[HN Gopher] Let's improve PeerTube - Help us define PeerTube's f...
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Let's improve PeerTube - Help us define PeerTube's future roadmap
Author : raybb
Score : 109 points
Date : 2022-07-21 19:16 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (joinpeertube.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (joinpeertube.org)
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Yes monetisation and ads would attract more people, but I want a
| YouTube without ads and without monetisation. It's more than them
| just being annoying, it changes the entire way people produce
| content and present it.
| yegle wrote:
| You mean YouTube Premium?
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| More like Youtube how it was in the beginning.
|
| What I'm saying is that monetization changes the way videos
| are made. They generally tend to be padded out, with intros,
| attempts at social engagement, ("Please like and subscribe,
| and let me know how you feel in the comments!"). This style
| is actively encouraged by YouTube.
| Crash0v3rid3 wrote:
| You want a YouTube like service but no ads/monetization?
|
| I'd love to hear about this business plan.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I think it's perfectly realistic for such a service to exist,
| but I also think Peertube has the wrong idea. IPFS is a
| little closer to how I'd prefer videos being hosted, but _I
| also_ prefer the sharding /peering of a Magnet link. Once
| someone gets all of that under one umbrella, you'd have a
| service that is ostensibly both faster than YouTube and more
| distributed/decentralized.
|
| Now, can we convince Mr Beast to join this platform? No, but
| I don't think most people will notice a discernible dip in
| quality. Most exploitation-tubers would probably scuttle off
| to Facebook or Instagram, but I think most of the Patron-
| supported content creators would buy-in to a well made
| alternative. Key operand being _well made_ though...
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Well by definition it's not a business. Maybe it's a bunch of
| friends just having fun doing good tutorials. Maybe it's a
| non-profit focused on financial literacy videos for the
| public.
| upupandup wrote:
| Who will bear the cost of bandwidth, servers and
| maintenance? What if it's not just your friends thats
| mainly using it but millions of people who rely on generous
| few to keep the lights on? What happens if somebody uses
| multiple IP addresses to download and drain the bandwidth
| with other users complaining? Who will handle those
| tickets?
| contravariant wrote:
| If big servers were the only ones paying for bandwidth
| this argument would make sense, but the way the internet
| works right now is everyone is paying for all the
| bandwidth they use so there's not a priori a reason to
| assume the bandwidth is entirely unpaid for.
|
| As torrents demonstrate it's not necessarily bandwidth
| that's a problem, it's mostly durability and
| discoverability.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Well it's peertube so bandwidth is reasonable. Most cheap
| high bandwidth projects rack machines in datacenters
| where you pay for the pipe, not the gig.
|
| Servers and other fixed costs can be handled by donations
| or selling merch.
|
| Tickets and high bandwidth cases may not be a good fit
| for the project, or may be on a "as available" basis.
| lxe wrote:
| Is there a "recommended" feed of peertube videos where I can
| discover content? Or a upvote-like system? Or something curated?
| Where do I find trending and interesting content on the
| ecosystem?
| cowtools wrote:
| Choose a homeserver you like and go to the discover or trending
| page. here are some big instances to try (many are european,
| you may want to choose an english language one):
|
| https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances?sort=-totalInst...
|
| A lot of my friends use diode.zone . That is like a more
| electronics-focused instance. There are views and likes, but
| mostly I just check my subscriptions. The popularity of a video
| depends a lot on traffic from external websites as well as how
| many instances federate it.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I think peertube needs to stick to the basics: a self hostable
| tube site server that federates over AP for comments and
| subscriptions.
|
| They've got a great API, they've done fantastic work on live
| streaming, they have WebRTC implemented to distribute server
| load, and they've figured out searchability across multiple
| servers with sepia search. I don't see what needs improvement
| really.
|
| Personally I think the 1 click monetization ad driven model is
| going to die, I don't think a lot of work should be put towards
| implementing something like this. People are moving towards a
| sponsorship model or patron model, and we are seeing all sorts of
| problems with the 1 click monetization with regard to patent
| trolling, content policing and the like, it just doesn't work out
| well. Of course with this transition comes a move away from
| monopoly on tube sites like what YouTube has, if someone is
| basing their revenue on patrons or sponsors they don't need to
| keep all their content on one website, peertube pretty obviously
| fits into this business environment well.
|
| So I think as far as monetization, peertube should focus on tools
| for creators that help them accurately count their viewership and
| active subscriptions, and integrations that enable people to hide
| content behind a paywall for patrons, a plugin system for
| different payment methods would be fantastic.
