PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform
github.com
github.com
I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch. This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram. Even a decent 20-minute video can easily take 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor.
I have a pretty small channel (~100K subscribers) with no employees and relatively low upkeep costs (a few hundred dollars a month), and even I could not make this work if I didn't get at least $500-$1,000 per video on average, since it just takes so much time and money.
Most channels with more than a million subscribers are likely founders working 60-80 hour weeks with multiple full-time employees supporting them. You cannot do that in the hopes of viewers donating $5 here and there.
And yes, there are people who make content for free - most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video. And the difference between a million views and a hundred is 10,000x. You cannot create a platform without big users.
I think any real competitor to YouTube nowadays would have to be backed by a big corporation that can pay big creators million-dollar deals to make the switch. Otherwise it's just dead in the water.
High quality videos just cost a lot of money and labor to produce. There is simply no way around this. Any platform which doesn't let creators monetize effectively will be stuck with what people produce in their free time. Which will essentially always be worse, because the competitors will have creators with actual budgets and time to work.
In fact, I'd expect the highest quality videos to have a relatively low viewership. Most people seem to want Mr Beast or whatever.
[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=WTEZjR5aNjw&list=PLoaXcYRr65txn8...
Nobody is going to go to OP's personal site to watch videos. They are going to fire up YT and eat what the algorithm feeds them.
The reason PeerTube and Nebula are important is it provides the potential for a true alternative destination for people looking for videos. Once these platforms have an enough content to draw an audience naturally, then content creators will be able to survive a post-YT world.
For people like the OP, it's probably best to follow the model video games do with DRM. Post on YT first, to get the ad revenue, then repost on other platforms after some time to build up an alternative subscriber base. Presumably, in-video sponsorships will pay for these views as well, even if there's no direct ad-sense like revenue model.
They also require an off-YouTube exclusivity contract, which was especially no bueno for me.
I know of a couple channels that do that, though it seems like there's a requirement to add a little extra bit on the end for the Nebula side.
Examples: Adam Neely, Tom Scott
People have been following this strategy of creating their own mini-brands for years and have their own following. YT doesn't even have all of the their content, and YT is just one lead gen channel. Frankly, Ad Revenue from YT is pitiful, and it's an open secret the real money is made as I've described (although it is a long term play).
I don't disagree with you about PeerTube and the like, but it is a two-sided marketplace and you need to prime both sides of that pump (content creators and viewers).
Unfortunately, I agree. It's not the algorithm for me, though. Rather, it's the capabilities of the platform. I use the cast feature almost exclusively. I rarely watch a video on a computer screen and never on a mobile device. YouTube's casting feature is constantly broken, but it's the only thing that even barely works. I have no idea how many others see it this way, but I don't think I'm particularly distinct.
I've been following https://github.com/futo-org/fcast for a bit, but it doesn't really have a viable receiver implementation that I know of.
Counterpoint: Channels with Patreons with uncensored and pre-release content.
Youtube can't be unseated as the main platform, but you're wildly wrong about the order of operations for what to do beyond your lead audience. No, you want to post on other platforms first, at a premium, and on youtube second. And should Youtube somehow magically evaporate, you just unlock your past premium content so people can find it and you have some degree of word of mouth as content that survived the apocalypse, as a lifeline.
I think I go to YouTube because it has interesting content, and the fact it's in video form isn't particularly relevant. Some content must be in video form but not all of it. I also follow several blogs, and Hacker News. I used to use Reddit when it was less enshittified, the way I use YouTube now. I don't know why I don't follow Nebula - I have a subscription because I want to support more independent platforms.
What is needed is a way to ingest YouTube video through peertube or through a client that treats peertube as a primary destination and YT as a fallback.
This client then gives multihosting a single UI and blurs YT branding.
Maybe?
Edit: Of course, you do need to have enough demand/scale to make it worth your while, but that will depend on your audience size and how engaged/invested they are in your content AND you personally to an extent. Perhaps be creative and start out with small experiments. Not too hard with LLMs nowadays.
To address the elephant in the room, except for "premium content", you're asking to pay for something the users didn't come for and most probably don't want.
So if you're not into mild grifting, the only way your content is directly monetized is paywalls, and that's an utterly complicated business as you need to show enough to entice, but not too much, while dealing with freebooting and custome support. It can be alleviated by joining a paywalled community like Nebula's, but it comes with it's own issues.
As you point out it's not impossible by any mean, it's just a huge PITA that will make no business sense for most creators compared to ad ridden platforms.
It's very difficult to do this in a way that produces sustainable, durable revenue, and I suspect that people doing technical educational content are finding it increasingly difficult in the age of AI.
Trends for his YouTube channel look pretty much like what I expected given the general trends in the marketplace.
https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UCJZv4d5rbIKd4QHMPkc...
That one is likely the best use case while one monetizes on YT waiting for FreeTube to gain more popularity. Worth also for keeping a safer online accessible backup in case things go south with the YT channel being taken down for any reason, be it bogus copyright claims or else. What I'm not sure of though is how long until Google changes YT rules to disallow linking or even mentioning competing, or perceived as such, services. Companies always do that: I'm a Ebay user since 2008, 100% feedback both as seller and customer, hundreds of positives not a single negative or neutral in 18 years, but a while ago Ebay in their infinite wisdom blocked a listing of mine because I added the links of the documentation needed to use the device I was selling; no way to appeal successfully or have it restored, they evidently either used a monkey or AI to detect what they identified as an attempt to contact the customer outside of Ebay, for a €30 item nonetheless. Years ago they didn't enforce such idiotic limitations, so I wouldn't put any trust on YT to remain consistent with their current rules.
Dunno if they’ve caught on, but just send what you need to send in a .png
Probably goes through a not-hotdog test, but that’s about it.
You need to build a product so good that my statement above sounds INSANE. Not just “I think he’s wrong” but “dude absolutely no way. Everyone will want this. Are you stupid?”
And this is not that product.
Edit: yeah. I was curious so I went searching for ASMR videos. The default search brought some (terrible-looking) ones up, but half of them were in French? I sorted by views instead, and even though I literally only searched for “ASMR”, there were no longer any ASMR videos near the top of the results. For something trying to compete with YouTube, this is a very mid experience. Nobody is going to waste time migrating.
Sadly, those won’t make a couple bucks anymore. You can’t get a cut of the revenue until you have 1000 subscribers.
The couple bucks a month from my 1 video that was more useful than professional was nice until the moved that goalpost.
In case you were wondering why every bloody publisher, big or small, asks you to subscribe, even if, well, why would you subscribe to a channel that helped you fix your phone one day but their next video couldn’t be more unrelated?
Meanwhile in my “blogging” days, that first couple cents/bucks a month from Adsense convinced me to spend more time on it & make $20/month, then $200. Was $2000/month for a while. Now they expect you to work for free to prove yourself?
It's a decentralized, open source, video sharing platform. It's not a product. It's okay for products to exist, but not everything needs to be one.
