PeerTube v2

I really want to like peertube but I think its UX, at least where it stands now, is going to hold it back from ever challenging youtube.<p>I use youtube a lot, and for a huge range of topics. I don&#x27;t have any interest in creating an account on a niche-specific instance and I think the average user who doesn&#x27;t even understand what federalization does even less. However, I literally don&#x27;t even understand how to make an account on what, as far I can tell, is supposed to be the go-to instance - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;peertube.social" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;peertube.social</a>. If there&#x27;s no main platform where you can watch and discover general content then there&#x27;s nothing that you can point new users to.<p>As a developer, if you want to host a niche video site, then peertube looks great. As a user, if you want to move off of youtube then I don&#x27;t think this is how you&#x27;re going to do that.

The peer-to-peer storage and sharing of video files isn&#x27;t the hard part: it&#x27;s the ability to search for and discover content that makes YouTube compelling in my opinion. Are any of these p2p YouTube replacements presenting a compelling way to search&#x2F;discover content in a distributed way? Or if the search index is centralized, do any of them have a compelling model for staying funded without selling everyone&#x27;s search&#x2F;catalog information to data brokers?

I really like the idea behind these types of decentralized projects. However I want to mention that they rarely take off. And it&#x27;s usually not due to some technical or marketing related reason. The simple economic reason for the lack of their success is that centralized organization like YouTube can operate much more efficiently than a decentralized one like peertube. Some of the reasons are: Higher organizational efficiency (faster restructuring due to an explicit hierarchy), which allows them to quickly adapt to a changing environment. Benefiting from economies of scale (buying specialized hardware for video hosting in bulk). Being a for-profit organization provides them with a constant feedback loop whether they still meet consumer demands. On top of that a constant source of income allows them to have paid employees. Paid employees are (all year round) more motivated to continuously adapt the platform to changing consumer demands.

I setup a peertube and companion mastodon just about a year ago. I mostly used the peertube personally. A few weeks later I noticed some user was uploading movie rips so I disabled the user account in the barebones admin user interface and set a user data limit at 2 gigabytes, the server had tons of space and this seemed generous.<p>Fast foward EOM, what appeared to be the same user created an automated system to create a new user, upload 2GB and move to the next. Peertubes basic ui had no way to mass ban, set filters, nothing. I had a monster bill and just unplugged the whole thing because the users were coming from a wide range of ips.<p>While I hope that was an outlier, the UI still leaves a LOT to be desired, and slower instances are painful to use

Went on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;peertube.video&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;peertube.video&#x2F;</a> and immediately got a bunch of porn. Not really sure from a consumer aspect this is yet fully there from a UX perspective!<p>But the tech is really interesting and as a federated alternative I could see it doing really well. Best of luck to the team!

Does anyone know of a successful server-based peer-to-peer project other than TOR and cryptocurrencies? I&#x27;m all for breaking free of the stranglehold of centralized proprietary platforms, but it also seems to me that most of the open source projects that ever really succeed at competing against entrenched proprietary incombents are the ones where a centralized service is being provided by a non-profit (e.g. Wikimedia Foundation, Mozilla, Canonical). Maybe expecting people to set up a server is just a bridge too far? Maybe there&#x27;s just too many conveniences in centralization for todays users to put up with the hassle? Maybe there needs to be a centralized server that is as easy to use as the proprietary ones, and then the hardcore users can set up their own and federate with the central one?

Great work! This is a good YouTube alternative I can get behind, however after reading a little bit I kind of frowned at this line on the plugin paragraph.<p>&gt; You could also imagine plug-ins to sort videos in reverse alphabetical order, or to add a Tipee, Paypal or Patreon button below videos!<p>Please don&#x27;t consider or be tempted by those three proprietary platforms, I would much rather prefer donating using Liberapay instead.<p>Other than this, PeerTube has got huge potential and I would love to know what content creators (on YT or HN) think of it.

Have you tried talking to universities or university video providers (e.g. Echo360)?<p>A lot of universities are part of networks (e.g., the one I teach at, UNE in Australia, is part of the Regional Universities Network.) So they seem to fit the pattern of organisations that produce and host a lot of videos (course videos), don&#x27;t like YouTube (we sometimes get told off for putting course videos there) and are part of networks that might like federated access to each others&#x27; video collections (while we mostly produce our own - it&#x27;s not tv it&#x27;s a teaching course and students usually want to hear from their teachers - sometimes we&#x27;ll want to include something like a guest talk from industry).<p>Universities may be less interested in the bittorrent streaming aspect (they already successfully stream video and don&#x27;t face the ridiculous peaks in demand because most videos aren&#x27;t public) but ActivityPub to be able to search selected videos from each others&#x27; repositories could be interesting.

I love this project and that is sets the focus on providing a video platform as its primary goal ignoring implementing monetizaion like crypto tokens etc. for now.<p>Many thanks to all the people who worked hard on getting PeerTube to what it is today.

