I don't understand the economics of this at all. Video distribution is bandwidth heavy. If you're running your own peer tube instance the server costs are surely going to outstrip any revenue you make from it. if users have to carry that load and seed your stuff they'll have to waste their own storage. What is the incentive for anyone to do this? Exacerbated by the fact that the entire thing mostly seems to attract people who get banned from anything else so the content isn't even going to attract advertisers.
The channel in this post has 20 YouTube subscribers and no more than a couple thousand total YouTube views.<p>The trending page on PeerTube shows a list of videos with at most a few dozen views.<p>Is PeerTube supremely unpopular (seems to have been launched several years ago: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube), or am I missing something? Does it really have an order of magnitude more Github stars (<a href="https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube</a>) than daily viewers?
One thing I really dislike about Fediverse services is that their landing pages are always about joining/signing up. For Twitter-like applications this might be ok. But for something like YouTube, I definitely want to browse the content a bit before signing up.
PeerTube does not have enough bandwidth to work.<p>Try PeerTube. Here's a cat video. Posted 1 week ago, 38 views, duration 10 seconds.<p><a href="https://peertube.tv/w/tsvCimhEaLSTZD16B3gqBQ" rel="nofollow">https://peertube.tv/w/tsvCimhEaLSTZD16B3gqBQ</a><p>Even as the only watcher, and with gigabit Internet both ways at my end, it stuttered, then stalled completely.<p>For short videos, you'd be better off putting them on a shared hosting site as .mp4 files.<p>Peer to peer video hosting is just not a good idea for bandwidth reasons.
If you want PeerTube to become popular, make it easier for people to upload videos. At the moment it's too confusing and complicated; no content creator cares what "instance" means and they never will. No one who creates an account and finds that "uploads are not allowed on this instance" or encounters some similar problem is going to waste any more time trying to use it. If you leave it the way it is now, it's always just gonna be by nerds for nerds. And more people are going to be enslaved by Big Brother who controls YouTube. So please make it accessible to normal people.
I was wondering who they were and why they were self-saboting. Then I saw that it's a channel with 20 subscribers on youtube with view numbers in the single digits for some videos. So somebody went from not being watched on youtube, to not being watched on peertube.<p>How did this even make it to the front page?
The submission links to 4:19 into the video, probably unintentionally?<p>Sadly peertube seems to have to buffer from the beginning to play from this position.
The primary motivation of most creators is to make money. What is PeerTube paying per view? 0$?<p>Why would any creator spend all that time and money making content to give away for free? Do you give away your daily work for free? They can easily use something like Patreon or one of the many pay-only tube sites if they're giving up on ads and asking for donations/subscriptions/etc.<p>I mean, I'm not against the idea, it just seems to fundamentally misunderstand why creators choose youtube. If Youtube paid $0/1000 views... the majority of the top 1000 creators would be gone overnight.
There is Lbry as an alternative to YouTube as well. It seems interesting. <a href="https://lbry.com/" rel="nofollow">https://lbry.com/</a>
Funny story : I tried going fullscreen at the exact moment when he's showing his YouTube metrics which he blurred for legal reasons. But I thought it was an issue with the player which wasn't able to download the video at a sufficient quality. So I was like "yeah, it's crap, I can't see sh*t; YouTube's better".
Before you think of how awful this site is, remember youtube in the beginning as well. This could be a great alternative, especially if they don't remove people without a good explanation, sell your personal info or try to sway an opinion.
What really interests me is, how I can host a PeerTube instance, without getting into all sorts of responsibility issues, like people uploading videos containing illegal stuff (upload filter laws). I would love to give my server something to do, but with the current law, I simply do not want to be responsible for what people upload and spread via my instance and my server. Does PeerTube offer me a way of reviewing videos before they can be found and a way of telling people, that they are responsible themselves and have that accepted by law? And how do other instance admins manage this? Does anyone here have that experience?
Why don't we just use BitTorrent for videos? Popcorn time works reasonably well and we don't need a social layer, there are already plenty of them. I d like to see everything that i like being seeded with care by its owners
Apart from the awesome technology, there is some great content in those instances. It's quite hard to discover genuine and exploratory DIY on youtube, small artists, etc.
If my favourite youtubers started posting exclusively on peer tube I wouldn't mind at all. One has outright stated he suspects he'll be cancelled at some point, and already dual uploads. And I check his instance fairly regularly.<p>To break it down further - it's not much of a deal breaker to go to "coolvideoguy.com" instead of searching "cool video guy" in the youtube search bar.
I love peertube and spend a lot of time these days watching videos on it, perhaps moreso than youtube now.<p>This video is not very good however, there's something not very stimulating to the imagination about moving from youtube yet still using shallow buzzwords like "content creator", "monetise", "open source".
Off topic, but the other day I switched to FreeTube (freetube.io) and it's been quite nice. It's not a comprehensive YouTube client (lacks true theming, plugins, etc.), it offers a lot of features that will be helpful for people who want to use YouTube without Google getting in the way.
I like these types of video websites, but a huge reason they will never beat YouTube is the age. YouTube has a huge abundance of content that spans pretty far back. When you have that much content its kinda hard to beat.
PeerTube, you need to remove view counts. They broadcast to new users how few people are at this party and how lame it is, let’s go back to that YouTube party.