While that might be true, it's worth noting that the project has been running for seven years already.
disrupting youtube is super hard, you basically need to bring your own audience from something else to do it, or have a platform already existing that you expand into the us.
This reads like MBA advice but the reality is not that simple. For a variety of reasons, relatively few people have the ability to produce durable revenue over the long term by pushing their YouTube audience to owned platforms.
The most successful YouTubers get a lot of attention but the reality is that outside of the 1%, there is no "long term winning play" for most of these people. The average YouTuber who finds some success building an audience tries to milk it for as long as they can before they're supplanted by new faces, they burn out, their category loses appeal, algorithms change, etc.
Does the order matter as long as I hit both?
Would having bonus content on the peertube version make sense ?
Or even more extreme do I want the YouTube bid to be a teaser to the peertube version?
...because they're directly tied to YouTube own revenue.
As someone who creates a fair bit of content, and am fortunate enough not to have to worry about the revenue from that, I deliberately try to minimize monetization because it ultimately becomes the main driving force behind your content creation.
Monetization as the only model for content creation leads to an incredibly safe and boring world while simultaneously meaning every piece of content you interact with is trying to extract money from you the viewer.
If I were to self-host my videos or put it on PeerTube if I wanted anyone to see it I would actively have to go out and promote it myself. YouTube does that for me.
No, that's not a given. It would be more accurate to say it is content people will watch, and not necessarily want to watch. I mean people will watch porn, I'm not sure they want to watch porn.
If you asked someone before vine or tiktok whether you wanted to watch an unending carousel of thirty second videos from nobodies for four hours straight I'm not sure a lot of people would say yes.
Am I the only one who sees ragebait titles to youtube videos that do not contain a modicrum of the rage that is advertised in the title?
I don't think we need to conflate algorithmic nudging with the conscience preference of the user frankly.
It's even in the name. PeerTube. Peer. Your talking about 'consumers' of a product you produce vs a way to share videos that isn't YouTube with your .. PEERs.
Not 100k views videos. Think you should step back and think what your actually trying to debate or argue. It comes off kinda like your misunderstanding the software and conflating a lot of things that don't relate and not relevant to PeerTube.
What does that even mean? Not everything published has to be with the purpose of entertaining. This is a more recent mindset that came with the advent of the "Content Creator" (think Mr.Beast). But it needs not be this engineered. Historically, some of the more interesting channels on YouTube have been people organically sharing something that was genuinely dear to them. Offered with little concern as to whether it's "what people want to watch". They make you want to watch it, because it's a passion that they manage to convey. By contrast, people who are particularly concerned about eyeballs seem to publish with the purpose of meeting the audience's interest as a main guiding factor. And yes, maybe for those, YouTube is a better fit. But I also know many for whom moving to a reliable alternative (tech wise) would be a step up.
If for instance your goal is to share educational content for free, provided that the hosting platform is sound, your main concern as far as your audience finding your content should be that of discoverability. Which is an easy enough kink to iron with current search technology.
> Not everything published has to be with the purpose of entertaining.
1. Why do you assume that people would “want to watch” something only for entertainment reasons, instead of for educational reasons, etc. GP commenter did not seem to even imply any focus on entertainment like your assumption that entertainment is the only reason someone could ‘want to watch’ something.
2. As far as what GP commenter meant by want to watch, they provided some specifics in their post - the most watched video on the home page had 29 views, so that presumably is the sun of people who wanted to watch it (whether for educational, etc reasons), accidentally viewed it, were required to view it as part of an educational program, etc.
If a channel has 100 subscribers - (except if it's a brand new channel) - it's because people saw the videos and decided, no, I don't want to see this, I'm not going to subscribe.
Put all of those people on a platform together, you will just end up with a platform with more creators than viewers.
if we could have less working hours or cheaper rent or less expensive bills more people could do hobby stuff again ofc. but right now is tricky for that
e.g. this thread. Here you have people making software for themselves to host their own videos without being beholden to the likes of Google. Absolutely nothing to do with OP. So why is OP criticising them? Where in the README does this free software project discuss monetization (other than mentioning it's ad-free)? Why is the topic even slightly germane?
Nope, there are still people doing this stuff to share what they are excited about, and they will continue to be people like that.
Economy has nothing to do with this — as mentioned, a lot of this comes out of university students and low rung staff, and they were never best paid.
And there is no audience interested in seeing average things online.
Frankly I wouldn't care at all if all of your over-produced thumbnail-bait disappeared overnight.
This isn't about "over-produced thumbnail-bait". This is about all high-quality media.
You mention Rick Beato. Do you really think Rick Beato sits down behind his laptop to edit his own videos? He has nearly 6 million subscribers and produces around 10 long-form videos per month. He has at the very least an editor (probably full-time) and a thumbnail designer (part-time), and I assume also a manager who sets up brand deals and contacts musicians for his interviews. He also records his videos on expensive cameras inside his well-lit studio, which also isn't cheap. It's very difficult to tell how much YouTube channels generate but I wouldn't be surprised if the Rick Beato channel is at this point a >$20K/month operation.
Edit: Also, do you really think Rick Beato making "The Secret Weapon Behind Dr Dre" or "The Real Reason Music is Getting Worse" is not clickbait? It's just clickbait, but for people like you. Part of good advertising is making people feel like they're not even being sold anything.
As a musician myself, and as someone who enjoys watching music and music theory content on YouTube, I can't stand watching Rick Beato because of stuff like this. There certainly are valid criticisms to be made against the music industry, but those videos are like 90% ridiculous cherry-picked comparisons and vague, superficial justifications. It's low-quality nostalgia-driven engagement bait that's optimizing for clicks and comments.
I really like this video by 12tone addressing Beato's schtick about modern music [0]. 12tone is an example of someone who I consider produces much higher quality content than Beato, and obviously puts a ton of time and effort into the videos (writing scripts, drawing the visuals, recording and editing, and making moderately-clickbaity titles and thumbnails). But I'd guess it's probably a one-person operation.
In comparison, Beato's channel strikes me as low-effort content (pick a topic and spend an hour talking unscripted in front of a camera) with a ton of money spent on production, editing, and algorithm hyper-optimization to maximize ROI. It's such a straightforward case of something that would not exist without YouTube's monetization system that it's rather ironic for the parent to use it as an example otherwise.
I find this to be very insightful.
I said above that Youtube itself created a generation that expects free videos, but it's also true that Youtube has created an industry that expect to make a living from their platform - to the extent that they literally cannot understand the point of view of the 'generation that expects free videos'.
There's obviously room for both since that's the world we live in, but it's interesting to see the two philosophically opposed 'bubbles' interacting with each other.
In any event, Rick Beato seems like a normal human being, albeit a somewhat goofy dad-rock oldie. 12Tone comes across as an aspie weirdo. I'd rather have more of the former.
