Last time I looked at peertube it had worse problems than that. The content was mostly neo-nazis and conspiracy theories, incels and other stuff that wasn’t on YouTube because it would get banned. I’m not interested in that. Has it got any better?
Last time I looked at peertube it had worse problems than that. The content was mostly neo-nazis and conspiracy theories, incels and other stuff that wasn’t on YouTube because it would get banned. I’m not interested in that. Has it got any better?
Wah, there is no Incel content on YouTube? What about Pearl Davis, or the flood of shorts extracted from this podcast I just cant remember right now?
Personally, I much prefer a uncensored platform over arbitrary censorship by big tech. Without censorship, I can at least decide for myself if I want to watch it.
In fact, I find it quite concerning that people like you seem to actively advocate for voluntary censorship.
They're not "advocating for voluntary censorship", they're simply pointing out that the Peertube (and the Fediverse in general) needs to avoid being the dredges of the internet.
I've never understood this concern with online platforms. It really shouldn't matter what content people publish if discover ability is user-driven.
A Twitter alternative could be full of neo-nazis, butbif my feed is only populated with people I follow them I would never know or care.
The problem is getting to critical mass: every service has to start somewhere but if I join and only see uninteresting stuff, I probably won’t stick around long enough for you to follow me, etc. Niche services have that bootstrapping problem where they need early users but also don’t grow if their primary adopters are people who were banned elsewhere (e.g. Gab) or are very tightly ideological (Truth Social has a whole political movement pushing it but is still failing to catch on because even most Republicans don’t want shouting 100% of the time).
Discovery is a challenge for sure. I just wonder how far a service could get with an entirely user-driven discovery, follows, search, etc.
Platforms get into the business of censorship when they attempt to currate content (handpicked or algorithmic). Engagement is obviously much lower if you aren't running an algorithm designed to hook everyone on doom scrolling, but plenty of people still happily use an RSS reader and just go away when their list of new posts is empty.
But where did those people go away to? My memory is that we moved from web rings and blog rolls to social media sites which increasingly made certain that you’d never lack for new content. Even if you’re not doomscrolling, this feels like humanity’s equivalent to moths chasing the brightest light around.
That's my recollection as well, and I take the same lesson from it with regards to human nature.
There is still a comparatively small bit active community of webrings, blog rolls, etc today. What I'm less certain of is whether the driver really consumers chasing the brightest light or platforms taking advantage of basic psych tricks to drive addictive behavior (or both).
I’d definitely say both. The social networks combined easier / more polished experiences to get a lot of people over but then they really ramped up the social tricks to get people to stay longer and look at more ads.
Sure, but you may never have found yourself on Twitter to begin with if it was full of neo Nazis. It’s like showing up to an important meeting in the wrong attire - how you present matters.
The issue isn’t hiding it away - be it by user or other - it’s that it hampers growth in general when you’re all of a sudden the platform of the deranged. It’s fair to question whether it’s seeing actual use outside of those communities.
(It might be telling that we’ve spent this many comments discussing it rather than pointing out e.g GNOME/Blender/etc use it - it’s not like it’s all bad)
By censoring?
You are the second person to imply that OP was saying we need censoring, when the comment could be read very differently.
We can do better than jumping to that conclusion. ;P
Peertube is a software, not a service. If you find hateful content, it's not because of peertube, it's because whoever is hosting it (and how you got there)
I’m not gonna argue with that. But I’m not going to use the software unless it hosts something I’m interested in.
they're simply pointing out that the Peertube (and the Fediverse in general) needs to avoid being the dredges of the internet.
I don't think that's quite right. It just needs to make sure there's plenty available in addition to the dredges of the internet. Sometimes the dredges are useful to be able to sift through, but that can't be the only thing on offer and ideally users would be able to filter that stuff out when it isn't wanted.
I would agree with this take in general, yes. We are more or less saying the same thing though I appreciate the nuance injection. :)
And how would PeerTube avoid that, without actively censoring particular content? Ask nicely? Pray? Hope?
That's impossible. When you let people host their own content some Nazis will host Nazi content, and there's nothing you can do about it because you are not the one hosting it. I guess we should ban HTTP so there can't be Nazi websites.
All that stuff and worse is on Youtube too, and probably in higher quantity. It doesn't get banned - not reliably. The algorithm is just good at hiding it from you.
Youtube is really good at surfacing videos you want to see. Peertube isn't. That's why you see stuff you hate, not because of censorship or the lack of it.
Maybe, I don’t know, I don’t go looking for that stuff. Most of the stuff I watch there is video games, retro tech or hiking. I was kinda hoping for some recommendations for interesting stuff on peertube.
Especially retro tech, I think a lot of it is fan funded (I do fund some myself). It's probably not a ton of money you get from YouTube unless you're Adrian Black.
Niche youtubers you already support, but especially retro tech, are probably prime candidates for putting their stuff on Peertube too.
Really depends on which servers you follow.
YouTube (and other mainstream providers) solves user stories. The user story is "I want to find and watch interesting videos" and they nail it.
You miss another user story: IT department wants to self host a video distribution platform on their intranet and users need to embed video in intranet CMS (blogs, wikis, kb, etc.) and they will watch those videos at home, at the office and in between places.
Thinking audience and monetization, is basically thinking "youtube clone", and that narrows outlooks on what peertube brings to the table.
The user story for this, judging by their homepage (https://joinpeertube.org), seems to be "I want a boring lecture on how bad Big Tech is"?
Just pick a different paragraph then:
What is PeerTube?
PeerTube allows you to create your own video platform, in complete independence.You miss another user story: IT department wants to self host a video distribution platform on their intranet and users need to embed video in intranet CMS (blogs, wikis, kb, etc.) and they will watch those videos at home, at the office and in between places.
It's not missed, that story doesn't exist.
In any place where IT can even think about self hosting video they likely control the user's entire tech stack and don't need a super flexible player, they can just use a video tag...
On the other hand a company like this is more likely to use a SaaS product because they would have done a cost benefit analysis and figured spinning up a server and allocating bandwidth which could include significant network stack upgrades would cost far too much money to self host video.
Also it's free to stick the video on YouTube as an unisted video and embed the player... There is also other platforms that can be paid for the exact same service...
> You miss another user story: IT department wants to self host a video distribution platform on their intranet and users need to embed video in intranet CMS (blogs, wikis, kb, etc.) and they will watch those videos at home, at the office and in between places.
It's not missed, that story doesn't exist.
Sure it does. We have been discussing it for weeks with colleagues and bed testing it. Next step is to consider using v5 or v6.
