvious option at the time.
I don't really understand why people use Twitter (at its best it just seems like a worse version of RSS), but the site presumably loaded quickly at some point and was easy to use, even if it's presumably worse now.
And so on. They persist through momentum.
Some things continue to persist, some things get beat out and die. But if you start off more confusing than your alternatives, at least compared to when they started, you won't get picked up in the first place.
The honest answer is that it isn't the content(RSS feeds), but the combat sport nature of the platform. It's the only place where you can tell a billionaire any kind of awful thing you can think of. It's also the only social media that drives important people insane. The wealthier they are, the more insane they'll be driven.
Facebook will drive your meemaw insane with AI generated ads of legless veterans being given a cake.
Twitter will drive the richest man on earth insane. It will drive every journalist at any paper of merit insane by interacting with the insane billionaires. Nearly every journalist who uses twitter enough will develop delusions of grandeur that their brand of psychopathy is the solution to the nation's woes. Since their bosses have also been driven insane via twitter, it's the kind of writing that gets published. This writing will take the insane delusions of the insane billionaires at face value. It will go along with conspiracy and never beg any question that actually needs answering.
It's truly a unique and addicting environment.
Pretty much all of my Twitter (and Twitter clones) interactions are involuntary when they show up on news articles or other media.
I'm a big proponent of Mastodon and still love using it, but the culture (especially early on) was exceptionally protectionist and lots of people got bullied off for very silly reasons. I think the attitude is less like a children's secret club and more chill generally.
All this to say, I think this is will get better, but the best way to help the fediverse is to join it, be active, and be chill.
Had no idea that was happening. What makes your say that?
* stop posting photos without a text description
* stop posting like that without a CW
* don't spell your hashtags that way
I was talking into the void. I gave up after 6 months of getting no reaction and finding nobody of interest to follow.
(Worse, half of what I wrote is now gone because my instance shut down and Mastodon doesn't even have a feature to migrate any content to a new instance.)
This also means your reach and what you see depends on your choice of server. I very much don’t want that.
It’s also confusing to non-technical people. Join Mastodon! But which one? How do I pick one?
Technically speaking, Nostr is better. Your identity is a key. Servers are just dumb relays.
Unfortunately it seems to be nothing but crypto bros talking about crypto, or was last time I checked. Nobody uses it.
Or that means that everyone can be their own little lord reigning over their own little server, to the point that it doesn't matter, because effectively, network nodes don't need to be "big" to be relevant in a federated ecosystem. I'm not so much into ActivityPub, but I run an XMPP server for my family. I'm not saying that this is for everyone, but close-enough.
Only if it's simple for the average person
And only until an admin of a big sever dislikes something you say and adds your server to the censorship list on fediseer.
The rest of the protocol isn't difficult since you basically just need to send JSON back and forth. The advanced options are complex but they're basically exotic cases for the most part.
I've enjoyed NOSTR a lot but feel that the definition of "relay" has been lost in recent times and NOSTR relays are today a set of huge servers that host data and act as databases, rather than the original goal of just connecting people in P2P style.
For my apps I'm developing a platform where relays go back to the original definition of "relay" and devices connect to each relay as a connecting bridge to engage in P2P between themselves using webRTC and bluetooth.
In contrast to Instagram, Facebook and co?
Are you on Instagram?" is easy to understand for someone not on it; they search for "Instagram", install the client app, sign up and done.
"Are you on Mastodon?" doesn't work the same way as they would need to pick a server to sign up against, which seems like an important decision (what happens if I pick wrong? Do I have to pick the same server my friend has? And so on?).
> Are you on Mastodon?
In both cases, you have to share the user handle, which is just a bit longer in the latter case.
> what happens if I pick wrong?
You move to another server.
> Do I have to pick the same server my friend has?
No.
(this kind of attitude of asserting technical superiority and blaming non-tech users for not understanding it and not willing to bother figuring it out is exactly why the free/libre software movement achieved zero impact with non-technical users; you have to meet your users where they are... or a competitor will happily do so.)
If you're not being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, you are welcome to search my username and "mastodon"/"fediverse" to see my thoughts on it in more detail and why it will never be a serious competitor to mainstream social media platforms. Happy to engage with serious arguments.