The videos are heavily edited with many cuts. So, I'd guess the production process is "have him talk for an hour, then edit it down to a 10 minute YouTube video".
> In any event, Rick Beato seems like a normal human being, albeit a somewhat goofy dad-rock oldie. 12Tone comes across as an aspie weirdo. I'd rather have more of the former.
And that's...kind of the point I'm making? The amount of effort put into the content of Beato's videos is quite low, with probably a couple hours at most of time put into research, coming up with talking points, and recording. But a lot of effort is spent on production, in order to make content that feels relatable and punchy and palatable to a mass market. It's junk food, and junk food sells well.
I have the most popular NSFW LoRA (actually a LoKR but whatever) for at least one major text to image model on CivitAI.
Once it blew up I made a Patreon, maybe 6 months ago? I get $50 a month from it. I doubt that even covers my electricity costs for training.
Podcasts and videos do have the advantage of being able to ask for people to donate with every podcast/video, but people just aren’t inclined to give their money away when they don’t have to. It’s a rare trait.
vtuber culture proves that this is categorically wrong
the fundamental issue a lot of people here don't seem to get is that high quality videos that people want to watch are expensive to create. Besides the huge amount of high-skill labor, there's also just production costs, software, equipment, upkeep, etc.
At the very least, ignoring all other costs, a single person making good videos somewhat regularly is a full-time job. People who make entertainment also need to eat and pay rent, the money has to come from somewhere.
They have a problem with high quality production (more engaging due to production), low value content that proliferates on platforms like YouTube, and would rather see more high value content regardless of production quality, and Internet, in general enabled that if not for people starting to think about (ad supported) revenue first.
I get your point, but many of them fail to hit some hundreds of views due in large part to all of the large, professional channels that are spending hundreds of man hours as week producing content.
If the production was less professional do you think total viewership hours would drop significantly, or would it be distributed across more channels?
The cost of creating and editing videos going to come way down, there's already ways to do it in the past few years.
Well, there's your problem.
You want the numbers that come from mass consumption, which means catering to the lowest common denominator thus producing shit with gold plating while then complain the gold plating is bloody expensive.
Some people just are knowledgeable and want to share with the rest of us mortals like say someone like Terrence Tao. Putting someone like him on "YouTube" is a goddamn travesty. We need an alternative and yes, you won't make money and no, it's not for you then.
At some point that becomes saturated, and you're better off catering to a niche that is poorly served.
I think people should be more aware of the perverse incentive of YouTubers saying, "my guaranteed source of income is very little and unstable guys, I need you to also subscribe to my patreon" where - could YouTubers perhaps have a reason to act like their ad revenue is very little? In my experience, while ad revenue isn't great, for any decent-size YouTuber its still enough to live on and in any case it always stays a significant income stream.
Streaming video is very expensive, even in 2026 and ignoring that someone is paying the main business expense of those creators is not very honest.
You make non interesting 20’ YT video? Well too bad your 80 labor hours & equipment time are lost.
Even if you count TikTok's higher average watch time per user, YouTube's broader demographic more than makes up for it.
Not bare breasts. Cleavage. Nearly all of Pamela Anderson's notable body of work would need to be censored to avoid risking loss of that precious, precious monetization. It's like fucking Iran.
And of course you can't say "die", "kill", "suicide", etc. You have to talk like a parody of 80s cartoon censorship—literally. (The neologism "unalive" came from Deadpool in an animated series called Ultimate Spider-Man, who realized he was in an animated show but thought it was 80s Saturday morning fare and constantly minced his intent to kill by saying he was going to "unalive" his target.)
Monetization has had a chilling effect on the kind of content people put on YouTube. I do not mourn its lack, at least on alternative video platforms.
As a video watcher, the main issue I have with YouTube is the presence of monetization.
If you want to make money in something, you're not part of the group who doesn't. There's already a giant platform for you. Why would you say hobbyists are entitled?
I was replying to that. This commenter is not a hobbyist making video, he watches some hobbyists video, and them getting paid is the issue he has.
The reason why is on full display here: this entire thread has been derailed by people asking how you're supposed to make money with it, denigrating people who "only" have 100 subscribers (imagine 100 people regularly coming to watch you give a talk or demo or performance out of pure interest!), etc.
In a hobby or leisure space, appreciation or encouragement alone is valuable. Monetizing leisure leads to some crazy ideas. Like completely turning the perspective around: "content creators" think what they're doing is interesting enough that not only will I give them my attention, but that I should somehow compensate them for it? Crazy.
To me that is in line with my original quote. He actively seeks work people put in while haivng an issue with them getting compensated for it.
Whether YT has monetization or not people's incentives are the same. Imagine that YT has no ads, people would put stuff behind paywalls or upsell aggressively.
> denigrating people who "only" have 100 subscribers (imagine 100 people regularly coming to watch you give a talk or demo or performance out of pure interest!), etc
I would never denigrate those people. But if you work hard enough and put in enough work that people watch 4000 hours of your videos in last year, and eventually you want to quit the job you don't like and just get paid by creating for people like that guy, and that guy says "monetization is the problem I have", it's kind of sociopathic. Drawing this line between work and hobby, like you have to do stuff you hate for money and god forbid you start getting paid for doing stuff you like
What that guy is telling OP is that he's not creating for him. OP came into a thread about a platform for freely sharing video, not for getting a job in the entertainment industry. There's already at least 3 major platforms for that, and the monetization is what that user said he doesn't like about youtube [in contrast to this]. It's like commenting in a thread about a package repo complaining that the problem with FOSS communities is lack of monetization. If you want a job in the field, go somewhere where people are looking for help and will pay you to do things for them. Not places where people are having fun so you can try to upsell.
And yes there should be a line between work and hobby. Hobbies are things you do for you. Work is something someone else wants and pays you to do. You are doing it for them. e.g. with making software, work should not be fun. It should be boring. Making it "fun" is just a pain for your colleagues. Conversely, leisure should be fun. Making it into a money-making endeavor makes it unenjoyable for everyone else. There is supposed to be a line.
Saying that people need to have money to survive and that it's great to be getting paid for doing something they love (while making stuff that's free for you to watch) is sociopathic and reducing them?
> OP came into a thread about a platform for freely sharing video, not for getting a job in the entertainment industry
Yes. But it's pretty silly to not think it will be compared to youtube. It's even called PeerTube, pretty obviously. youtube became so popular to inspire peertube in the first place thanks to its monetization. So it's a very obvious thing to bring up.
> And yes there should be a line between work and hobby. Hobbies are things you do for you. Work is something someone else wants and pays you to do
You keep that masochistic distinction if you want but please don't impose it on others
You take payment to do things that are acceptable to you, that the other person needs, and that you are capable of. You don't tie emotions into it. Certainly not strong ones.