In any place where IT can even think about self hosting video they likely control the user's entire tech stack and don't need a super flexible player, they can just use a video tag...
I had written a longer comment but if you equate slapping an mp4 URL in a video tag with what peertube brings then I frankly don't see the point. Not sure what controlling the user's entire tech stack even means then.
On the other hand a company like this is more likely to use a SaaS product because they would have done a cost benefit analysis and figured spinning up a server and allocating bandwidth which could include significant network stack upgrades would cost far too much money to self host video.
Pretty sure peertube and its variable bitrate and resolution will use less bandwidth than a user's original mp4 file in a video tag would but okay.
edit:
Also it's free to stick the video on YouTube as an unisted video and embed the player...
Yeah, right. What can go wrong uh...
Not sure what controlling the user's entire tech stack even means then.
Hardware and software they are running as well as bandwidth available to them both at home offices as well as on site offices.
So yes just directly serving whatever bitrate video would be equivalent to YouTube 1080p internally as the only option is just fine since even if it's less bandwidth I don't think any of my users would want to be watching 360p video.
And at the same time I don't need to allocate too much bandwidth for on my own server that since I can easily offload that to a CDN.
If I need to serve a large repository of videos I wouldn't self host, I would pay a SaaS since storage costs alone would be absurd, having to then also store not only the high bitrate masters but also every intermediate format...
> Also it's free to stick the video on YouTube as an unisted video and embed the player... Yeah, right. What can go wrong uh...
Naturally a lot, but for a company that won't pay the actually low rates a SaaS provider charges for this, this would work just fine... Also why I mentioned that there are SaaS providers that do offer that which is a little more reliable. I believe one if them is the new up and coming one called Microsoft that most companies already have some sort of business agreement with.
I get so tired of hearing about tech stacks. Tech stack discussions are 90% developers spinning their wheels and 10% money. Its really closer to 80/20, but most developers cannot get out of their own heads enough to reach a 20% discussion about money and business expenses.
In this instance tech stack has nothing to do with developers but rather what software and hardware is deployed to end users.
An example:
HP ProBook + Win 11 + Microsoft 365 each allocated x amount of bandwidth allowed to burst to Y amount
It can get significantly more in depth than that and it's 90% cost driven unlike choosing which DB you will be using as a developer...
In the current scenario with companies cost-cutting, I would say money is 30% or 40%.
At some point, someone literate enough to understand how bad Big Tech is but still promoting Big Tech should be face it.
It is like smoking. People say "I know that smoking kill, I don’t want to be reminded all the time".
Well, as long as you are polluting and killing innocents by smoking in their vicinity, you are the asshole. You don’t seem to understand so people keep telling you (and, guess what, in the case of Peertube, they even tell you in a friendly way with cute mascots.)
Comparing using Youtube to smoking is why I can never take these conversations seriously.
And yet the comparison is apt. Both provide ephemeral positive signals to the brain at a cost that is detrimental to individuals' or society's health (not even talking about environment, which is a part of society's health).
"I want to find something to do other than smoking. I find I smoke the most when I"m bored."
"Have you considered attending this lecture about the dangers of smoking?"
Who says Peertube needs to take off to be good? I like, prefer, and use the fediverse in its current state personally.
It's frustrating how people only take the capitalist / startup founder point of view when evaluating open source. It's like people can't grasp the idea that somebody could be pursuing a project without having the greatest possible user base / profit as their primary goal.
You hit the nail on the head. Hacker News ironically tends to be pretty hostile towards open-source.
Offering free and open alternatives is often met with the criticism of "this will never take off and it's not really an alternative because it doesn't do what the multi-billion dollar corporate competitor does to a tee."
If you dig deep enough, you'll see that "open-source" is actually the preferred term for HN because it is business-friendly: I can use this open-source, depolitized piece of code to make money and not give any to anyone. It's why the term "open source" exists when "Libre" also defines it, but as an anti-business sound to it.
You hit the nail on the head. Hacker News ironically tends to be pretty hostile towards open-source.
It's actually much better than it used to be. Since it's roots are in startup culture, there has always been an under-current favoring capitalistic stances. Those currents have weakened over time though. At one point things like dark patterns for user engagement were given a more neutral response than you would see nowadays.
It would have been highly amusing if HN had been around when Linus launched Linux and we could go back and read commentary from all the pragmatists about what a huge waste of time and effort it was across the whole spectrum of casual dismissal to a sense of outrage that anyone would have the hubris to take on major companies already providing far superior platforms.
Hackernews really does seem to be heavily capitalist, and anti-opensource when it comes to the comments section at least.
Who says Peertube needs to take off to be good?
The fact that it's a video-watching site and that means it needs people to upload videos onto it.
>Who says Peertube needs to take off to be good?
The fact that it's a video-watching site and that means it needs people to upload videos onto it.
It's not a video watching Website. It's a video serving platform in the fediverse. You can use it to host videos independently. It's not necessarily meant as a platform with a single entry point for users to find any kind of video like YouTube. It's more comparable to WordPress maybe
You realize this can be run by individuals and groups with their own videos that aren't actually looking for third party uploads.
On one side, I want to say "well, I would like them to kill YouTube, and have all our videos through federation"
Oh the other side, I miss the era of low volume content of passionate people. I didn't live such an era for the internet, but I did for smartphones. Back in 2009, you didn't need "have 25 people test your app" requirements, because people pushing apps cared about their apps. You didn't need to go through a dozen of apps before finding one with a usable amount of ads. Heck, runtime permissions weren't required because developers were reasonable in their usage of permissions
I'm not much a fan of videos, so I don't really know whether the same happened with youtube. But the way I consume the few youtube videos I watch is just to "follow" people [1], there is way too much meaningless content in youtube to even glimpse at what there is, and those algorithms really don't favor high-quality content, just baiting ones. So I feel the fediverse wouldn't have to grow much for me to replace YouTube.
[1] I also look at tournesol.app recommendations, but they are /waay/ too oriented towards their very own microcosm, and even though I'd like to contribute it takes quite a lot of time. That being said, I recommend taking a look at tournesol.app because there is real democracy research behind it
Who says Peertube needs to take off to be good?
All those who don't remember we are in Eternal September.
Taking control of your digital life will always be unappealing because it means you have to do the drudge work. There is no possible escape from massive corporations.
That’s not true. A nonprofit/coop could in theory run single peertube instance.
Then you're beholden to it, and it will not be as lenient as Google is in some legal grey areas, because it cannot afford any legal liability.