|
| Besides this I think peertube is pretty much feature complete,
| although some work could be done on decentralizing search.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I agree here. I think features that help the (general) patreon
| model are a winner for adoption. Maybe features that make it
| easier to host custom peertube instances for content creators.
| zackees wrote:
| haolez wrote:
| How's the censoring story on PeerTube? The good kind of
| censoring, I mean. If I'm to use a decentralized service which
| provides me with content, I want to be able to sensor it against
| terrorist propaganda, child pornography and the likes. Does it
| offer a solution to that? Genuinely curious.
| cowtools wrote:
| It depends on the instance you are on. I don't think I have
| ever seen child porn or terrorist recruitment videos on
| peertube, but only about half of peertube is english-speaking
| so I can't speak on behalf of the whole network.
|
| Moderation depends on the instance. The sysadmins choose what
| videos to ban and what other instances to federate with. Most
| users choose a single homeserver that reflects their values on
| moderation.
|
| Diode.zone is an example of a popular "heavily moderated"
| instance. It has some decent videos.
|
| The less-moderated instances tend to federate more so I think a
| lot of the unpopular stuff gets drowned out with "popular"
| stuff (which apparently includes a lot of european TV news,
| linux stuff, liberal/libertarian rants, video games, public
| domain films, and "my little pony" videos). There is very
| little NSFW content at all because the default behavior is to
| blur the thumbnails and many instances just block it anyways.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Is terrorist propaganda, generally, an issue with stuff like
| this? I have never heard of that specifically as a concern.
| agentdrtran wrote:
| Nope, it's fully decentralized as far as I'm aware. The
| resolution is "forward the URL to the cops".
| uncomputation wrote:
| But what can law enforcement do against decentralized
| networks with anonymous hosters? With torrents for example,
| the ISPs go after peers using their service but the content
| itself will stay up until all peers stop seeding.
| wmf wrote:
| AFAIK PeerTube is federated and non-anonymous; it's quite
| different from P2P.
| TheDesolate0 wrote:
| LOL.
|
| No.
| riffic wrote:
| Framasoft should run a Peertube-as-a-service and pitch the
| platform to those who may be Google-averse or have a need to keep
| content on their own domain name (govs, institional orgs, etc).
|
| btw I think this is what Eugen, et al, should be doing with
| Mastodon gGmbH.
| Tmpod wrote:
| Yeah, that would be nice, like how Matrix has EMS and such.
|
| Mastodon already has plenty of services like that, such as
| Masto.Host, but none are "official".
| max51 wrote:
| It would only work while the service is not popular and almost
| on one uses it. As soon as they attract the attention of
| copyrights holders, they will be forced to implement the same
| type of BS we see at youtube. The tech might might be
| decentralized, but you lose 99% of the benefit of
| decentralization when you pay a company to host it for you.
| Whatever good intention they may have, it's all gonna go out
| the window they the owners are facing a decade behind jail
| and/or tens of millions of dollars in fines.
|
| It's the exact same thing with most platforms that people think
| will kill youtube. The only reason why they avoided
| implementing all the crap we hate about youtube is that they
| are not popular.
| wmf wrote:
| Or the hosting provider can just drop you at the first sign
| of attack and it's up to you to migrate your domain and
| restore from backup at a new provider.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Genuinely curious, if nobody at all is making any advertising
| money from it, and hosting costs are decentralized (even if
| that concept is fraught in practice), _will_ copyright
| holders and /or trolls be as aggressive?
| riffic wrote:
| perhaps copyright owners could be more willing to share
| their content if they had a place they could do so from,
| and could also monetize to their hearts content.
|
| this would effectively cut Google out of the rent-seeking
| loop.
| [deleted]
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| I like the idea. When you say "keep content on their own domain
| name," do you mean the physical bits are on my servers as the
| owner of the content, exposed by my custom domain, or do you
| mean the bits are hosted on PeerTube's servers and merely
| exposed using my domain? The distinction is important.
| riffic wrote:
| an example of this in action:
|
| I live in Los Angeles. I want the city to archive its city
| council meetings on a video platform. Preferably, these would
| be available from a subdomain of lacity.gov instead of being
| available through youtube or another company of that sort
| (there are _all sorts_ of namespace issues with today 's
| approach).
|
| The example here doesn't need to be limited strictly to
| council meetings either, the city could host all sorts of
| video on its own instance of the PeerTube site. I know
| there's currently a "LACityClerk" channel, but I'm sure you
| could find other Youtube channels concerning the fire
| department, LAPD, Department of Transportation, City Library,
| etc:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/c/LACityClerk/videos
|
| I (as a constituent) don't really care about the underlying
| hosting. Framasoft, seeing as how they are intimately
| familiar with how Peertube works, can sell that underlying
| hosting. The benefit for the city is they can centralize
| administration and control over this rather than just give
| all their content to Google.