Of course they compare themselves to youtube, but via contrast. Specifically, that you control your own platform and (out of the box) there's no ad ecosystem. For people who want to share videos without making people watch ads, that's perfect. The entire point is that it's not youtube. And if you want "not youtube but still full of shills and grifters" there's also Instagram and TikTok. The "monetized 'content'" space is very well served already.
Masochism is turning the things you love into a grind, recontextualizing them such that they're now always carrying a question of economic utility (and therefore optimization) as you do them so that you can no longer just enjoy them for what they are.
I rest my case.
'But it's pretty silly to not think it will be compared to youtube. It's even called PeerTube, pretty obviously. youtube became so popular to inspire peertube in the first place thanks to its monetization. So it's a very obvious thing to bring up.' or that
it makes it clear what I think about people being able to get paid for their work and 'they would not otherwise make them' is bullshit i never said. they would never make the videos that in recent years made youtube the place it is nowadays, but they would make some other stuff.
Yes, that's exactly it. What I'm saying is I'm fine with not having the videos that in recent years made youtube the place it is nowadays, and I'm fine with the other stuff.
The existence of ad bucks is what made people create better and better productions, which attracted more viewers, and that is why youtube became the default place for people like you to go for video stuff. You can't just remove that feature and have the rest.
I'm sure you didn't talk to every single creator whose video you watch and ask them if they did it without hoping for some YT ad bucks and whether they would have done it if there were no YT bucks. You can say they would but don't kid yourself we live in a capitalism and most people don't have enough money
Youtube itself is responsible for an entire generation expecting the videos to be free.
The monetisation and injection of advertising into roughly-everything is only a relatively recent development. Free-until-monopoly.
True, it did create this weird world. But then think about all of the amazing high production value work we enjoy because someone once did it for fun, got paid and then decided to keep doing it and make a nice living off it while you still don't pay them a cent. Sadly it's probably impossible for YT to have that original atmosphere.
You are a self described youtube watcher. Unless you pay for youtube premium, you expect free content literally every time you open youtube. By definition.
> All the people who want to make money from YouTube can just stop making stuff if money is what's motivating them.
I don't know how old are you but after certain age things are not so black and white. We don't live in severance where we can slave away at a denigrating unethical job we hate just to earn money. People prefer to do something they love AND earn money from it. If they don't do the latter they starve and go bankrupt. Guess what then they can't provide free content for you.
Good examples of more or less "free" content that fits PeerTube are cited in other comments, though. Conference footage, MIT OCW, archival footage of any kind of live event. Productions where the work is in putting on the event in the first place. Holding the conference, creating a course, putting on some kind of skateboarding competition, whatever it might be. Incidentally filming it and uploading the footage costs next to nothing in comparison, isn't expected to drive revenue compared to the live attendance, and it doesn't make much difference to the viewers if the footage is terrible. Shitty quality Feynman lectures is still watching Feynman lecture. It was really cool, for a recent example, that somebody found and uploaded phone footage of Caitlin Clark's fabled scrimmage against the Iowa men's team from however many years ago. Nobody cares about the quality of the video or who filmed it. Likely nobody subscribed to whatever channel it first ended up on, but how cares? People who wanted to see a rare real world event would still have been able to find it and it cost nothing to the person who pulled out a phone and turned it on while that event was happening.
If a new incumbent can raise some money, offer creators some money and a path to a higher cut than their competitors, they can win big.
A video sharing website is not a social media platform, it's a streaming platform. The real competitors to YouTube are not PeerTube or whatever, it's Netflix and HBO.
This is why Nebula also managed to find a niche and be relatively successful: the issue is not ads or a monthly subscription or something, the only problem is: people want to watch high-quality content. Find a way to get them high-quality content. If you cannot do that, everything else is meaningless. In Nebula's case, even a few high-profile YouTubers in the same niche uploading exclusives on a platform is better than a thousand nobodies uploading low effort content.
Decentralized system rely heavily on how much you trust other humans, I do not, so I hear them.say Decentralized and I run.
The point being that building a production company to produce videos is a known thing, Peertube is a distribution network, and historically this is a remarkable mirror of 'independent' theaters and 'studio owned' theaters. It was a characteristic of that time that the big studios would use their monoply power to force small studios to give them their work at a discount that allowed the studio to get most of the income. They made it just enough that the small studios didn't feel motivated to build a competitive system.
When I read your comment it struck me that perhaps "$500 - $1000 average per video" was the number Google has determined to be 'just enough'.
There is a different requirement if you only post shorts.
I shed a tear (and subscribe) when I encounter an incredibly useful video but they have “only” a few hundred subs.
More subscribers to a channel doesn’t save Google money at all.
Requiring X hours of views encourages posting longer videos, which costs them more to store and process.
Is it though? Let's say I weave a basket out of reeds I've spent the weekend picking from the shores of a local creek. I take the basket to a guy who pays me $20 for it. Then that same guy takes it to a swap meet that he runs in town and sells it for $200.
That's just market economics, until you try to set up your own smaller swap meet on the route to this guys market and sell your baskets there, and this guy calls the police and has them shut down your "illegal swap meet." So you go to city hall for a permit and they say, "We don't sell permits unless you can prove that at least 1,000 people will go to your swap meet and every week you'll have at least 10 new products to show." See where I'm going with that?
Asymmetric markets are ones where a single individual or small group of individuals can exercise control over the entire operation of the market. You can think of then as nascent monopolies or perhaps price fixing cartels. In the US, after experiencing the Great Depression, as a result of unregulated markets, the US made it government policy to regulate market abuses as no single participant (or even a set of participants) could hope to compete with the monopoly or cartel.
Information markets, or non-real property markets like video content, did an end run around controls in an effort to capture the value that is associated with a product you can manufacture instances of for pennies, but sell for dollars. Games, Office processing suites, Videos, Musical recordings, can all be "sold" for 100 to 1000x the cost to produce them. It is an area that is under studied in my opinion.
What I want from such a platform is authenticity... and curation.
Through effective search, Google enabled mass deportalization. The best link would win. Your crappy but good blog about how to fix an issue could become top in the results.
Now YouTube favours entertainer-mechanic making subscribeable but generic videos instead of… the one specific to your vehicle by some gruff but knowledgeable mechanic.
Like, c’mon buddy, the bolt only comes off like that in the studio after 3 practice runs.
As a computer user I see that as the main advantage
No third party intermediary
No advertising
Computer users need peer-to-peer options for sharing video with each other that do not use third party advertising companies, e.g., posing as "search engine" or "social media", to transfer the bits
Whether PeerTube works well, I do not know. I know that overlay networks I have tested work well enough
ofc you would prefer high quality content delivered directly to you for free, because you're ignore the producers perspective.
As a user I would see a grocery store where everything is free as an advantage... utill the products inevitably run out and no food supplier is willing to stock the shelves for free.
https://compliancehub.wiki/section-230-the-backbone-of-the-i...
There are some people to whom I'd like to send it
But I'm not uploading it to YouTube's servers
That said, I'm also okay with there being platforms out there where monetization is difficult or impossible. I want there to be places where creators can get paid, but I am also nostalgic for a less commercial internet.