For example, it would ban Louis Rossmann after just one cease-and-desist from Apple, because it couldn't afford to withstand a SLAPP lawsuit from Apple. (A SLAPP lawsuit is when you sue someone who hasn't done anything wrong, because you're a big company who can afford to bankrupt them with legal fees)
It's totally viable to create an entity in a jurisdiction where lawsuits are not automatically ruinous and stick to your principles.
On top of that, a small entity would not be as lenient about Google in terms of customer support or taking advantage of your personal data.
Ah yes. Let me just register a public Peertube instance in checks notes Malaysia.
Peertube takes under twenty minutes to set up. It's really, really not hard.
And where will you set it up?
And what will you do when that company sends you a letter saying illegal stuff came from your server?
It's quite sad that Peertube is not on Sandstorm [1], where it becomes a one click install.
Yep, efforts to replace Youtube (and the rest of BigTech) should be spend on building better search and cataloging of videos across all the Web instead of focusing all effort on one specific hosting technology that nobody uses. I'd be much more inclined to use a service or software that improves on Youtube by including other sources of videos, then one that tries to replace Youtube with their own set of (drastically inferior) videos.
Miro[1] tried that a long while ago, but I haven't really seen much else going that direction since then.
Okay but what service exists that doesn't exhibit the same problems as youtube, ie the necessity of hyper-growth to satisfy investors, ads everywhere, total surveillance of its users ? Because a search engine that indexes only services like that won't really solve the problem _if_ the problem is to respect users' and community's freedom and privacy.
It's doesn't really matter what the service is doing when you aren't using the service in the first place. Right now I can use `yt-dlp`, download videos from Youtube and watch them in a video player of my choice. I never have to interact with the Youtube platform directly for this, it just acts as dumb server that hosts `.mp4` files. Same is true for a lot of other services.
The missing part is a good way to discover those videos in the first place. Subscriptions and recommendations are not something your average Web browser or search engine provides, yet are really important for discovering content. That's the kind of features I'd like to see implemented in a service independent manner. RSS went that direction, but not far enough, as it generally depend on the service itself to provide that information, instead generating it automatically from information found via webscraping.
You don't care about most users, and you don't care about creators, that's alright, but please don't behave as if they didn't matter. You are not representative of useful population if you use yt-dlp to bypass issues. It's nice that you can do it, but it's a shitty situation that you have to do it to evade pervasive surveillance and the madness capitalism brings us into.
YouTube doesn't want you to see their videos outside YouTube. They let you do it at the moment because it's more profitable this way, but you'll always be fighting against them. Why not propel a platform you don't have to fight against ? One that serves your needs because it is a digital commons ? yt-dlp and any other means of accessing content can be built with the platform instead of against.
You behave as if you were totally independent from platforms, but it's wrong: as a user you depend on them. You depend on developers maintaining it and making it better, on admins running it, on business people allowing you to freeride. It doesn't make sense to live in a society where we are adversaries by default, it's such a waste of time and energy.
Why not propel a platform you don't have to fight against?
That does not exist and fundamentally can't exist. A platform is by definition a thing I have no control over. Somebody else runs the thing and they can do with it as they please. And even if a platform is nice to use today, it sooner or later will get enshittified.
The only actual solution is to move as much data to the client and let them decide how to handle it. Especially when it comes to metadata, that shouldn't be that difficult. There is no reason why something like channel subscription can't be handled locally.
Youtube could disappear or, more realistically, become heavily censored (internally or externally) at any time for a variety of reasons. The true value of this project and other federated or fully distributed and open source alternatives is to have a freedom friendly alternative should the need present itself.
Most end users don’t care about the “what if?” They care about the right now. What does this offer today?
Maybe I’m being unfair and this isn’t targeted at end users but professionals. Is that the case? Then the landing page makes a lot more sense.
This app is pointed at the people who do care, and not to end users, end users aren't running servers or video platforms.
I think Peertube has a bit of a benefit here in that if they can get the SEO right folks don't really need to use the federation guff to find videos, they should just be able to find them via a regular old search engine
I'm not sure I agree on the content being hidden in a dark corner, there's a fair few examples of instances and content on the homepage. It'd be nice if the "Discover more" button showed more examples rather than dumping you into a search engine but it's not terrible.
The regular old search engine controlled by a company that would lose billions if Peertube took off?
No, it's true that YouTube's advantage is the same as Spotify's advantage: Discovery. It has an actually damn good recommendation engine. It fairly regularly shows me videos with less than 10000 views that are spot on. I'd love to use Peertube over Youtube, but I have to actually know of something cool on Peertube first, and finding it by searching is pretty hopeless.
I said a regular old search engine, not the. There's more than one search engine.
As for the implication that Google may boost YouTube or deboost Peertube in search results, good news! There's already a lawsuit in progress there with Rumble, so hopefully we'll see if they are doing that at some point in the (relatively speaking for this kind of thing) near future :)
https://casetext.com/case/rumble-inc-v-google-llc-5
Latest update I could find on this:
https://twitter.com/chrispavlovski/status/172704434443016627...
Also, switching costs are high when big tech has the first mover advantage. The Digital Markets Act might stir things up. Meta being designated as gatekeepers are the only reason they're considering connecting Threads to the fediverse.
Imagine if YouTube was a PeerTube compatible instance in the fediverse that displayed videos from other PeerTube instances. We wouldn't have to "switch platforms".
The interoperability that Doctorow preaches needs to be implemented by law. Or else the status quo will remain.
They never say they want to replace YouTube, they just want to be there as an alternative for nerds
The story on peertubes site isn't directed at the "i want to find and watch interesting video" crowd, it's for the "i want to run a site where people can watch videos, but i hate big monopolies" crowd
I think it's possible to use peertube to create a service that does what you describe.
Maybe the way forward is peertube provides the technology, and someone else focuses on how best to use that technology to fulfil that user story.
Any volunteer?
It's a short analysis, youtube is centralized and acts as a hub, it's amazing to feel you have access to everything but it quickly devolves into mediocre content.
There's good content on peertube, surely not as much, but this era is overcooked with too much content, it's nice to have less.
My main issue is how to get a large view of what is available because you end up on isolated islands and you're never sure what is there.
I still cannot grasp how supposedly tech literate HN users can't seem to understand the purpose of PeerTube.
Do you have a company and do you want to self host your promotional videos? Make a PeerTube instance and embed them in your website.
Do you have a conference and want to self host the recordings? Same
Do you have an institution of any kind and want to self host the video material? Same.
Nowhere it's touted as a rival to youtube in the popularity sense, just like you wouldn't call WordPress a rival to Twitter.