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| Cool. So if I understand you correctly, you effectively
| want to decouple hosting (where the bits are) from exposure
| (how I as a user find and view them).
| tpxl wrote:
| I think three models are viable:
|
| * Youtube-like website where people post videos
|
| * A hosted service on your own domain where they host the
| videos (like the parent was talking about)
|
| * A self hosted version where you host the videos and pay
| for technical support
| riffic wrote:
| I made some edits to my parent comment to further explain
| my pitch and what the benefit to my hypothetical example
| city would be if they were to be a Framasoft / Peertube
| customer.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The Wordpress equivalent of YouTube, with discovery and
| federation plug-ins. Anyone can host a Wordpress
| instance, but you can also pay Automattic to host it for
| you (your data is also portable and you can move from
| hosted to self hosted and vice versa).
| riffic wrote:
| that should probably be my go-to metaphor here.
| Automattic seems to be doing okay as a professional
| WordPress hosting shop.
|
| Your clarification about the data being portable is
| definitely key here.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| You might find these resources of value:
| https://www.ngi.eu/blog/2021/10/05/internet-trust-
| accessibil...
|
| https://beeldengeluid.github.io/extending-peertube/
| riffic wrote:
| really cool!
|
| Cities aren't the only ideal client to make this pitch to
| either, there are all sorts of art collectives,
| educators, museums, even commercial interests who would
| probably benefit to _move off of YouTube_ perhaps simply
| for the privacy and data collection concerns.
| [deleted]
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Agreed. Framasoft really needs to consider becoming the
| Automattic equivalent to Peertube, which could then spin
| up the revenue flywheel for further development.
| Donations have worked so far, but only work up to a
| point. You need dedicated engineering, product
| management, customer support, etc if you want to take on
| Youtube, and the vast majority of customers don't want to
| do this work themselves (in my experience). They want to
| provide a payment method and either be turned loose on
| the product or have their hand held.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| What exactly does PeerTube solve? People want to comment and
| explore libraries of videos. This is just a protocol for
| independent video sharing platform instances, HTML5 supports
| video playback.
|
| A lot of the instances are poor quality, with flickering buttons.
| They outright look like the player ui's that porn sites use....
|
| Is there a way to explore content across all peer tube instances?
| cowtools wrote:
| Yes, it is federated. You can search, like, make comments from
| one server to another so long as they are federated together.
|
| Here is a pretty good search engine:
|
| https://search.joinpeertube.org/
|
| I usually try that if i'm trying to watch a video for free and
| I can't find it anywhere else. There are are servers that just
| re-upload documentaries and stuff.
| powerhour wrote:
| I searched for a common term, "Linux", and of the top 5
| results only one worked -- the rest times out before any
| content (html and all) loaded. On the first page, of the two
| videos available only one began loading, however playback did
| not begin for the minute or so I waited. Bummer.
|
| This isn't a problem with the search engine, exactly, but
| it'd be useful if it filtered out unavailable content.
| cowtools wrote:
| Interesting. I am sorry to hear that. You may be better off
| going to a large instance that follows many other instances
| and search for videos there. For example, kraut.zone seems
| to index many other instances:
|
| https://kraut.zone/search?sort=-views&searchTarget=search-
| in...
|
| You can find well-connected instances here, if you sort by
| "Following":
|
| https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances?sort=-totalIns
| t...
|
| You might also need to enable WebRTC. I know I usually
| leave it disabled for security reasons.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Ok great, I don't like hoping across 1000 instances, feels
| messy and unsafe. Like mini 2006 YouTube's everywhere lol
| cowtools wrote:
| You stay on the same site. It fetches the video for you
| from the other server. For example with this URL:
|
| https://kraut.zone/w/aWCVkSQTXKJ1yuR6o8zjDY
|
| Kraut.zone is fetching this guy's vlog from his personal
| server. But you don't need to visit this random guy's site
| yourself or run any of his JS in your browser. But if you
| are really concerned about security you shouldn't even be
| using JS in the first place. "Le Walled Garden" is not an
| exception.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Sepia search, and federated timelines.
|
| I think a client that is able to subscribe to remote instances
| client side (without an AP account somewhere) would
| significantly improve the state of discover ability across
| peertube servers.