That's a feature, not a bug.
The Youtube experience has always sucked for me - right from the first year Youtube launched. I just don't like the interface, web site, layout, etc. It's why I didn't have a Youtube account until I needed to share a video with someone, and even then, I never log into it (so I don't follow[1], rate, etc).
And then over the last few years, the ad situation has gotten astronomically worse. I'm not exaggerating when I say that old school cable TV with its ads was a significantly better experience.
I do a search for something specific. I start clicking videos to see if it has the content I want. But very often, on my Roku or similar device, I won't be able to see anything of the video unless I watch 15-60s of ads.
Only to find out the video is not useful for me. Click next video. Repeat the pain.
I think this is what leads a lot of people to just plain hate Youtube. It's what leads me not to care if suddenly no one can make money on Youtube (even the folks I like). It's why I want Youtube to just die.
If they made the site much more pleasing, and found a way to allow 3rd party interfaces (while still serving ads), and weren't anywhere near as annoying with the ads, I'd like the platform.
Regarding monetization: For the folks who have well established viewers, and who make most of their money via embedded ads in the video, I don't think they'll lose anything by switching to Peertube - as long as the Peertube infrastructure can handle the load. The major fans will know where to find the content.[2]
The real problem with Peertube is discovery. How can a new content creator be noticed? And then how can they show accurate viewership numbers to get those sponsors?
[1] Well, I may follow via other means: Manually, or via RSS, etc.
[2] Incidentally, some of the "popular" content I watch on Youtube exclusively gets monetized via embedded ads. Youtube demonetized that whole category a while ago. So embedded ads is totally viable.
So yea.. it takes a lot of effort -> if you are nobody.
For eatablished streamers just slapping something from stream on ytb is enough.
Or is that the clause of YouTube "you must not post elsewhere"?
But then how does twitch work? Genuinely asking, whats the difference?
I completely get that it's your job now... But the fact it's become a job for people is probably why I don't like it so much anymore. With all the ads and such too, it's now just television. But worse.
This might simply revive a platform that no longer exists. It might not be about paying creators or collecting ad revenue. It's peer to peer, after all.
What you state sounds more like a chicken and egg problem. You'll publish content only when there are enough viewers but there can be viewers only when you publish content.
Like others have said, There's not much effort to publish in both platforms; good way to hedge against the algorithmic risks.
The real barrier issue is that of network effect. There's simply (almost) no audience, which means there are (almost) no creators, which means there is (almost) no audience.
I've been publishing my videos on my own peertube instance for a while and I really do appreciate it as a platform, but I don't think that the technical aspects of it alone will ever be the key to its potential success.
This is something I always thought to be extremely funny. Producing videos is a hobby. If you made it your job, go figure out how to monetize your material yourself. Nobody prevents you from taking sponsorships.
> And yes, there are people who make content for free - most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video.
Where is the "fail" though? Some of those videos take exactly as long to make is it does to watch them. If they don't get monetized (maybe for speaking normal English instead of saying "unalive" and "to grape"), then someone else doesn't make a lot of money from even the little effort it took them by showing ads [0] to people. If all you want to do is talk at a camera and maybe with some people, then all that is a plus.
[0] Speaking of ads, some of the stuff on youtube is wild. Like, honestly gross and disturbing to me.
If you are looking to make money of it, sure, starting with peertube only would be nonsense. If you just wanna make videos, do it! Upload the best ones to youtube and mention peertube, so you maybe get some audience. Then if you really get into it, and make better stuff, spend more effort than just "start record, say things, upload as is", you can upload everything to youtube, too. After having livestreamed the whole thing on Twitch, just to use every part of the buffalo.
That's the main benefit. Monetised content, and the people who make it, is despicable.
>and even I could not make this work if I didn't get at least $500-$1,000 per video on average, since it just takes so much time and money.
Have you considered getting a real job?
>Most channels with more than a million subscribers are likely founders working 60-80 hour weeks with multiple full-time employees supporting them.
Putting them out of business would be a fantastic turn of events.
>And yes, there are people who make content for free - most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video.
Cool and good.
>I think any real competitor to YouTube nowadays would have to be backed by a big corporation that can pay big creators million-dollar deals to make the switch.
That would be like paying a malware company to move from windows to apple.
There are several YouTube channels I love; Folding Ideas, hbomberguy, Kurtis Conner, Contrapoints, etc... but I see those essentially as semi professional / professional variations on television. Once I got into their content via YouTube, YouTube of course drove me away with horrid vile ads, and I moved on to supporting those creators on Patreon.
And that's all good - the digital medium needs places like YouTube. But that doesn't mean there isn't a huge amount of value in the amateur unmonitized video landscape. Pairing those with some niche phpbb style forums was, for me, the last time I truly enjoyed the experience of actually being on the internet.
But you can do that in hopes of youtube sharing a percentage of fluctuating ad revenue? Certain things can get you de-monetized, you can get strike-bombed, falsely accused of copyright infringement via automated systems, etc, and unless you are a very big channel owner, you will receive a minimal droplet of support likely involving no humans in the loop.
There are sustainable creators getting much more revenue by collecting direct subscription money from their patrons while providing exclusive or first-hand content to them which is then re-uploaded to youtube for reaching a wider audience. They can run their own integrated ad-campaings without google deciding what they are advertising or which content they can or cannot produce.
I mean, when you spin your own instance, because frankly, that's what the best option if you're a content creator, you can put whatever ads and monetization strategies you want. So basically the full income that gets generated gets to you, instead of splitting it with some third party that invests minimal effort. Yes, you'll have to pay someone to maintain and upkeep the server, but assumedly the people that can make the change will take that cost into account.
> a big corporation that can pay big creators million-dollar deals to make the switch.
I'm surprised by this. Isn't controlling your full production/distribution/revenue a good enough payback?
Low key shitting on other content creators? Some of IG content creator easily match professionalism you are describing. I know you are probably partially venting your frustration, but that doesn't paint you in a nice light.
By charging it for content. Since HN doesn't like any form of Ads. /s
Sorry I have to write this out. But I am somewhat glad in the past 2 years HN has returned back to discussing monetization, money, business in a sane way.
Yet it's currently hard to find a real usecase for it, since neither the content you want nor audience is there on PeerTube at the moment. If you're interested in open source software or data privacy you might find something here or there, but topics like gaming, music, sports or movies are very much underserved on the platform at the moment, and get almost no attention from viewers.
For example, I recently did a test search and found a let's play for the Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. The videos had something like 3-5 views on PeerTube, and about 10-15 times that on the creator's YouTube channel.
It's the same issue as on Mastodon and Lemmy to be honest, except exaggerated. If the majority of topics aren't well represented on these platforms, then the general public won't use them. And if the general public won't use them, then the creators that would bring the general public over won't use them either.
