[HN Gopher] PeerTube v6
___________________________________________________________________
PeerTube v6
Author : p4bl0
Score : 363 points
Date : 2023-11-28 09:07 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (framablog.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (framablog.org)
| glenstein wrote:
| Truly inspiring work from Framasoft! I just hope for more
| adoption. I don't know if anyone remembers the days of Firefox 2
| and 3 and the days of "community marketing" but I think something
| like that could be a worthwhile project here. I would love, for
| instance, if significant creators could do a Framasoft February
| each year where they commit to hosting some portion of videos of
| their choice on Peertube.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Well, how reliable is peertube? Say I would do a ShowHN, that
| gets traction and a HN hug of death. In theory peertube could
| take the load for the videos without having to rely on youtube
| - but has anyone done this succesful in reality?
| j_maffe wrote:
| They talk about stress-testing of livestreaming towards the
| end of the article. A quick search shows that they've done
| several of them for videos as well. The peer-to-peer
| structure really protects them from sudden scale in demand.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "The peer-to-peer structure really protects them from
| sudden scale in demand."
|
| In theory, for sure. But in reality the p2p part might not
| work for lots of users for various reasons (firewall etc.)
| so then the server gets all the load and chokes. At least
| that has be my experience when experimenting with webRTC.
|
| "Last year, thanks to French indie journalist David
| Dufresne's Au Poste ! livestream show and his hoster
| Octopuce, we got a livestream stress test with more than
| 400 simultaneous viewers "
|
| And 400 is not a very big number, if one has ambitious
| goals. But it is a good start.
| amomo wrote:
| Indeed it's not a big number, but you don't need to have
| a lot of viewers to be in the top 1% of twitch :
| https://twitter.com/zachbussey/status/1367868296473813001
|
| So, what if peertube was a good answer to 99% cases ?
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Oh, then those people should certainly use peertube. But
| then personally I would like to have a safe fallback, but
| this creates overhead.
| glenstein wrote:
| Moreover, could we zoom out and ask what's at stake with
| this kind of question? What does a road map from Peertube
| in its present day towards twitch or YouTube level
| adoption look like, how long would that take?
|
| I ask because that's the kind of runway where there's
| time to continue to work out questions like this, and
| they aren't at present make or break, and so far as I can
| tell there's no reason to believe issues about firewalls
| pose an issue that's any more or less difficult than the
| technical challenges they've already solved.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "there's no reason to believe issues about firewalls pose
| an issue that's any more or less difficult than the
| technical challenges they've already solved."
|
| Certainly. I am 100% certain that the whole concept is
| doable.
| joelthelion wrote:
| Framasoft February sounds like a great idea! I would definitely
| ask my favorite content providers to participate.
| glenstein wrote:
| Well my thinking is that you can hardly think of an easier,
| lower-stakes ask than asking creators to voluntarily agree
| that something from their back catalog gets hosted and a new
| place.
|
| And it allows old content to do new work, breathing life into
| a new platform.
| sschueller wrote:
| A bit of topic.
|
| I created a peertube client[1] for android a few years ago. I
| love peertube and I really believe in the project however the
| effort I have put into the client and the rewrite which I almost
| finished using jetpack/mvvm structure just doesn't seem to be
| worth it. I feel bad for abandoning it but I think I may have
| too.
|
| [1] https://github.com/sschueller/peertube-android
| errhead wrote:
| Sad to hear, but totally understandable. I'm sure the official
| app will need lots of contributors when it comes out next year.
| sschueller wrote:
| Is there an official app in the works? I wasn't aware. Do you
| have a link?
| errhead wrote:
| https://fediversereport.com/framasofts-yearly-report/
|
| >Framasoft also announced that next year they will bet big
| on PeerTube, working on features such as better moderation
| tools, working on promoting the ecosystem more, and an
| official PeerTube mobile app.