And before the objections come: yes you can self host videos already, but which platforms employ the power of the torrent protocol to distribute bandwidth so you can run with minimal costs?
> but which platforms employ the power of the torrent protocol to distribute bandwidth so you can run with minimal costs?
If TFA is to be believed, not PeerTube. ;P
> We needed to settle a technical debt : v6 removes support for WebTorrent to focus on HLS. Both are technical bricks used to get peer-to-peer streaming in web browsers, but HLS is more fitted to what we are doing (and plan to do) with PeerTube
I did some testing of peertube a little over a year ago, and in practice you never used the webtorrent stuff anyway.
The webtorrent always had a static http seed which is how videos played fast, but that web seed was usually more than capable of serving all the traffic. More so, it _must_ be capable of doing so because not all your clients will be able to support webtorrent effectively.
In order to use a webtorrent, you needed someone else to be watching the same exact video as you at the same time, talk to the tracker, create a p2p connection, negotiate chunks and hope the other side has those chunks.
This just never happened. Even when I tried to force ideal scenarios it was just too slow to be usable.
I did some similar experiments with IPFS and results where much better but got worse every time I revisited the tests in the months after. Then protocol-labs completely scrapped all the libraries I was using and it doesn't work at all.
At the point I'm pretty uncertain if a p2p web browser video app can exist and be usable enough to have people actually want to use it.
At the point I'm pretty uncertain if a p2p web browser video app can exist and be usable enough to have people actually want to use it.
People really need to give up on the idea that the browser is a good foundation for robust p2p protocols. There's too many restrictions and the way users conventionally interact with web pages means that running instances of the client tend to be very ephemeral, even if you design it as an SPA. WebRTC kinda works as a transport but it's still a misapplication of the technology.
What PeerTube should do now is have some kind of opt-in peering between instances to mirror each others videos and provide secondary sources to share the load, and then later build some kind of desktop client for user mirroring of content.
What PeerTube should do now is have some kind of opt-in peering between instances to mirror each others videos and provide secondary sources to share the load
They've had this bit for a while:
https://docs.joinpeertube.org/admin/following-instances#inst...
Oh that's fantastic! I hope this is supported on the new HLS-only streaming system.
HLS has been the default system for years, and yes, it works perfectly.
Aye! The way I used it when tinkering with Peertube (not making the content to make it worth keeping things going yet) was to set up secondary Peertube servers dedicated to this function to spread the load across multiple servers rather than use the p2p side of things - I wasn't sure of the GDPR implications of p2p
It worked really well at least at the small scale I was testing with :)
At the point I'm pretty uncertain if a p2p web browser video app can exist and be usable enough to have people actually want to use it.
It's not webbrowser based but live torrent streams like acestream work really very well. Unfortunatly acestream is pretty shady and closed-source and associated with malware distribution and illegal sport streaming - but it looks like a modified python bittornado implementation. Porting this to webtorrent would be interesting as it would at least allow to share the bandwidth for live-streams. I assume from a technical point of view this is not impossible.
I'm not aware of any open source implementations for the browser.
I would imagine the main use case to be as fallback in times of peak usage.
"Do you have a company and do you want to self host your promotional videos? Make a PeerTube instance and embed them in your website."
If I'm a small company, I'd use something like BunnyCDN to stream my videos, because no one else will watch them so the benefits of Peertube are not there.
If I'm a company and I'm large I should have no problems paying for something and again would use something like BunnyCDN.
It isn't easy to handle playing videos just with a CDN. You have to handle:
- the different formats because browsers support different stuff
- different qualities because you have to respect bandwidth visitors' bandwidth
- dynamic / adaptative quality
- CSP stuff
- nice UI for the video
etc.
At this point, PeerTube handles all this for you and it's easy to setup.
>It isn't easy to handle playing videos just with a CDN. You have to handle: [... various video delivery tasks...]
I think gp's "BunnyCDN" was shorthand for the video-as-a-service Bunny Stream: https://bunny.net/stream/
That "turnkey" managed service from Bunny would be more feature-complete for businesses than self-hosting PeerTube.
+1 I should have made that clearer, thank you for filling in my gaps.
Most CDNs have services for that but also that stuff matters much less if you’re not Netflix or YouTube. A basic HTML5 video tag has better UI than half of the complicated players, H.264 at phone and desktop sizes will cover almost everyone, and you’ll be fine for most businesses, conferences, etc. You need to have a LOT of traffic before the money you’re paying for bandwidth is greater than the cost of screwing around with complex infrastructure, and unless you’re streaming live events at high resolution having a CDN serving cached content is going to be faster than messing around with dynamic quality or trying to provide dozens of codec / resolution / quality permutations.
What is the incentive to self host when embedding YouTube videos is free and easy? Peer tube might make it easy but it adds a lot of maintenance complexity and server costs. Is the avoiding risk associated with YouTube over the video control worth that cost? For some maybe, but most I imagine not.
"Free (price) and easy" are not the values peertube is pushing forth, so it's not really relevant. Peertube makes it so you own your infrastructure, your data, and can do whatever you decide to do. You are not subject to foreign laws like with YouTube, you are not dependent on ads that are a problem by design, you are not beholden to ecocidal capitalism to display videos, you do not have to give more power to a company that employs children and refugees to build their AI. You are building a saner world just by not using YouTube. That's kinda hard to beat.
I mean, I personally deleted every video I put on YouTube once they wanted to start putting ads into my media to monetize them when I put them up for people to see for free.
Embedding youtube videos means tracking javascript for users, potentially ads for other companies showing up (if not now, later), it just doesn't seem sustainable.
Peertube seems not so good because of the overhead of federating, but the upside of course is anyone on other services like Mastodon can just add comments... no need for yet another 3rd party vendor with their own tracking javascript to handle comment threads... and people can trivially share your video on other federated services.
But it does have a lot of overhead if it's federating a lot.
What is the incentive to self host when embedding YouTube videos is free and easy?
If your videos include any of the verboten topics, then Youtube is not free and easy. Also they can change those topics at any time on a whim, and start retroactively removing/striking/banning. They'll drop a ban-hammer on you for multiple "violations". For example, imagine you wanted to discuss Covid 19 in any non-CDC approved way during 2020/2021? If you mentioned the Lab Leak Theory back when it was politically incorrect, or questioned the efficacy of cloth masks, your content was removed and you were given a strike. Your entire presence could be deleted, and by the time it turns out you were right (or at least possibly right), you're already disappeared.