They need to figure out a way to encourage people outside of the 'hardcore tech nerd raised on Usenet' audience to use these platforms.
I generally like smaller sites, but those topics weren’t exactly engaging for me.
My login server is lemmy.world, so if you sign up with something else ymmv.
There's discussion on all topics these days.
What does Peertube pay?
There is your answer. If people want good stuff, there needs to be money flowing to the source of it. The internet desperately needs to shed this "everything good is totally free" mindset, because what it actually manifests as is "I love taking without the requirement of giving".
If we are talking about clickbait and making money from getting unwanted ads in people's faces, no thank you we don't need more of that.
It's the most annoying and persistent counterpoint brought up in these discussions, but it has no grounding in reality. The most popular contingent of viewers are ad-supported, close behind are ad-blocking, then the last 5% are your subscribers and donators.
(I deem periodic support as donations.)
Not the most common way to make money from videos, for sure, but it's not "nobody", and they need hosting.
I'm a professional YouTuber. The problem with a "donation" system is that, unlike something like tweets or even blog posts which are either free or low-cost to produce, high-quality video is really. expensive. to produce. And people just will not pay if they don't have to.
A good 20-minute video can easily cost 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor to produce. That is, a whole week of labor. And that's not counting expensive equipment, software, licenses, etc.
I cannot run a business on people deciding to give me money for nothing out of the goodness of their heart. And I am still a one-person business, imagine having 5 full time employees. Even YouTubers with millions of subscribers and mature audiences with disposable income often struggle to clear like $5K/month on Patreon. Which, for a multi-person business, is simply not enough. Meanwhile, that same creator might be pulling $20K/month through ads and a similar amount through sponsorships.
YouTube is more similar to Netflix and HBO than Twitter or Reddit. Yes, in theory anyone can upload to YouTube, but the majority of content that is actually watched is at this point produced by full-time creators, some of which are solo self-employed while others are at this point running whole media production companies. And those are the people you need to make a service succeed.
The top channels get all the views because they're the only ones making videos people want to watch, and they're monetized because making such content is really, really expensive.
The problem is that beyond creators with "hollywood-like budgets", even just making 1 good video a week is a full-time job. Most creators are not looking to get rich or get massive returns, they just want to survive and pay rent. Which means any channel of any value has to be able to generate at least few thousand dollars month.
Some of those accounts get a lot of views...
by posting pirated content.
That's an absurd statement.
Every video I've uploaded has gotten some views. Very few videos get zero views.
People forget that historically, Youtube wasn't a place for "content creators", but really just for people to share stuff with friends. Easily 95% of uploaders are not trying to make any money.
While we’re making up statistics, easily 99.9% of viewers are trying to watch content that does.
> People forget that historically, Youtube wasn't a place for "content creators", but really just for people to share stuff with friends.
Utterly useless statement.
There is a reason why there is mountains of free software and comparative dust mounds of free media, free hardware, free services.
Software, like media, is simply free to replicate, and there's a much stronger culture of "I made this for me, and it costs me nothing to give it to you too, so you can have it too." There is a lot of free media out there though: music, art, short films, games or game mods, etc. What they don't have is marketing.
Compare to open source hardware, where you need a lab with thousands of dollars in equipment, need to consume supplies to build stuff and need to pay manufacturers for prototyping.
Software benefits enormously from having zero dependance on the physical world. Its about as resource intensive as building houses in Minecraft.
PeerTube is software you could use to make a video streaming website like Nebula.
The legal landscape of media publishing is filled with antiquated deals from broadcast days for regional control. That has changed marginally with the adoption of streaming.
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/1586#issuecomm...
The same use case as Youtube in its early years.
You upload a video, and send your friends a link (or post/embed on your blog).
That's good enough. It's totally OK if search is not useful.
Of course, the elephant in the room is the cost to run one of these servers...
It was a really good experience, so I'll continue that way.
If you want to check out the videos: https://www.asfaload.com/videos/
- Discovery (as in search)
- Monetization (as in ads)
- Hosting (as in storage)
- Playout (as in data distribution)
PeerTube only performs the fourth, and maybe the third. It's not a flooding distribution system like BitTorrent. It's just a way for a large number of people to play the same video without overloading a modest hosting server. Playout load is distributed amongst the watchers browsers.
I put videos in PeerTube, tech demos of various rendering tests. Works fine. No ad insertion, which is why I use PeerTube.
Peak view count is 2.3K.[1] Nobody is expected to discover them there. They're linked from various forums. Some are for a very tiny audience, such as "Second Life sim server EstablishAgentCommunication message bug", with 10 views, mostly from the devs who needed to see this.
Technically it works fine, but it's not going to displace YouTube. Unless, say, Taylor Swift decided to stream her wedding on it to avoid ad insertion.
It's one thing to put a <video> element on a HTML page (or implement video over webtorrent), it's quite another to make people actually watch it instead of their TikTok feed.
Youtube's biggest threat ever died in the cradle because they foolishly thought users would volunteer money to them.
No one with capital and capability looks at youtube, looks at youtube's audience, and says "Yeah, 30-40% ad-blocking and 4.5% paying for premium, these are the people I want to build services for!".
Those are the people who will happily go to an alternative product. And while that product might start as a pirate YouTube, the one that nabs 30% of YT's traffic can certainly make a pivot to legit. If you're a content creator whose audience is mostly in that group, you're likely to start posting content directly on the competitor's site.
I'm guessing OP had their account banned for using a tool like yt-dl too aggressively. Then again, doing that does give a warning.
I explained exactly why I think they are important in that entire paragraph. And the evidence I'm right is the fact that YouTube could trivially prevent ad-blockers tomorrow, but they don't. They've tried it and quickly rolled back the changes. Presumably they lost a lot more audience than expected.
Even more annoying is that it terminates your YouTube account entirely, so now I can't even login to use it. And I was a premium subscriber, too!
The best thing about YouTube is their agreements with rights holders to allow music and revenue sharing easily, which makes it very simple for creators and remixers etc to not get their stuff removed via DMCA.
Small or hobby creators, who aren't making money anyway, could use small platforms - but then they forfeit their chance to ever become big and get that money - at best they could become big and not get that money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_video_platformsThat sort of work also tends to be less well-compensated than that of SWEs which makes it more important to be paid for work (which most FOSS project cannot do).
I might open a pull request to support some new video code, and that might only require a few dozen lines over a few files. That's easy to review, and it either works or it doesn't. Worst case they say "our convention is to register codecs as a subclass of X class, but you subclassed Y class" or something equally straightforward.
Let's say instead I wanted to change the workflow to register an account. Now I'm changing a bunch of JavaScript, CSS, templates, I'm adding pages, and I also need to update the backend. Even if someone is that into frontend work, it might take forever to even get reviewed by the maintainers because it's a massive PR.
Plus, now we've moved into subjectivity land: "I'm used to the old workflow," (because they designed it) "The last one was really easy" (for an engineer), "I think we should focus on the backend before we work on the UI," "I don't like this font because the license isn't free as in freedom" etc.
