Next.js Hacker News
PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform
183 points by doener 6 hours ago | 34 comments
  • CM30
    It's a promising system, and I'd probably use it over a non-federated video hosting system if I wanted to run a video hosting site of some kind.

    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.

    • WarmWash
      Creators get 60% of youtube's ad revenue from youtube.

      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 is actually manifests as is "I love taking without the requirement of giving".

      • zelphirkalt
        The matter of compensation or donation can be handled completely separately. Creators can be supported on other platforms like Liberapay, Patreon, Kofi, and many creators are supported that way.

        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.

      • dylan604
        Not really sure how people need to be explained this, but for whatever reason, this most basic of information is seemingly skipped over. Even if peertube wants to pay 65%, that's just a bigger percentage of nothing.
    • karmakurtisaani
      Lemmy is pretty ok actually. The lack of big user base is more of a feature than a bug.
      • organsnyder
        I've found the same with Mastadon. It has a pre-eternal-September feel to it.
      • al_borland
        Has it normalized? When I first tried Lemmy it was mostly communists talking about communism. Then after some Reddit drama it seemed to be a bunch of people complaining about Reddit.

        I generally like smaller sites, but those topics weren’t exactly engaging for me.

  • raphinou
    I am currently recording tutorial videos for an open source project. It's produced fully with Foss software (on Linux, obs, kdenlive) and about an open source project, so I wanted to host it with peertube (though YouTube might be used later on for its network effect, it was easier to publish with peertube as yt required an video of me and my ID). It's going fine until now. I don't host peertube myself though, I use an existing instance, and embed the videos in the website.

    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/

  • pocksuppet
    PeerTube has some interesting technology with the P2P sharing between users who watch at the same time. But with these kind of projects I think there are unfortunately social factors that impact their success as well as technical factors.

    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.

    • manusartifex123
      yeah video social media is way ahead with algorithms and content. I still think they need to exist and keep pushing for this idea
  • hungryhobbit
    Stupid question: when people inevitably use this for pirate content, and the feds try to shut the service down ... what's the plan?
    • paxys
      They can't shut down the service because there is no single service. They can go after individual servers, and that is fine. The admin is responsible for what happens on their server.
    • treyd
      The plan is the same as it always has been. It's no different than running an open FTP server.
    • dewey
      Someone is still hosting the content and paying for resources just like with every other service distributed or not so it doesn't really add anything new to the equation.
    • rpgbr
      The feds will go after the instance admin that is sharing pirate content.
  • GodelNumbering
    Youtube has been incredibly frustrating for many many reasons and is evidently evil in many axes now. We really need competition in video hosting.
    • WarmWash
      Then start loading ads.

      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!".

  • orphereus
    Does it have good content? I explored it a bit in the past, but was a bit underwhelmed with content I could find there.

    Edit: in the past

  • jesse_dot_id
    I like the idea of all of these federated services but why does the UX always feel like an afterthought when it is the most important factor for adoption?
    • cosmic_cheese
      Same reason why the Linux desktop often suffers on the UX/UX front: people naturally drawn to these projects tend to lean heavily technical, and highly technical circles have a bad habit of driving out less technical contributors through devaluation of their work and lack of agency within the project among other issues.

      That 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).

      • jollymonATX
        Maybe some devs in OSS are married to their horrid idea of how things should work?
      • StableAlkyne
        UX work is often also a lot heavier and more subjective than the plumbing.

        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.

  • matt_lo
    Random idea…

    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.

  • RobotToaster
    Last time I tried it the federation was whitelist based, that is you could only follow people on instances added by the admin of your instance. This made content discovery difficult.
  • Raed667
    It is unfortunate that in french « peer » reads as « pire » which translates to « worse-tube »
    • dewey
      It's developed by a french company, so that confusion can't be that critical.
    • gausswho
      Snarky lemma: In French, is the trend of things going worse to worse?
  • zuzululu
    is it bulletproof ? I don't think peertube has fixed that massive legal liability to the "seeders"

    same situation that bitorrent found itself in

  • thinkingtoilet
    My recent experience with PeerTube was to click on the OpenMW released video and the video didn't load. Is that a regular occurrence on PeerTube?
  • ekjhgkejhgk
    Does it allow streaming?