| cowtools wrote:
| NewPipe supports this.
| freedomben wrote:
| This also addresses the problem of bandwidth being super
| expensive and out of budget for small creators that want to
| self host. Users watching it are also uploading fragments, so
| if a video goes viral your AWS bill isn't gonna be $10,000 for
| bandwidth.
|
| It also gives some decentralization because the original source
| can go completely offline, yet as long as there is a copy of
| each fragment on somebody's machine, everyone can watch the
| whole thing.
| hedora wrote:
| I don't understand what PeerTube is for, concretely. (I've read
| parts of your docs before, and understand what federation is.)
|
| I would like to be able to host videos inexpensively, perhaps in
| an s3 bucket or on a raspberry pi. The free / cheap version needs
| to scale to at most 2-10 concurrent viewers (a more expensive
| version that scales indefinitely would be nice for commercial
| use).
|
| It would be optionally password protected in a way that is client
| side encrypted (probably in a way that is transparent to the end
| user; such as via a key in a url, that loads a bit of javascript
| that fetches and decrypts the video).
|
| That way, amazon or whoever won't accidentally decide my video is
| a pirated win95 iso or whatever. Also, the people in my videos
| won't (necessarily) have their images harvested for bulk
| survelliance.
|
| I should have final say in whether the content is taken down (and
| own the domain name, in case I want to move to a new cloud
| provider).
|
| It should be trivial to set up.
|
| I get the impression that PeerTube meets zero of these
| requirements.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| S3 itself allows for client-side encryption. Get a bucket with
| no public access and use your favorite encrypted messenger
| service or email to send a pre-signed url and decryption key to
| 2-10 of your friends.
| cowtools wrote:
| >I don't understand what PeerTube is for, concretely. (I've
| read parts of your docs before, and understand what federation
| is.)
|
| I get the impression that it's for personal video sharing.
| Technically competent users will host their own personal
| instances and host instances for their communities. These
| instances are federated into larger social networks where users
| can interact across instances.
|
| >I would like to be able to host videos inexpensively, perhaps
| in an s3 bucket or on a raspberry pi. The free / cheap version
| needs to scale to at most 2-10 concurrent viewers (a more
| expensive version that scales indefinitely would be nice for
| commercial use).
|
| I do not think something proprietary like an s3 bucket would be
| compatible with Peertube, but I have not maintained an
| instance. The system works with webtorrent (a version of
| BitTorrent that runs over WebRTC), so it depends whether the
| concurrent viewers are all watching the same video or not
| (because then they will seed the videos to each other using
| webtorrent).
|
| >It would be optionally password protected in a way that is
| client side encrypted (probably in a way that is transparent to
| the end user; such as via a key in a url, that loads a bit of
| javascript that fetches and decrypts the video). That way,
| amazon or whoever won't accidentally decide my video is a
| pirated win95 iso or whatever.
|
| The fact that your VPS host is untrustworthy and temperamental
| is not peertube's fault. Consider a better VPS provider
| perhaps.
|
| >I should have final say in whether the content is taken down
| (and own the domain name, in case I want to move to a new cloud
| provider). >It should be trivial to set up.
|
| These two things are in conflict. Merely getting ahold of a
| domain name is non-trivial, although I suppose you could
| operate it as a Tor onion service or something on the other end
| of zooko's triangle.
| hedora wrote:
| > _The fact that your VPS host is untrustworthy and
| temperamental is not peertube 's fault. Consider a better VPS
| provider perhaps._
|
| The US CLOUD Act ensures they're all untrustworthy (or on the
| wrong side of an iron curtain).
|
| >> _It should be trivial to set up._
|
| > _These two things are in conflict. Merely getting ahold of
| a domain name is non-trivial,_
|
| OK, then no more difficult than setting up a raspberry pi or
| hobby AWS account.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| If there was a way to run ads on your instance then it'd become
| massive.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Would it really though? they don't have the interest of average
| users.
| ronsor wrote:
| Ads interest creators, and users are interested in the
| presence of content from creators they like.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Look at how incentivising running an instance made
| cryptocurrencies a hot topic. Without some kind of
| compensation, contributing hardware and bandwidth to an idea
| like PeerTube means it will remain niche.
|
| Likewise, cash for creators means better content and not
| needing YouTube.
|
| None of this should utilize crypto may I add. Stripe and
| PayPal APIs are very comprehensive, especially for mass
| payouts, and split payment systems.