(ftr I am sympathetic to YT because I do think there needs to be some moderation. It's a hard problem and I don't have all the answers)
How likely is it that my company's promotional videos will be federated to the extent that it'll actually reduce my bandwidth cost by a non-trivial amount? Will hosting videos like this increase reliability or reduce it? I genuinely don't know - i've never used it - but it would be far from my first pick for this kind of stuff.
but which platforms employ the power of the torrent protocol to distribute bandwidth so you can run with minimal costs?
You mean apart from S3? https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/API_GetObjec...
Amazon S3 does not support the BitTorrent protocol in AWS Regions launched after May 30, 2016.
oh.
beside that... using a hosted service doesn't quiet qualify as selfhosted either.
And thats also ignoring the elephant in the room called pricing. egress is pretty expensive on AWS, you'd at least want to use their video streaming service instead of s3 for a consumer website.
Yep, using s3 to serve video streams is one of the worst things you can do to yourself. If you've got the money and need, Cloudflare Stream is pretty damn good.
I think when you “cannot grasp how supposedly tech literate users can't seem to understand the purpose of” something, then sometimes you need to that as a signal and reevaluate.
Reevaluate what exactly? OPs not wrong.
The newer crowds are so entwined with current CDNs/Stacks that their instant dismissal to a released product is wrong.
It's common display that unless it's using some $cloud $lang its an instant dismissal of "You shouldn't do that, cloud/saas does this!"
Nowadays folk don't understand the requirements of on-perm. The cloud aids but isn't a it-all.
I don’t mean to disparage the project or argue against on-prem, I’ve built and hosted too many servers for that.
I meant to suggest maybe it’s useful, but more in a niche way.
For example the growth in popularity has been steady but incremental.
Nowhere it's touted as a rival to youtube in the popularity sense, just like you wouldn't call WordPress a rival to Twitter.
But I also wouldn't give it a name that, to the casual observer, makes it _sound_ like a rival to Twitter.
You mean a name like Tumblr
I think this speaks to the frustration that OP has which I also do, which is that the commentary has barely moved even a millimeter past first impressions.
It's not in the form of any kind of principled objection to the project of building out the fediverse, any technical issue with the choice of technologies, or any affirmative argument in favor of the status quo where all this activity being captured by increasingly enshittified platforms. The motivations and the objectives are play are wrestling with important questions, and the peanut gallery thinks that talking about the first impression of the name counts as participating in that conversation, which is depressing.
Just to add to the noise. Tech literacy doesn't always translate into product or business literacy.
Nor critical thinking ability.
Relatedly, Mastodon is a) too hard for me to sign up for and b) a failed experiment. That the former was being repeated by people here still makes me chuckle.
https://mastodon.social/auth/sign_up
here you go
I think because many of us are not big fans of fediverse. For all of those examples you provided I would rather just pay for an existing service rather than burn time running PeerTube. The fediverse projects are interesting and glad people enjoy them but they are still not made for the masses (which I suppose is to the liking of those that enjoy the fediverse.
they are still not made for the masses (which I suppose is to the liking of those that enjoy the fediverse)
I think more to the point, the fediverse is largely anti-commercial. You -can- advertise, but risk getting defederated if you do it in a way people disapprove of. And you -can- run a walled garden, but then what are you doing running a node that supports federation (this is one thing I'm still confused about with Threads, so I'm curious how that shakes out)?
But the reason the web exploded (at least in my mental model) was because it evolved to support commerce, which then got businesses using it and users following to buy things online which was a lot more convenient than buying things in brick and mortar stores. So if the fediverse remains anti-commercial (which is the only version I'm interested in) then it will probably never get the kind of money that Web 1/2/3 has, since every evolution has been funded by commerce, so it will probably always stay niche.
There are also legitimate usability challenges, too, though. I expect those will be solved eventually, but not soon since there's no money in it and money has always been an accelerator of technical development to the point people assume tech is fast because they're so used to the massive amounts of money being poured into tech. Even when they are solved, though, I still expect the fediverse to remain niche due to the lack of commercial opportunity (and I say that as a big fan of the fediverse - as you suppose, I think it's actually to its benefit that it to some extent undoes the Eternal September).
Mastodon is called an alternative to Twitter.
And?
Nowhere it's touted as a rival to youtube in the popularity sense, just like you wouldn't call WordPress a rival to Twitter.
... the first image on the article linked here shows a monster called "Videorapter" with YouTube, Vimeo and Twitch logos, and calls for donations to "help push back Videoraptor"?
It doesn't help that their name heavily implies it is a P2P YouTube replacement.
It also doesn't help that, at least outside HN, every thread I see complaining about YouTube has commenters telling everyone to switch to PeerTube.
but which platforms employ the power of the torrent protocol to distribute bandwidth
Don't visitors need to watch the same videos at the same time for this benefit to materialize?
If so, it seems unlikely for the examples you mention (promo videos, conference recordings) and so I don't know that that is an effective selling point.
It's because HN folks know that keeping a service running takes time and effort, and they can't believe that this is somehow a solved problem.
Do you have a company and do you want to self host your promotional videos? Make a PeerTube instance and embed them in your website.
That video is likely to end up blocked by corporate users. If I'm a company I don't want to have my audience of potential customers looking things up on their lunch break reduced.
Peertube is something I've been meaning to use, so I'm interested but don't know much about it.
The post says they dropped webtorrent in favor of HLS. Does this mean Peertube is no longer peer-to-peer?
HLS is a codec or container format or something, whereas webtorrent sounds like a method to have peers stream video data to each other such that the server doesn't easily bog down under traffic spikes. That seemed like a fundamental advantage of Peertube over other platforms and I thought that's why the name was chosen. Am I misreading it or has this truly been dropped now?
The post says HLS is also a brick in peer-to-peer streaming but.. it's not? I've used it, it's a container format that encapsulates video data, something like MP4 or MKV, not something that sets up peering sessions. HLS data would rather be something that webtorrent could be gossiping, if webtorrent weren't removed.
This is very confusing to me too. WebTorrents are just torrents over WebRTC Data stream, I guess by "P2P HLS" they mean sending HLS over either WebRTC Data or Video stream?
But if you stream from the server, it still would still not be p2p. SO either they implemented their own custom p2p solution, where the peers stream HLS to other peers, or they abandoned p2p.
edit: the main FAQ on the website still clearly says, it is p2p. But now I am curious if they really implemented their own p2p solution, or if this is outdated.
https://joinpeertube.org/en_US#what-are-the-main-advantages-...