|
| And on another front of the mobile battle, podcasting 2.0
| apps are increasingly supporting PeerTube video via the RSS
| feed.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| It was announced a few days ago at the _Capitole du Libre_
| festival in Toulouse, France. Framasoft is hiring a second
| developer to work on PeerTube (for now it is mostly the
| work of a single individual), and they will, among other
| numerous things, work on mobile apps and video /sound
| decoupling to allow for the podcast usage cited in another
| comment, for example.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Still has the same problem as all these alternative social media
| networks and why they're not taking off: on one hand you've got
| YouTube/etc which works and has appealing content front-and-
| centre, and on the other you have technobabble like "federation"
| and "instances" while the actual content (if there is even any!)
| is relegated into some dark corner.
|
| YouTube (and other mainstream providers) solves user stories. The
| user story is "I want to find and watch interesting videos" and
| they nail it.
|
| The user story for this, judging by their homepage
| (https://joinpeertube.org), seems to be "I want a boring lecture
| on how bad Big Tech is"?
|
| These services need to think in terms of the casual user if they
| want to actually take off and offer a viable alternative. Nobody
| is interested in a lecture against Big Tech and the intricacies
| of the client/server model and the concept of "instances" (or
| "platform" as they're called here) if they can go on YouTube.com
| and immediately start watching.
| mnd999 wrote:
| Last time I looked at peertube it had worse problems than that.
| The content was mostly neo-nazis and conspiracy theories,
| incels and other stuff that wasn't on YouTube because it would
| get banned. I'm not interested in that. Has it got any better?
| j_maffe wrote:
| Really depends on which servers you follow.
| lynx23 wrote:
| Wah, there is no Incel content on YouTube? What about Pearl
| Davis, or the flood of shorts extracted from this podcast I
| just cant remember right now?
|
| Personally, I much prefer a uncensored platform over
| arbitrary censorship by big tech. Without censorship, I can
| at least decide for myself if I want to watch it.
|
| In fact, I find it quite concerning that people like you seem
| to actively advocate for voluntary censorship.
| Klonoar wrote:
| They're not "advocating for voluntary censorship", they're
| simply pointing out that the Peertube (and the Fediverse in
| general) needs to avoid being the dredges of the internet.
| autoexec wrote:
| > they're simply pointing out that the Peertube (and the
| Fediverse in general) needs to avoid being the dredges of
| the internet.
|
| I don't think that's quite right. It just needs to make
| sure there's plenty available in addition to the dredges
| of the internet. Sometimes the dredges are useful to be
| able to sift through, but that can't be the only thing on
| offer and ideally users would be able to filter that
| stuff out when it isn't wanted.
| Klonoar wrote:
| I would agree with this take in general, yes. We are more
| or less saying the same thing though I appreciate the
| nuance injection. :)
| _heimdall wrote:
| I've never understood this concern with online platforms.
| It really shouldn't matter what content people publish if
| discover ability is user-driven.
|
| A Twitter alternative could be full of neo-nazis, butbif
| my feed is only populated with people I follow them I
| would never know or care.
| Klonoar wrote:
| Sure, but you may never have found yourself on Twitter to
| begin with if it was full of neo Nazis. It's like showing
| up to an important meeting in the wrong attire - how you
| present matters.
|
| The issue isn't hiding it away - be it by user or other -
| it's that it hampers growth in general when you're all of
| a sudden the platform of the deranged. It's fair to
| question whether it's seeing actual use outside of those
| communities.
|
| (It might be telling that we've spent this many comments
| discussing it rather than pointing out e.g
| GNOME/Blender/etc use it - it's not like it's all bad)
| acdha wrote:
| The problem is getting to critical mass: every service
| has to start somewhere but if I join and only see
| uninteresting stuff, I probably won't stick around long
| enough for you to follow me, etc. Niche services have
| that bootstrapping problem where they need early users
| but also don't grow if their primary adopters are people
| who were banned elsewhere (e.g. Gab) or are very tightly
| ideological (Truth Social has a whole political movement
| pushing it but is still failing to catch on because even
| most Republicans don't want shouting 100% of the time).