| ronsor wrote:
| Maybe Stripe, but PayPal sucks more than most people
| know[1][2] and only exists because it's really convenient
| when you're not being screwed over.
|
| [1]
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-13/paypal-
| su...
|
| [2] https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.paypal.com
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Sure, this happens on every platform owned by a third-
| party that gets enough users, it is a statistical
| inevitability. Even crypto wallets aren't immune to being
| manipulated. See Chivo.
|
| FWIW, I've used PayPal since the 90s, I run a biz that
| uses it, clients use it every day and have used it every
| day for over a decade without any issues, and I have
| personally sent several thousand PayPal Invoices over the
| years. Automated billing also works just fine, far more
| reliable than charging a card that will eventually
| expire.
|
| Further anecdote: whilst you point to PayPal, I've heard
| of more people having their bank account frozen for
| whatever reason, e.g. someone stole their card, suspected
| fraud etc. We can point to any of these things as a worst
| case scenario, but likely 99% of the time, it's working
| as intended. PayPal's support has also been some of the
| best to deal with when it comes to API queries.
| snoopy_telex wrote:
| I think the root issue for PeerTube is that video monetization
| has not been figured out. Established YouTubers won't switch away
| from existing revenue streams unless there's parity. New
| YouTubers will focus on building a business and will go where the
| money is.
|
| Rock and a hard place. That's where I would focus on platform
| improvements though.
| upupandup wrote:
| You laid out a really good point here, advertisers with big
| wallets are not going to bet their brand on a decentralized
| video platform without any centralized moderation.
|
| And without those large advertisers your CPM will be extremely
| low which will just invite even more content aimed at capturing
| that market (spam, low quality videos).
|
| People forget that decentralization doesn't work well for some
| industries, especially ones that rely on ad revenues
| (centralized entities) that rely on centralized control over
| audiences and content allowed on the platform.
|
| There's a reason Youtube works so well and its because of its
| censorship and AI led moderation to appease the big
| advertisers. You can't rely on some regular joe advertising his
| Token on PeerTube to continue paying in crypto and neither can
| creators rely on PeerTube to be able to convert tokens on a
| third party exchange that is facing insolvency.
|
| It's amazing to me how quickly people forget the on-ramp and
| off-ramp of money is still fiat, nobody is going to hold on to
| PeerTube's tokens for decades.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| This is a manifestation of how we've sleepwalked a situation
| where Google probably should have fallen foul of antitrust
| legislation but haven't.
|
| They have a pretty tight control over video hosting, video
| monetisation and video discovery, making it impossible for an
| incumbent to enter into one of those markets without
| challenging Google in all three.
| akersten wrote:
| > They have a pretty tight control over video hosting, video
| monetisation and video discovery, making it impossible for an
| incumbent to enter into one of those markets
|
| You're kind of putting the cart before the horse here in
| asserting that those are three independent markets. I could
| just as easily say that restaurants participate in the "food
| cooking, table bussing, and patron seating" markets, and that
| it's way too hard for my upstart kitchen to compete in the
| food cooking market due to Cheesecake Factory having such
| tight control over the seating and serving markets. But the
| reality is, maybe my cuisine just sucks, and the singular
| market won't entertain it.
| raybb wrote:
| I see how this is true for programmatic ads. But do you think
| the same goes for sponsored videos? If sponsored videos are
| paid for X number of views why wouldn't that work for peertube?
| snoopy_telex wrote:
| Getting a realistic number of views out of a p2p service
| is... difficult. It's too easy to fudge. Youtube acts like a
| neutral party that won't cheat, because it has no reason to.
| There's no neutral party in peer tube to provide the count.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > Youtube acts like a neutral party that won't cheat,
| because it has no reason to.
|
| Actually it has a huge reason to, and sometimes large
| advertising companies do get accused of such cheating. [0]
|
| You're right, though, that getting accurate numbers is hard
| even for companies with large budgets to invest in stopping
| "fake" clicks, which usually involves all sorts of
| fingerprinting and surveillance tech.
|
| Trying to recreate all that in a transparent and privacy-
| preserving way, across a network of nodes in different
| jurisdictions, and with no contractual obligations, is...
| well, if not impossible, then let's just say it's going to
| need a _lot_ more blockchain to make it work. ;)
|
| [0] https://www.marketing-interactive.com/facebook-sued-
| for-alle...
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I don't know how Youtube ads work, but I would think it's
| like Adsense where you can make money long before you are big
| enough to attract sponsors.
|
| Platform-level ads are surely for everyone not big enough to
| attract sponsors.
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