My general experience is that clunky software is what made people tech literate, and now that everything has safety barriers and protects the user from everything tech literacy has fallen.
How much time do you need to take to learn "click on the swirly orange thing for Internet"? It looks just the same as it does in every other OS.
> (which is a sunk cost on windows: already paid it)
This is actually something I'm coping with at the moment, because I have to learn how to use Windows and it's the most backwards thing ever to use.
Who currently "admins" your Windows system?
It's the exact same in Linux. Click on it, get Internet.
You do everything in a browser anyway.
At present, the emphasis is on the potential of large language models (LLMs) and the related ethical considerations. However, I would prefer to address the necessity for governments or commissions to assume responsibility for their citizens concerning "social" media, as this presents a significantly greater risk than any emerging technology.
In that case, the alternatives are also clunky. I use Windows, MacOS and Linux regularly, and all of them got serious UX problems.
Namely, in the case of PeerTube, content creators. Youtube is convenient because it comes with builtin monetization. You can probably expect loud objections (rightfully so) from some of them if you download their stuff from Youtube to upload it to PeerTube.
If you don't have the content creators, you don't have content consumers and you cannot bootstrap a network effect (some services did bootstrap a network effect with plain and simple piracy, though).
I believe the UX is secondary to available content. People do make the necessary efforts if they think the benefit is worth it.
Except now, apparently - and I'm still not exactly sure how - business owners and activist groups and event promoters communicate everything about what is going on via... photos?! I suppose it's the digital version of flyers, except you could see flyers posted up all over town, in all the record stores or cafes you already frequented, friends could hand you them when they saw you out and about, you'd get bombarded with them when you left related events... And none of those situations forced you to enter a heavily-surveilled gated community owned by a spectacularly wealthy foreign company notorious for enabling genocide, live streaming murder etc.
I was at some event a couple weekends ago and an organizer came up to me saying that there was going to be an after and just check the Insta for the address, and I'm like... But I don't have that? Can't you tell me now? And because the site is login-walled even when at some point later in the day the thumbnail did appear, trying to click on it to see the details resulted in the login block and so I missed out.
But I am well aware that I am a teeny tiny minority of people involved in this boycot and so I'm only really hurting myself. The way I've heard it described by activists is that using Insta (or X or YouTube) is like tacitly accepting that we already live in a panopticon and thus all resistance has to take place within full view of the authorities, it just needs to be smart and present itself as something that isn't actually resistance, or that works around censorship using codewords, or this, or that, "just like how it's done in China". And it's like, great, the new generation of western activists who actually still live in a society which grants them some civil liberties have decided they're all doomed to exist under the totalitarian jackboot and practice their resistance accordingly. After all, you can't build a movement out there on the actually free fediverse or the small web where there's only a smattering of nerds.
I don't know if I should be depressed or just suck it up and get that stupid Insta account.
Zuck, you do not deserve to be spoken of in the same breath as actual internet pioneers
but I'm never exactly sure what to suggest as an alternative.
It’s not the solution but I cannot get other people to stop posting on proprietary platforms
Naturally, gated by whatever Cloudflare setting it is that doesn't just block me but runs a CPU to 100% indefinitely unless I kill the tab
And I'm not chasing clicks, likes, nor monetization on that platform; I was fortunate to ignore FB's SSO with IG as I deleted that account a decade or longer ago.
Secondly, the corporate media have been straight up propaganda centers for decades now and anyone who has been paying attention has known that for a long time now. That is not something that we are on the edge of our seats waiting to happen. It happened a long time ago.
Remember when CNN was meeting with the Pentagon so that the Pentagon could approve their stories during the Iraq War? Remember when the media constantly lied to us during COVID? Remember when they told us Biden's health was in pristine condition and that he was never better?
Don't try and politicize this issue in one way or the other. Anyone paying attention can see that there is no savior on the left or the right. It's the corrupt politicians vs. us.
And a dozen pirate networks stand ready to fill that void at a moment's notice. From oldschool torrent, to cyberlockers, to the dark webs of Tor and FreeNet ... there is an entire ecosystem of hardened video distribution schemes out there. Youtube was aguably born from piracy and fights in the courts to this day. The next thing, whatever replaces youtube, will likely also come from shadows.