In the space of distributed video platforms, I think Peertube has the right idea: Bitchute is gaining a lot of traction, but the core issue of centralized control remains. Distributed content delivery is not enough to prevent censorship and viewer manipulation. Federation will allow many platforms to proliferate and solves this problem.<p>I hope Peertube gains traction, but they&#x27;re fighting an uphill battle when it comes to the centralized competition. The problem that PeerTube cannot solve is engagement and stability:<p>- Engagement: Unlike Youtube they cannot use a recommender system like for suggestions. Most Youtube views are from recommendations and related videos. - Stability: As a business or media outlet, I will link to a Youtube video but not a PeerTube video because I know Youtube will host it indefinitely.

A major differentiator for PeerTube, if they are still doing the decentralized data route, is that content publishers control their content. I am curious if that is still the case with PeerTube, but it used to be &#x27;Mastodon for Videos&#x27;. That means a central authority can&#x27;t take down videos. A site like peertube.social can only ban certain videos from being shared through its site, or ban individual users, and perhaps keep a blacklist to share with other sites.<p>I find it interesting that the Madame Secretary episode I watched last night (from last week) dealt with the issue of deep fakes. Particularly how easy it is, if someone is willing to put in the time, to create and publish video showing someone doing&#x2F;saying something they&#x27;d never do.<p>Decentralized trust and reputation metrics are going to be a big thing over the next decade.

The work done is awesome. I’ll try it because the idea of self-hosting low traffic videos is interesting.<p>Besides, I can’t stand articles that use the so called écriture inclusive. Either they write in the accepted, standardized version of French or they fork it but don’t call it French.

So the only peer-related functionality is allowing a site to share videos with other sites? While I appreciate the project, this seems like a useless gadget to me.<p>If we want to fix the problems of Youtube we need a service that allows creators to independently make their own video distribution website as easily as creating a Wordpress blog today. It means something that just works without technical knowledge, while the creator has 100% freedom and responsibility about what is hosted.<p>The www is decentralized by nature, no need to reinvent crazy and complex things. We just need to be able to create a video-distribution-website as easily as a facebook page or a youtube channel.

I really like the platform, but I think it would shine even more with scalable video coding support, to the point that it would be a game-changer. Unfortunately, the issue was closed [1].<p>Do any of you know open source libraries, or documentation on SVC for mp4, VP9 or AV1? I don&#x27;t think ffmpeg supports this at all, which is a shame.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Chocobozzz&#x2F;PeerTube&#x2F;issues&#x2F;99" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Chocobozzz&#x2F;PeerTube&#x2F;issues&#x2F;99</a>

peertube will not catch up unless someone creates an advertisement market place for PeerTube, so content creators can monetize their content outside YouTube<p>here&#x27;s a startup idea for you all. :-)

Do I understand it correctly, that the federation in this case means that I can watch video from site A on site B, while it&#x27;s being hosted on A, meaning bandwidth cost for A and no ability to for instance suggest videos A hosts, show viewer advertisement, etc?<p>Not sure how would I like it if I hosted instance, paid storage and bandwidth costs while noone even visits my site and views all content on site with better SEO.

I like the idea, peer to peer and decentralized, but it seems like the UX and UI should be the biggest problem of it by now.

I tried to play the about PeerTube video and selected 1080p and got about a second, then spent most of the time waiting while it buffered... very slowly (100-200KB&#x2F;s), whereas YouTube 1080p is near-instant. I would have thought there (probably) most popular video should be well seeded, but I only see like 2 seeds on it.

Some people here said that Youtube has a good recomandation algorithm, this is weird because I stil get same video recommended and auto played even if I disliked it and trying to google &quot;how to do X on youtube&quot; just returns youtube results for your query not web results on how to fix youtube

Is there a search engine to look for content across all instances?

elephant in the room: how does this platform deal with DMCA requests, copyright violations, and content moderation.

My problem with peertube is - if I install it and federate I&#x27;ll have all sorts of illegal videos on my computer. Nazi propaganda, child porn, anything.<p>I&#x27;m not going to spend hours moderating that, and I certainly don&#x27;t want to explain myself to police.<p>And if I don&#x27;t federate it&#x27;s basically less convenient ftp.

can anyone tdlr peertube vs lbry?

Unfortunately, &quot;normal people&quot; are never going to use something like this in significant numbers.<p>We need a centralized video hosting website, with freedom of speech values, with huge funding, which markets to normal people.<p>The only way I see this happening is a single bored billionaire going for it.

It seems like they did not consider how they want peertubers to be able to monetize. On the contrary, it seems they have something against &#x27;capturing your attention and selling it to Fanta&#x27;. I want this piece of work to be exhibit A in how staying inside your ideological bubble will ensure failure. I think it&#x27;s especially sad since they used crowdfunded money so they aren&#x27;t just failing on their own dime.