Even if you just mockup something on Figma or whatever, unless you're a maintainer it's probably going to just get ignored as a feature request. Because there's also the psychological aspect of basically being told that the UI you wrote is implicitly bad, if you're the maintainer reviewing the mockup.
I know many developers who make at least some open source contributions, be it to an existing project or by open sourcing their own.
It has never, ever happened to me that a UI/UX person opened a PR saying "here, I made a logo for your project because I know how".
I think that there is a cultural thing, where UI/UX people don't consider that they have to work for free on the Internet, and software developers have a tendency to believe they should, "for their CV" or something.
The spacing of every component feels wrong, the font choices are off, the text is too small, there is way too much white space, the "other video" section looks like its just jammed off to the side. The overall feel of the website is very amateurish.
When I go to https://joinpeertube.org, I'm met with a double hero section that tells me about PeerTube, which is ultimately meaningless to 99% of the population.
When I get to actual content on that page, it's not an aggregate of all of the most popular videos across the federation, it's a description of the types of videos you can find on federated sites with links to the sites and not video embeds. You're telling me on the front page that I have to do legwork to find the videos I want to watch. You're already not competitive. You already lose.
Creators go where users go. If you don't build the platform to attract users, you will not get the volume of content that is required to hold people's attention. There's a reason why people come to YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News, Reels, etc. There are almost no clicks between the user and the content, and the content is plentiful.
Every time I try to use PeerTube, I have to try to find where to find the videos. As someone who's been chronically online since 1995, it's not that big of a deal. I can find them eventually. But that UX sucks, even for me, so it's probably utterly untenable for the vast majority of casual users.
You are trying to compete with slot machines by inventing a machine that makes the user read a bunch of stuff between each pull of the lever. It's not super difficult to see why that is a competitive disadvantage.
But, boy, I do know this: when I sit down, I better be able to just pull the lever and start.
An example of federation might be that a bunch of universities run their own instances where they post colloquia, and they federate with each other to make it easy to subscribe to departments in your field from another university, or to comment on their videos. IMO state universities should be posting their material online like this, and on a platform that does not require the public to watch ads (something fundamentally against the mission of an educational institution), or agree to some random company's terms.
> PeerTube is a tool for sharing online videos developed by Framasoft, a french non-profit.
> PeerTube allows you to create your own video platform, in complete independence.
I think it's pretty clear that it's software for running your own video sharing platform? Sure, people are used to monopolies and consolidation now, but surely you can wrap you head around the idea that some people might want to host their own site? Like why are you here and not on reddit? Is this site a bygone way to do things? Or is it just... its own thing?
As I said above, I think entities tied to governments should be using something like this, not youtube. The obvious place to look for e.g. recorded meetings from your city would be your city website. Likewise with schools. And government functions like that absolutely should not be monetized and should not have ads attached.
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
> PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform developed as an alternative to other platforms that centralize our data and attention, such as YouTube, Dailymotion or Vimeo.
The original PeerTube launch I saw on this platform several years ago very much sold it as a replacement for YouTube. I'm not sure what exactly you think I'm saying or trying to do here, but what I've said has absolutely nothing to do with the use case you're defending. It's a good use case and it makes sense. It's fine for hosting your own stuff or in coursework or something where the videos are directly linked to from a CMS. Some people want to host their own stuff. Some people should host their own stuff.
For everybody else... The UX sucks.
If you're interested in Debian, you go to Debian's peertube which is part of Debian's website, where the Debian foundation hosts their videos. If you're interested in Blender, you go to Blender's peertube which is part of Blender's website. It's always worked this way. There's also activitypub federation if you want the social parts with a single account so that cooperating instances can interact. Like email, it's an open protocol so any servers can federate. Like email, they can also choose who they accept traffic from.
There is also a search engine that indexes a bunch of instances, but just as Google is not the web, their search engine is not the peertube. "The web" is just the sum total of all of the websites out there. The thing you seem to think has bad UX, the peertube, is just the sum total of all of the peertube instances out there.
There's no giant overlay or mesh network like gnutella or IPFS. There's just people running their own servers, like the web or email.
It's an alternative to youtube for people who just want to share videos in the same way that an email server is an alternative to gmail for people who just want to send emails to each other. Or a web server is an alternative to Facebook for someone who wants a website. It's understood that those monopolies are then distinct and generally incompatible.
Users have become used to having quick and easy access to a lake of content. When I go to PeerTube's website, I should see content first, and if I'm a creator, I want a guarantee that my content isn't going to suddenly disappear. YouTube can make these guarantees. BlueSky is the only such federated alternative that has gained any degree of traction with normal users because they ripped off the UX of Twitter verbatim.
If you're on episcodon.net and you want your friends and colleagues to join you there, what does that look like? Your answer invariably resides at the end of a labyrinth of shit UX, including the legwork you have to do first to know wtf episcodon.net even is.
People use GMail because it makes email easy to use and there is an implicit guarantee that the emails they have access to today will be there in 10 years because there are an army of engineers being paid to maintain the service. The UX is good and that's why it's popular.
To advertise yourself as an alternative to a popular social media platform, you must address why those platforms are popular in the first place or you are not competitive as a default state.
Peertube's website is not for consumers. It is for publishers. They're quite clear about that when they advertise that you can run your own platform. Again, you are basically complaining that nginx.org doesn't list some cool websites to get started browsing the WWW (except peertube even goes so far as to actually even point to a couple instances).
It's not a regression if your goal is not "create content"/"find and consume content". Like if you actually have interests, and e.g. are a Blender user, and you already visit blender.org for news about the Blender project, then it makes sense that they might say "here are some videos about our project". And of course they offer RSS so you can use your preferred subscription software.
> if I'm a creator, I want a guarantee that my content isn't going to suddenly disappear.
Then install peertube and post your videos? This is what various organizations that don't want their information to disappear like Debian or Blender have done.
> shit UX, including the legwork you have to do first to know wtf episcodon.net even is.
So your criticism is that it's not literally the current monopoly that everyone already knows.
What do you even mean "join you there"? Sharing a peertube video is the same as sharing a youtube video: you select the address, copy, and paste into a message. There's no commitment. You either just... click a link and watch a video, or if you also want to post, you put in your email/password to sign up. I have hundreds of saved logins in my browser, including Google/youtube (who are more onerous and require e.g. a phone number to sign up, or back in the day, required an invite). Peertube is somehow uniquely shit for... not literally being Google?
Is there an actual criticism here that isn't "videos aren't literally recommended on youtube and I'm not literally already logged in via youtube and subscriptions aren't literally managed within youtube"?
I clicked on "Browse content", because that's exactly what I wanted to do: I wanted to browse content.
All I got from that was a needless introduction to an entirely unnecessary cuttlefish named Sepia, and a search box. There was no content to browse; I was lied to.