| _heimdall wrote:
| Discovery is a challenge for sure. I just wonder how far
| a service could get with an entirely user-driven
| discovery, follows, search, etc.
|
| Platforms get into the business of censorship when they
| attempt to currate content (handpicked or algorithmic).
| Engagement is obviously much lower if you aren't running
| an algorithm designed to hook everyone on doom scrolling,
| but plenty of people still happily use an RSS reader and
| just go away when their list of new posts is empty.
| vintermann wrote:
| By censoring?
| Klonoar wrote:
| You are the second person to imply that OP was saying we
| need censoring, when the comment could be read very
| differently.
|
| We can do better than jumping to that conclusion. ;P
| immibis wrote:
| That's impossible. When you let people host their own
| content some Nazis will host Nazi content, and there's
| nothing you can do about it because you are not the one
| hosting it. I guess we should ban HTTP so there can't be
| Nazi websites.
| lynx23 wrote:
| And how would PeerTube avoid that, without actively
| censoring particular content? Ask nicely? Pray? Hope?
| rakoo wrote:
| Peertube is a software, not a service. If you find
| hateful content, it's not because of peertube, it's
| because whoever is hosting it (and how you got there)
| mnd999 wrote:
| I'm not gonna argue with that. But I'm not going to use
| the software unless it hosts something I'm interested in.
| vintermann wrote:
| All that stuff and worse is on Youtube too, and probably in
| higher quantity. It doesn't get banned - not reliably. The
| algorithm is just good at hiding it from you.
|
| Youtube is really good at surfacing videos you want to see.
| Peertube isn't. That's why you see stuff you hate, not
| because of censorship or the lack of it.
| mnd999 wrote:
| Maybe, I don't know, I don't go looking for that stuff.
| Most of the stuff I watch there is video games, retro tech
| or hiking. I was kinda hoping for some recommendations for
| interesting stuff on peertube.
| corobo wrote:
| I think Peertube has a bit of a benefit here in that if they
| can get the SEO right folks don't really need to use the
| federation guff to find videos, they should just be able to
| find them via a regular old search engine
|
| I'm not sure I agree on the content being hidden in a dark
| corner, there's a fair few examples of instances and content on
| the homepage. It'd be nice if the "Discover more" button showed
| more examples rather than dumping you into a search engine but
| it's not terrible.
| vintermann wrote:
| The regular old search engine controlled by a company that
| would lose billions if Peertube took off?
|
| No, it's true that YouTube's advantage is the same as
| Spotify's advantage: Discovery. It has an actually damn good
| recommendation engine. It fairly regularly shows me videos
| with less than 10000 views that are spot on. I'd love to use
| Peertube over Youtube, but I have to actually know of
| something cool on Peertube first, and finding it by searching
| is pretty hopeless.
| corobo wrote:
| I said _a_ regular old search engine, not _the_. There 's
| more than one search engine.
|
| As for the implication that Google may boost YouTube or
| deboost Peertube in search results, good news! There's
| already a lawsuit in progress there with Rumble, so
| hopefully we'll see if they are doing that at some point in
| the (relatively speaking for this kind of thing) near
| future :)
|
| https://casetext.com/case/rumble-inc-v-google-llc-5
|
| Latest update I could find on this:
|
| https://twitter.com/chrispavlovski/status/17270443444301662
| 7...
| clot27 wrote:
| They never say they want to replace YouTube, they just want to
| be there as an alternative for nerds
| MiguelX413 wrote:
| Who says Peertube needs to take off to be good? I like, prefer,
| and use the fediverse in its current state personally.
| Qwertious wrote:
| >Who says Peertube needs to take off to be good?
|
| The fact that it's a video-watching site and that means it
| needs people to upload videos onto it.
| master-lincoln wrote:
| > >Who says Peertube needs to take off to be good?
|
| > The fact that it's a video-watching site and that means
| it needs people to upload videos onto it.