I guess it is more an alternative for Microsoft Stream than youtube really as it is more likely to be used as an internal video communication platform for a company than a public video streaming platform.
[1] if the audience is small, you are just fine sharing vids using the html video tags
Yet people do not do that.
If only there were a smart way to build a cryptocoin without the environmental mess of miners, but where you earn coinage from seeding videos. I feel like you'd want people to have a desktop client to let you seed in the background then award some sort of virtual currency that can be sold later. I hate to sound like a crypto-bro but I can't think of anything else more fitting for something already decentralized.
> We are building an anonymous, taxable payment system using modern cryptography. Customers will use traditional money transfers to send money to a digital Exchange and in return receive (anonymized) digital cash. Customers can use this digital cash to anonymously pay Merchants. Merchants can redeem the digital cash for traditional money at the digital Exchange. As Merchants are not anonymous, they can be taxed, enabling income or sales taxes to be withheld by the state while providing anonymity for Customers.
And then, people watching videos are used to the YouTube experience with its world class CDN infra enabling subsecond first frame latencies even for 4k videos. They go on Peertube and first frame takes like 5 seconds for a 1080p video...realistically, with today's attention spans most of them are going to bounce before it ever plays.
I suspect that non-Chrome browsers are being intentionally hobbled
I don't doubt at all that Google hobbles their sites on Firefox but at least on my machine they aren't doing a great job of it
If I set my user agent to something like Linux/Ubuntu, it loads just fine. If I set my user agent to some unheard Linux distro, it lags as the same with FreeBSD.
Is it inconvenient to transcode before/during upload?
5 seconds is somewhat exaggerating, I clicked through 10 or so videos on my instance to check and it's 2-3 seconds most of the time.
I've experienced B2 throwing a wrench into the dream of low latency, but some object stores are very fast. And more importantly you only need the first couple megabytes of each video to be on fast storage.
Would it change the equation, meaningfully, if you didn't offer any transcoding on the server and required users to run any transcoding they needed on their own hardware? I'm thinking of a wasm implementation of ffmpeg on the instance website, rather than requiring users to use a separate application, for instance.
Would you think a general user couldn't handle the workload (mobile processing, battery, etc), or would that be fairly reasonable for a modern device and only onerous in the high traffic server environment?
I think the user experience would be quite poor, enough that nobody would use the instance. As an example a 4k video will transcoded at least 2 times, to 1080p and 720p, and depending on server config often several more times. Each transcode job takes a long time, even with substantial hwaccel on a desktop.
Very high bitrate video is quite common now since most phones, action cameras etc are capable of 4k30 and often 4k60.
> Do you think a general user couldn't handle the workload (mobile processing, battery, etc), or would that be fairly reasonable for a modern device and only onerous.
If I had to guess, I would expect it be a poor experience. Say I take a 5 minute video, that's probably around 3-5gb. I upload it, then need to wait - in the foreground - for this video to be transcoded and then uploaded to object storage 3 times on a phone chip. People won't do it.
I do like the idea of offloading transcode to users. I wonder if it might be suited for something like https://rendernetwork.com/ where users exchange idle compute to a transcode pool for upload & storage rights, and still get to fire-and-forget uploads?
I really appreciate you walking through that; it's an eye-opener! It seems like you not only deal with a considerable amount of five-minute-or-greater videos, but much higher quality than I was expecting, too.
I also like the idea of user-transcoding because, honestly, I think it's better for everyone? I would love if every place I uploaded video or audio content offered an option to "include lower-quality variants" or something. Broadly, it's my product; I should have the final say on (and take responsibility for) the end result. And for high-quality stuff, the people who make it tend to have systems equipped to do that better anyway. So they could probably get faster transcoding times by using their own systems rather than letting the server do it. Seems like a win-win, even outside of the obvious benefits of "make a whole lot of computers do only the work they each need done, instead of making a few computers do the work that everyone needs done". With the only slight downside of the "average user" having some extra options that they don't understand which cause them to use it wrong and then everyone hates your product. Yay, app development.