"WebTorrent is a wonderful library that allowed PeerTube to be created five years ago. But due to many limitations of the library we decided to implement and default to another P2P protocol used in coordination with HLS. This new HLS player works very well, and does not have all the limitations of the WebTorrent player. It also allowed us to implement live streaming in PeerTube."
Thanks, now I am really curious to try that out and see how it works under the hood. What I need, would also be the option to ask users first, if they want to upload as well. People on a mobile connection should be able to opt out. (Quick search did not reveal this).
You can find this option in "My Settings", in the left menu.
"Help share videos being played"
Oh, that was easy. Thx.
This is what they use https://github.com/chocobozzz/p2p-media-loader forked from novage a while back. Nice explanation with diagrams at the link.
It has worked surprisingly well in my testing during livestreams when you can count on multiple simultaneous viewers.
Their source code is on Github, though took a min to find.
I'm still going through it, but I suspect so far they are transcoding via HLS and then streaming it out over the p2p connection.
The p2p connetion itself is interesting again, I suspect a regular websocket that is sitting on their express server.. but will dig some more. Was always curious .
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/client/s...
Hi!
There is a page on official documentation (docs.joinpeertube.org) (which needs to be updated to reflect the removal of WebTorrent but is still relevant on hls parts).
Here is the one concerning us:
" - If using the HLS player (depending on the admin transcoding configuration):
- The player loads the HLS playlist using hls.js from the origin server
- PeerTube provides a custom loader to hls.js that downloads segments from HTTP but also from P2P via WebRTC
- Segments are loaded by HTTP from the origin server + servers that mirrored the video and by WebRTC from other web browsers that are watching the video. They are used by hls.js to stream them into the <video> HTML element"Am I right in my understanding that sharing the load only happens for people viewing the same video?
Could there be a benefit to P2P distribution of bandwidth that isn't just at the video level, but perhaps at the instance level, where they choose to federate with other instances that also agree to share the P2P load? Or rather, to share the P2P wealth?
That's the p2n layer that already exists in PeerTube through the redundancy feature in federation.
Federated instances that enable redundancy copy all resolutions of a video that meet chosen criteria of popularity. When a user views the video on PeerTube, their browser grabs the sections of the video from any of the PeerTube instances that have a copy, creating an ad-hoc distributed CDN. This covers the mid-level of popularity and keeps the hosting instance from getting slammed on bandwidth.
If something goes viral, or during livestreams which are by nature simultaneous, then the p2p in the browser between viewers kicks in and reduces load on the peering servers even more.
That's great! And along the lines of what I was hoping might be true. A question though: It sounds like you are saying various instances can help each other on a per-video basis, for videos above a popularity threshold.
But what about the prospects of distributing the load that isn't localized to a particular video? As in, users do some peer to peer load distribution of any and all videos above the threshold, regardless of whether it's the one they are watching?
WebRTC isn't great for non-realtime streams where quality is much more important than latency. I hope p2p WebTransport gets standardised soon.
I assume they are using data channels for the transfer, not the webrtc a/v streams.
also from P2P via WebRTC
Does this mean the list of IP addresses of people currently watching a video is necessarily public?
PeerTube is distributed streaming, not distributed hosting. The master copy is hosted on some web site, yours or someone else's. If enough people are watching, a peer to peer streaming distribution system kicks in to provide more bandwidth. It's just a way to have many viewers without needing huge hosting bandwidth.
Almost nobody uses PeerTube. Here's the "Trending" list on Hardlimit.[1] 217 views of the top video. A video I posted two days ago to illustrate a bug report is in 9th position, with 14 views. This is pathetic.
Maybe if they got Wordpress integration, so Wordpress sites could serve videos via Peertube, it might take off. And get more sites to support auto-embedding of PeerTube videos, so that just providing a link produces a playable video.
no need to be so dismissive. my instance of peertube doesn't even show up on that indexer you linked. lots of people who make different kinds of fediverse indexers end up excluding a ton of instances by accident or on purpose.
GP takes the time to upload his videos to PeerTube, which I'd say makes him less dismissive than pretty much everyone.
We needed to settle a technical debt : v6 removes support for WebTorrent to focus on HLS. Both are technical bricks used to get peer-to-peer streaming in web browsers, but HLS is more fitted to what we are doing (and plan to do) with PeerTube
My read is there are trying to do a distributed CDN with peered(federated) instances. They already did that on past, the instances will stream from other peertube servers that had the same content.
Truly inspiring work from Framasoft! I just hope for more adoption. I don't know if anyone remembers the days of Firefox 2 and 3 and the days of "community marketing" but I think something like that could be a worthwhile project here. I would love, for instance, if significant creators could do a Framasoft February each year where they commit to hosting some portion of videos of their choice on Peertube.
Well, how reliable is peertube? Say I would do a ShowHN, that gets traction and a HN hug of death. In theory peertube could take the load for the videos without having to rely on youtube - but has anyone done this succesful in reality?
They talk about stress-testing of livestreaming towards the end of the article. A quick search shows that they've done several of them for videos as well. The peer-to-peer structure really protects them from sudden scale in demand.
"The peer-to-peer structure really protects them from sudden scale in demand."
In theory, for sure. But in reality the p2p part might not work for lots of users for various reasons (firewall etc.) so then the server gets all the load and chokes. At least that has be my experience when experimenting with webRTC.
"Last year, thanks to French indie journalist David Dufresne’s Au Poste ! livestream show and his hoster Octopuce, we got a livestream stress test with more than 400 simultaneous viewers "
And 400 is not a very big number, if one has ambitious goals. But it is a good start.
Indeed it's not a big number, but you don't need to have a lot of viewers to be in the top 1% of twitch : https://twitter.com/zachbussey/status/1367868296473813001
So, what if peertube was a good answer to 99% cases ?
Moreover, could we zoom out and ask what's at stake with this kind of question? What does a road map from Peertube in its present day towards twitch or YouTube level adoption look like, how long would that take?
I ask because that's the kind of runway where there's time to continue to work out questions like this, and they aren't at present make or break, and so far as I can tell there's no reason to believe issues about firewalls pose an issue that's any more or less difficult than the technical challenges they've already solved.
"there's no reason to believe issues about firewalls pose an issue that's any more or less difficult than the technical challenges they've already solved."
Certainly. I am 100% certain that the whole concept is doable.
Oh, then those people should certainly use peertube. But then personally I would like to have a safe fallback, but this creates overhead.
Framasoft February sounds like a great idea! I would definitely ask my favorite content providers to participate.
