PeerTube v5: the result of 5 years’ handcrafting

This actually makes me sad :(<p>Hear me out: the Internet was supposed to be about peer-to-peer connected computers, and the privileged roles ISPs and later &quot;cloud&quot; providers assumed changed that for the worse.<p>It was SUPPOSED to enable me, myself, hosting my videos, on my computer(s) and making them available to whomever I want to, including everyone. This is how early protocols were designed. Everyone was supposed to be a SMTP (e-mail) host. Everyone was supposed to run FTP and HTTP. Everyone got an equally routable (the link quality depends, of course) address, not some 3rd level NAT retail monstrosity. If you needed aggregation, you make search sites like Google (and AltaVista and others before it) and RSS to pull data from multiple sources and CACHE IT LOCALLY.<p>Of course I welcome projects like PeerTube, but I&#x27;d much rather go back to the original idea. No ISPs or Clouds, only Peers.<p>With Internet like water grid - a utility.

PeerTube is a free, decentralised and federated video platform, and a part of the fediverse, meaning you can interact with it via Mastodon and other tools, thanks to the ActivityPub protocol.<p>There is only one paid developer, working for the French non-profit Framasoft – and I think it&#x27;s important to share this in non French-speaking spaces.<p>If you want to help them &quot;Collectivise &#x2F; Convivialise the internet&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soutenir.framasoft.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soutenir.framasoft.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;</a>

Not a single embedded video on the page showing off the platform. Technologists&#x27; blindness to product and market building is so painful.

PeerTube is basically developed by a single guy and has solved the infrastructure problem that many organizations have when wanting to host videos. Any organization can now host VoDs and live events on their own server(s) without being bled to death by the hosting provider since the badwidth will be shared among the concurrent viewers.<p>This is such an underappreciated piece of technology that I hope many intitutions will adopt, at least as a backup against using the usual Youtube&#x2F;Facebook&#x2F;Vimeo&#x2F;Twitter&#x2F;Instagram as content hosts

I truly like PeerTube as a technology, however I still haven&#x27;t managed to build even a minimal stock of PeerTube based content creators I&#x27;d enjoy to follow.<p>On Youtube it&#x27;s easy, there&#x27;s much more high quality content about any topic imaginable than I ever could watch in my limited time on this planet, but on PeerTube instances I haven&#x27;t found anything that made me come back to that particular creator.<p>So my question is, can you recommend a good cooking PeerTuber, or a good one discussing the newest single board computers? It&#x27;s really difficult finding something worth watching.

Question about Peertube: Is it possible to personally view and verify each uploaded video, as the host&#x2F;admin of the service? (time constraints aside)<p>My concern is, that if I host a peertube instance and anyone uploads illegal stuff, I am going to hang for it. So perhaps I would like a Peetube instance just for my friends an me, where I can personally review each video, to not get into trouble. Basically doing the job which the big platforms are too high and noble to properly do and use their algorithms for.

Looking at the article, I can&#x27;t help but to find the summary of the past releases to be really nice:<p><pre><code> PeerTube v1 (Oct. 2018) allows you to create a video platform with federation, peer-to-peer streaming, redundancy, search tools and multilingual interface. PeerTube v2 (Nov 2019) brings notifications, playlists and plugins. PeerTube v3 (Jan. 2021) adds federated search, live and peer-to-peer streaming. PeerTube v4 (Dec. 2021) allows to customise each platform’s homepage, to sort and filter displayed videos, and to manage them more easily. </code></pre> Kind of makes me wish most software projects had summaries of changelogs like that. For example, for versions of PostgreSQL&#x2F;MySQL&#x2F;React&#x2F;Vue&#x2F;Java&#x2F;.NET or anything else - just to see what the most notable features have been in the releases over the years.<p>Also, PeerTube itself is pretty nice, I&#x27;m still hosting v4 for my own needs and use it as a solution for backing up and encoding stream VODs from Twitch. Might eventually get a YouTube account, but still keep it as a backup just to minimize the risk of losing the videos, though storing hours of them does definitely take up some space on my server&#x27;s HDDs, backups of those included.

Peertube is amazing. My cheap VPS punches well above its weight thanks to it, and I can host videos that have had (low) hundreds of thousands of views without having to rate limit anybody or force registration.<p>I&#x27;m always quite concerned that it&#x27;s practically a one man project, though. I hope it can build the community of developers that it deserves.

Has anyone here experimented with IPFS to create a mirrored video archive for things like their YouTube channels?<p>I don&#x27;t hear much about IPFS these days.

I love the idea of PeerTube and often browse videos on tilvids (a fairly curated instance).<p>However, lately I&#x27;ve been wishing for a tool where lectures could be hosted that has nice searchable transcripts, allows people have have comments and discussion based on the time. Something kinda like Loom but more oriented around making lectures annotateable by students for referring to later.

What are the privacy implications of using peertube for the viewer? Is his IP address exposed to other viewers? Does peertube offer a way to shield viewers from one another?

I tried PeerTube but deleted it after it ignored my custom media profiles for AV1 and silently encoded the videos as AVC. No official way of using FOSS formats because the head of PeerTube does not want give people the choice of cutting off Apple users and the official plugin for creating custom encoding profiles just encoded as default AVC when MY AV1 profile was selected.