You of course, can do this anyway. PeerTube allows you to completely disable transcoding. But again that means you're streaming the full resolution. Your client may not like this.
If realtime performance is your concern I think PeerTube allows you to pre-transcode to disk. If there is a transcoded copy matching the client request, the server streams that direct with no extra transcode.
To answer your question: shifting transcode onto the client won't improve performance and will greatly increase bandwidth requirements in exchange for less compute on the server. You almost certainly do not want this.
I'm also sceptical that activitypub is a good fit for video, IPFS could be a better solution.
It's a shame the US government killed LBRY.
Given the multiple articles I've seen on how federation can easily accidentally DDOS mastodon servers, which isn't even a form of federation that primarily uses something as heavy in data usage as video, I do not find that so strange tbh. And that's before factoring in malicious actors or even just careless ones like all the AI scrapers.
It's a thing, it happens a lot and Lemmy instances have the same problems to fight. Unwanted porn in my eyeballs is sadly a not uncommon experience until you've put in effort to set up blocks and filters on your personal accounts. Peertube being explicitly video based is a natural target for porn pushers.
I built the original android native client. Every so often I would get an update rejected from the play store because of the default instance content.
The app is currently still in a pending appeal because of a NSFW switch already for more than a year. I have abandoned it at this point.
https://github.com/sschueller/peertube-android/issues/302#is...
From what I can tell, it is UN affiliated/related project where basically it tries to make countries integrate these digital public goods in their country's ecosystem/ work on these (products?)
Is there any amount of sponsorship money that come with this classification or more tax benefits?
Or does UN (thus countries who fund UN) itself fund DPGA?
I find this idea fascinating now thinking about it if that can be the case, for these countries a few millions or even billions collectively might not mean much but it can mean a lot towards open source and digital soveriegnity in my opinion too.
https://www.unicef.org/innovation/growth-funding#:~:text=Gro...
In practice, being a DPG makes your project slightly easier to choose in UN and government procurements. In most cases, they're choosing your platform because it's free, so it's unlikely that money or code contributions will come your way. It can even be a downside, because your software may end up deployed on an under-provisioned government server that generates a flood of support requests. Ask me how I know...
You may also get a bit more visibility and become eligible for some DPG-related funding calls. But in my experience, funding ultimately depends on demonstrated impact, donor relationships, alignment with national digital strategies, and the ability to deliver at scale.
So I thought that having an open source project in DPGA would be really great but it seems that everything that glitters isn't gold like how you mention support requests etc.
I have a question tho, What are the best foundations or labels (like DGPA) that an open source software can qualify for which might give it more exposure and funding
Personally I am starting to believe it might be NLNET (https://nlnet.nl/) but what are your thoughts on it?
If it's a library, make it easy for developers to contribute code.
If it's an app, make it easy for individuals/businesses who value it to pay (e.g., cloud hosting).
I gave a talk about this at the launch of WHO's Open Source Program Office[1].
https://video.hardlimit.com/c/aninats/videos
(It's discouraging having put in so much effort on trying to make the Metaverse work, and then having the entire sector die.)
meljoann@tv.gravitons.org : https://tv.gravitons.org/c/meljoann/ "Meljoann is an extremely physically attractive Irish multidisciplinary artist. They’ve been supported by Pitchfork, Beats Per Minute, XLR8, KEXP, Dan Hegarty, Cian Ó Cíobháin, Jenny Greene and Tara Stewart of RTÉ radio, Irish Times, Nialler9, Hot Press, BBC’s Gemma Bradley, Dummy Mag, HMUK and the Arts Council of England. She’s currently releasing a series of self-directed video singles. ‘HR’, their anti-capital concept album, is out now. Their third album, ‘Status’, releases in 2025"
I'm looking forward to trying out PeerTube.
Start archiving now, the internet is rapidly getting user hostile.
Drives are cheap, data is expensive.
It's not a perfect platform, but generally does well enough from my home server and a gigabit fiber connection.
It's a great project, but it's not a replacement for YouTube, and that's fine.
Prisoner's Dilemma Bonus: I'll upvote all responses if no responses attempt to explain Peertube's philosophy to me.