Well my thinking is that you can hardly think of an easier, lower-stakes ask than asking creators to voluntarily agree that something from their back catalog gets hosted and a new place.
And it allows old content to do new work, breathing life into a new platform.
I love the idea of this project. But unfortunately there are economic reasons that make PeerTube unlikely to win. It's not even about the cost of video hosting, it would apply even if hosting was free.
Imagine yourself as a popular creator. You can put up your videos on an ad-free platform where users can watch them without distractions and be happy. Or you can put them on an ad-supported platform and get a cut of the sweet ad money. As your videos become more popular, the temptation to go for (2) will become stronger. So the free platform will experience a drain of the most popular content, and viewers will flock away accordingly too.
The same argument applies more generally to free vs commercial platforms. It's basically the reason why the internet sucks so much today. If there's a way to square this circle, I don't know it.
To combat your pessimism - I would point to podcasts. In general, these were distributed on free platforms. The content became profitable through sponsorships. That is, the content creator does a deal directly with a brand to include a spot within the content read out by the presenter.
So, there is a clear and well-trodden path to monetization for content creators even on free distribution platforms. Of course, as anyone who watches enough YouTube knows content creators double-dip on commercial platforms by including sponsorships and getting a cut of AdSense - so there is still a major advantage to also publishing on YouTube. But for the sponsorship, the value of the deal is related to overall reach across all platforms. That might give incentive for creators to release on multiple platforms, as long as the main commercial platform doesn't enforce exclusivity.
I don't have data about how common various podcast monetizing techniques are, but my impression is that it's quite common for the podcast hosting provider to inject ads into the audio file at download time, enabling them to target ads based on the downloader's IP address or whatever other information they have about the downloader.
inject ads into the audio file at download time, enabling them to target ads based on the downloader's IP address
I've only had this happen once. The experience was so irritating that I probably won't ever listen to a podcast that does this. It just cut off without notice and suddenly a German ad played during an English-speaking podcast. (I get why they do it, but I hate it. In that particular case, I actually signed up for their ad-free premium thing because I really want to listen to it and it's actually reasonably priced.)
I don't have stats either, but working for a company that offers the shuffles for that kind of monetization for streaming media (jitm packaging and remix, drm, personalized ads, live2vod) and enthusiastic Podcast listener I tend to believe quite the opposite. (Jit ad insertion is popular in video (ie FAST) but we barely ever sell this to audio shops)
Dominant (tech) podcasts seem to favour focus on production, not distribution. Spotify went in guns ablaze and mostly failed. Personally targeting outside walled gardens often misses basic stuff like ads in a matching language. Content catalogue is billboard-irrelevant class. Nothing remotely near classic product placement or creator curated ads.
Of course, as anyone who watches enough YouTube knows content creators double-dip on commercial platforms by including sponsorships and getting a cut of AdSense - so there is still a major advantage to also publishing on YouTube.
Maybe add for the time being. I mean yes sure some creators double dip - they probably need the money. For the moment YouTube might allow that, but them being the platform, they might change the rules any time. It your viewers aren't yours, and the ads aren't either, you're not in a great position to profit from distribution ofyour content.
It doesn't have to be ad-free, just someone has to have a nice interface and set up the advertisement/payments platform. There s clearly a market for advertising outside google: all those companies that sponsor videos. In fact it seems youtubers make more money from that than they make from google
So someone has to make the effort.
You can't seriously put out your 1-minute theory that goes against more than ample evidence to say this is going to happen to peertube.
The premise itself is wrong: the conditions of "winning" are not the same, to the point that it's not even useful to use that word. The metric of success for Peertube, and Framasoft, is how free the society and its communities are. Seeing the trend of the fediverse and of Libre softwares being used more and more tells me they are on a very good trajectory.
Is it possible to see someone hosting this, as an example?
My test server you can reach at https://troll.tv/ . It has very limited federation as I need the content to pass the play store when I release an update to the android client.
I'm listened briefly to some hard heavy metal.
Where is this physically hosted?
Switzerland, exoscale
https://diode.zone has been running many years. It was the first peertube instance I came across. Edit: https://tilvids.com/ is another
Here is the curated list from Frama: https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances that is used for the serach engine: https://sepiasearch.org/
A bit of topic.
I created a peertube client[1] for android a few years ago. I love peertube and I really believe in the project however the effort I have put into the client and the rewrite which I almost finished using jetpack/mvvm structure just doesn't seem to be worth it. I feel bad for abandoning it but I think I may have too.
Sad to hear, but totally understandable. I'm sure the official app will need lots of contributors when it comes out next year.
Is there an official app in the works? I wasn't aware. Do you have a link?
It was announced a few days ago at the Capitole du Libre festival in Toulouse, France. Framasoft is hiring a second developer to work on PeerTube (for now it is mostly the work of a single individual), and they will, among other numerous things, work on mobile apps and video/sound decoupling to allow for the podcast usage cited in another comment, for example.
https://fediversereport.com/framasofts-yearly-report/
Framasoft also announced that next year they will bet big on PeerTube, working on features such as better moderation tools, working on promoting the ecosystem more, and an official PeerTube mobile app.
And on another front of the mobile battle, podcasting 2.0 apps are increasingly supporting PeerTube video via the RSS feed.
You haven't explained why its not worth it.
Is it because there is no interest in Peertube, or because there is no demand for an Android version?
It looks like a chicken and egg situation. Is it an Android or IOS app for Peertube that will make Peertube popular, or is it Peertube popularity that will create demand for an Android app?
I think it is more the former than the latter. I can't judge your motives for abandoning it, but I think you should persist and go that last mile which is usually the hardest of all.
Removal of WebTorrent is sad, as it's still WIP in actual torrent clients (but those do move slow anyways, it's not WebTorrent's fault). So it was removed before it got a chance in an ecosystem that moves slow.
It also takes PeerTube instances further away from being able to P2P without too many extra steps other than a shared infohash (and DHT). Video re-upload conflicts with such immutable solutions, but that's more of a positive. (Did you know the Crazy Frog uploaded years ago was VERY recently silently replaced with a different cut? https://youtu.be/k85mRPqvMbE?t=75 vs. https://hobune.stream/videos/k85mRPqvMbE) Reuploads should be reuploads, old versions should be separate.
As a third order effect, it also makes it even more impossible to generate and find interoperable YouTube archives based on the same source. Archival and mirroring efforts all disjoint and duplicated.
but those do move slow anyways, it's not WebTorrent's fault
Given how complicated WebRTC is, I wouldn't put the blame on torrent clients either. libwebrtc by Google is the de-facto standard, and afaik you need to compile all of it (including video and audio codecs) even though WebTorrent only cares about data streams.