But there's a note at the bottom about "Peertube instances" with a literal "CLICK >HERE<" cursed-abomination-style link.
That click lead to a list of... 25 "Peertube platforms", in one column on the right, even though I clicked >HERE< for "Peertube instances".
There's a written suggestion that I can add filters to find more of these, but that's exactly the opposite of the way that filters have always worked in my world: Filters are reductive, not additive.
Finally, in the left-hand column, is another CLICK >HERE< style link that is supposed to take me to "videos or channels" -- you know, the stuff I'm looking for.
That link brings me back to the stupid page with Sepia, the iconic cuttlefish, and a search box.
Having been lied to twice (thrice?), I gave up. At this time, I have not yet seen any videos.
You say that you're genuinely interested, but chances are that any given maintainer is not. Willingness to actually listen to UI/UX critique is what separates the Blenders from the GIMPs.
Peertube covers the enterprise use case, but makes unreasonable demands from hobbyists, single users, tinkerers. Kids, gather around and learn from the Peertube design mistakes that an experienced and well-meaning software designer would refuse to subject his users/operators to. Why is this important? Because the number of hobbyist operators is much greater than the number of enterprise operators, given the intended target audience of people who are interested in decentralisation and federation. Peertube engineers and product managers should sit down with the intention to make a smart market move, and expend the next half month of effort to optimise for the majority of operators who make up the long tail, not the minority, so that hurdles to entry are demolished and the stated goal shown on the homepage of "community-owned" becomes attainable for many more people than is the case right now. The resulting network effect would be tremendous.
1. Packaging. Peertube is not packaged by the major players. <https://repology.org/project/peertube/versions> Real-life experience shows that this is almost always because of a circumstance which frustrates a distro packager. Other NPM-conformant libraries and software are packaged nearly automatically, there is good support in the distros to create specfile/RPM package, control file/Deb package, etc. from an Nodejs library tarball with just one command. Peertube must investigate why it is so exceptional and difficult to package and demolish the hurdles.
2. Configuration. Peertube must as the installation step make effective an usable configuration that has some sensible defaults, or perhaps auto-configure at install time or run time. A user should be able to install the software (from a distro package, or a git checkout/unpacked tarball and build step), run it, and immediately use it. It is okay when some features are not working until configured. It is not okay for a software to refuse to work altogether until each and every operator spends time and brain power to figure out what are essential configuration options and what are not, and make decisions about them. The reason why I say it is not okay is because this is a clear abdication of responsibility from the Peertube software devs and an externalising of mental burdens onto the many Peertube operators.
3. Database. Peertube should work with Sqlite by default. An enterprise user can configure PostgreSQL additionally when the need arises.
4. Web server. Peertube should work with the Node.js Web server (possibly express.js or a work-alike) by default. An enterprise user can configure Nginx additionally when the need arises.
5. Cache. Peertube should work with a simple file system cache or no cache at all by default. An enterprise user can configure Redis additionally when the need arises.
I picked a random instance and played a video - did not see any problems.
And Youtube: I've hated their UX since they launched. It shouldn't be hard to make something with better UX than Youtube.
Edit: in the past
However it does certainly suffer from the fact that all federated instances can't pull in videos from other platforms in some reproducible way (so that all instances would be able to serve the same content).
I'm sure some YouTubers would allow mirrors if they didn't have to pick an instance and keep it running.
Im envisioning a spotify replacement. You could pay for your streams directly to artists or platform the artist hosts on. Allowing for a more free market of creators and consumers.
The 'Explore' part, would basically just be like Mastadon or Bluesky
My business model is showcase and archival of my prototyping work. I'm the only account on my instance so there is no surprise with suddenly someone abusing the instance.
This is the same problem as TOR exit nodes and why 3 letter agencies run most of them.
believe it or not, YT too gets a crapload of copyrighted content uploaded hourly yet they exist
Not a chance to figure that out (I am no mastodon user, so hard for me to guess).
These platforms are promising, but they need to remember that the average user will turn away immediately if there is no clear guidance on how to do the basic things.
(And no, it is not spelled "VH SKY" - it's a pun on the VHS video format - in Czech to say "multiple VHS casettes - you would say "vhsky", hence the name. :) )
Sadly I cannot leave the platform. The network effect is far too strong. PeerTube, and Vimeo, and Spotify are all well and good, like any other, but the network effect means that YouTube is where the channels are. The official channels that I follow and watch every day, for news, for updates, for the most important things in my hobby and my daily life. I cannot simply stop watching those things.
Call me an addict or something; I don't know. I have no TV, no family; I need some kind of time-chewing entertainment that is mostly passive. I wish I could curl up with books and knitting or crafts or something, but my eyes are still glued to these screens.
Help?
PearTube (PoireTube) would just have the Fox News clips.
I keep on saying we need to eliminate Google for real. I mean it too. But the services NEED TO BE FLAWLESS if you want to have a chance against Google. I don't understand why people don't seem to understand it. Software can often be better. PeerTube's software was disappointing and really poorly implemented compared to Google. There is no way to win here that way against Google. That's not realistic.
I could totally see myself hooked if I can watch news on it. Can someone from a proper news agency, such as BBC, DW, Reuters, NYT etc test the software and maybe make a pitch? If these agencies are hosting their own PeerTube instances, that would be a major win.
Many of these publishers already got a podcast/video publishing routine anyways and they just put ads directly in the podcast/video. I guess maybe it's not that hard for them to add another publishing channel.
Getting one of the proper news agencies on board is very beneficial for the PeerTube network, because currently there's not much good quality content on it. News videos maybe a good baseline to keep user engaged (as long as they're not too political).
If PeerTube is my software, I'll probably pay my own money to get the agencies on board. I'll even host their site myself if it needs to (at least for the first few years, to demonstrate the value of the software).
same situation that bitorrent found itself in
1. Chunk one inside a YT video 2. Chunk two inside a TikTok video 3. Chunk three on an X thread
And then just post the manifest somewhere that can be read by a client, that then pulls the data in (video, doc, anything)
Obv, not meant for speed or good UX, but if we’re going down the route of decentralization, we can probably leverage social platforms to host chunks of data.
How do people running an instance not fall foul of all the protect the children UK legislation? Will peers also be done by the UK regulator, or only hosts?
Because of their unique monetisation feature.
You can mute channels or entire federated instances so they don't appear in feeds or search results. It does get tiresome to always have to do this when you see unwanted video's, but they do stay gone, unlike Youtube's system of "Not Interested"/"Don't recomend this channel".
All in all i've been watching less Youtube lately and starting to watch some Peertube videos and finding the grassroots nature of it very refreshing.
I designed it in order to stream videos and get paid without worrying about getting deplatformed
Two weeks ago it was covered in a respected security publication: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/06/19/safecloud-browser...
It's coming out soon, but if you're adventurous, you can try it on GitHub already.
Edit: I posted it on HN right now as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48763565