Even for Node.js, which should be an easy choice since webtorrent is written in JS, your choice is to either use wrtc (native addon that has to either be built from source or use a prebuilt binary - this is what webtorrent-hybrid uses - and this library hasn't seen an update in last 3 years) or electron (which bundles libwebrtc as part of Blink engine - afaik this is what webtorrent-desktop uses).
I wish there was a better web API for P2P traffic - sadly WebTransport is not meant for P2P use cases, i.e. doesn't punch firewalls etc. Then we could see some real improvements done to P2P ecosystem, instead of everyone wasting time on figuring out how to build, use and ship libwebrtc.
You have more choices then that for node.js
* https://github.com/shinyoshiaki/werift-webrtc
* https://github.com/murat-dogan/node-datachannel
If libwebrtc fits your needs you totally should use it! Alternatives have existed for years though
Those are absolutely amazing libraries, thanks for linking! I see that much has changed for the better in the past year.
Perhaps a fork is in order!?
Hi!
Concerning WebTorrent, this techno was not used as a default since a long time. It's bound to how it was hard to implement Live Streaming with it (available since v3).
OT and speaking of decentralization.
Does anyone understand why exactly we don't have a _decentralized search_ for torrents?
Torrent clients that provide search then lose the legal plausible deniability that they are not specifically creating software for breaking the law.
Besides torrent search websites and big uploaders make a lot of money from ads. Difficult to include ads in apps.
Difficult to include ads in apps.
lol what?
Let me restate. Difficult to include ads in apps, when multiple excellent open-source torrent clients exist.
Does it plan to use yggdrasil[0] on ipv6 side of things, or is that not even relevant?
Yggdrasil in the browser? Come on.
This instance has been upgraded to 6.0.0-rc.2 if you want to give it a try: https://framatube.org/videos/local (see About: https://framatube.org/about/instance)
Couldn't find one with stable v6.
Oh I love that RSS is not an obscure feature like in YT.
How do people rate the ease of installing and administrating PeerTube?
Is there a way to install PeerTube that is as easy as MediaCMS [0, 1] installation [2]?
I ask because I evaluated options for self-hosted video (basically YouTube replacements). PeerTube is more mature/popular than MediaCMS by far, by the looks of it. However, I really wanted "easy" and ended up landing with MediaCMS for now. I somewhat wonder about the project's potential longevity, but set that concern aside for lack of "better" options.
If PeerTube can be spun up (single server will do) just as easily, I'd love to learn if it's possible/done. I know this is a tech site, but I do not want to spend time administering and configuring stuff a lot that is outside the scope of my main activities. I want it to just work as much as possible, but self-hosted (bare metal okay).
I get that PeerTube is maybe much more, but any thoughts on taming (perceived or actual?) complexity related to hosting PeerTube would be most welcome. Thanks for any thoughts along these lines.
[0] https://mediacms.io
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25507204
[2] https://github.com/mediacms-io/mediacms/blob/main/docs/admins_docs.md#2-server-installationI was easily able to set up a PeerTube instance for mostly internal use among my friends with Docker. I don't remember how long it took, but I don't think I've encountered many issues. Adding login via our existing LDAP server was super easy, too.
We needed to settle a technical debt : v6 removes support for WebTorrent to focus on HLS (with WebRTC P2P). Both are technical bricks used to get peer-to-peer streaming in web browsers, but HLS is more fitted to what we are doing (and plan to do) with PeerTube
Sad to see WebTorrent support go. I'm a big believer in the idea of Torrent over WebRTC, and PeerTube seemed like a great use of the technology. It really solves the "this video is going viral and I'm being hugged to death" problem. I haven't heard much about P2P HLS... Hope to hear more.
IIRC from about 2005-2010 there were intense experiments as to using torrents for video streaming. But, again iirc, the results were that there was too much competition for the earlier blocks. This was because unlike conventional file sharing, streaming is linear and people abandon videos halfway. Ultimately the savings over conventional hosted streaming were small. And so Blizzard and Nine Inch Nails used it, but the video players didn't.
Do I misremember something, or has something substantially changed since then?
bittorrent is not a CPU hog. But peer-to-peer WebRTC video is a major hog that makes it a pain to share video with more than ~7 people. Is this also true for peertube?
I recommend giving this recent video a watch on PeerTube/Mastodon if you're interested!
I run my own peertube instance like I run my own mastodon instance.
Mastodon is cool, your private instance can just link up to any other instance and get all the data. If you search for something, your instance will proxy the search back to the originating server. The experience is only trivially more annoying than just using one of the big servers.
Peertube is not like that. Notionally it supports all the same features, but when all the details come together, it just doesn't work.
Say you have a private instance and you just want to browse videos. How do you find remote content? You can have your server 'follow' another, duplicating its timeline into yours... If the remote server allows it. As a user, you can simply follow any channel anywhere and it will populate into your server's local timeline.
But what about search? You have to use a third party search index, and it's opt-in. Or you can go to each remote instance you know of and search there directly.
Assuming you have a bunch of content coming into your server somehow, how do you find something to watch? You don't! Most of the filtering and searching is useless. Your individual user subscription feed is the only thing even remotely reliable.
As much as I want to love PeerTube, I really, really hate it. Discoverability is so bad that the whole platform is nearly unusable.
Realistically I'm sure that the best results you can get is just from signing up to the largest instance you can find. Which really defeats the entire point of it being distributed and federated.
It really doesn't matter how many videos exist on the service if no one can find them. PeerTube is going to have to put some serious effort into this problem or they're going to fade into irrelevancy in a few years.
It's now a long term, well paced project. I kinda admire these :) kudos
For some reason, the page's html header identifies the page as language "fr-FR", so Firefox helpfully offered to translate this page into English.
Still has the same problem as all these alternative social media networks and why they're not taking off: on one hand you've got YouTube/etc which works and has appealing content front-and-centre, and on the other you have technobabble like "federation" and "instances" while the actual content (if there is even any!) is relegated into some dark corner.
YouTube (and other mainstream providers) solves user stories. The user story is "I want to find and watch interesting videos" and they nail it.
The user story for this, judging by their homepage (https://joinpeertube.org), seems to be "I want a boring lecture on how bad Big Tech is"?
These services need to think in terms of the casual user if they want to actually take off and offer a viable alternative. Nobody is interested in a lecture against Big Tech and the intricacies of the client/server model and the concept of "instances" (or "platform" as they're called here) if they can go on YouTube.com and immediately start watching.