|
| It's not a video watching Website. It's a video serving
| platform in the fediverse. You can use it to host videos
| independently. It's not necessarily meant as a platform
| with a single entry point for users to find any kind of
| video like YouTube. It's more comparable to WordPress maybe
| cchance wrote:
| You realize this can be run by individuals and groups with
| their own videos that aren't actually looking for third
| party uploads.
| phh wrote:
| On one side, I want to say "well, I would like them to kill
| YouTube, and have all our videos through federation"
|
| Oh the other side, I miss the era of low volume content of
| passionate people. I didn't live such an era for the
| internet, but I did for smartphones. Back in 2009, you didn't
| need "have 25 people test your app" requirements, because
| people pushing apps cared about their apps. You didn't need
| to go through a dozen of apps before finding one with a
| usable amount of ads. Heck, runtime permissions weren't
| required because developers were reasonable in their usage of
| permissions
|
| I'm not much a fan of videos, so I don't really know whether
| the same happened with youtube. But the way I consume the few
| youtube videos I watch is just to "follow" people [1], there
| is way too much meaningless content in youtube to even
| glimpse at what there is, and those algorithms really don't
| favor high-quality content, just baiting ones. So I feel the
| fediverse wouldn't have to grow much for me to replace
| YouTube.
|
| [1] I also look at tournesol.app recommendations, but they
| are /waay/ too oriented towards their very own microcosm, and
| even though I'd like to contribute it takes quite a lot of
| time. That being said, I recommend taking a look at
| tournesol.app because there is real democracy research behind
| it
| paulnpace wrote:
| > Who says Peertube needs to take off to be good?
|
| All those who don't remember we are in Eternal September.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| It's frustrating how people only take the capitalist /
| startup founder point of view when evaluating open source.
| It's like people can't grasp the idea that somebody could be
| pursuing a project without having the greatest possible user
| base / profit as their primary goal.
| keb_ wrote:
| You hit the nail on the head. Hacker News ironically tends
| to be pretty hostile towards open-source.
|
| Offering free and open alternatives is often met with the
| criticism of "this will never take off and it's not really
| an alternative because it doesn't do what the multi-billion
| dollar corporate competitor does to a tee."
| Goronmon wrote:
| _You hit the nail on the head. Hacker News ironically
| tends to be pretty hostile towards open-source._
|
| It's actually much better than it used to be. Since it's
| roots are in startup culture, there has always been an
| under-current favoring capitalistic stances. Those
| currents have weakened over time though. At one point
| things like dark patterns for user engagement were given
| a more neutral response than you would see nowadays.
| rakoo wrote:
| If you dig deep enough, you'll see that "open-source" is
| actually the preferred term for HN because it is
| business-friendly: I can use this open-source,
| depolitized piece of code to make money and not give any
| to anyone. It's why the term "open source" exists when
| "Libre" also defines it, but as an anti-business sound to
| it.
| cchance wrote:
| Hackernews really does seem to be heavily capitalist, and
| anti-opensource when it comes to the comments section at
| least.
| yborg wrote:
| It would have been highly amusing if HN had been around
| when Linus launched Linux and we could go back and read
| commentary from all the pragmatists about what a huge waste
| of time and effort it was across the whole spectrum of
| casual dismissal to a sense of outrage that anyone would
| have the hubris to take on major companies already
| providing far superior platforms.
| grumbel wrote:
| Yep, efforts to replace Youtube (and the rest of BigTech)
| should be spend on building better search and cataloging of
| videos across all the Web instead of focusing all effort on one
| specific hosting technology that nobody uses. I'd be much more
| inclined to use a service or software that improves on Youtube
| by including other sources of videos, then one that tries to
| replace Youtube with their own set of (drastically inferior)
| videos.
|
| Miro[1] tried that a long while ago, but I haven't really seen
| much else going that direction since then.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miro_(video_software)
| rakoo wrote:
| Okay but what service exists that doesn't exhibit the same
| problems as youtube, ie the necessity of hyper-growth to
| satisfy investors, ads everywhere, total surveillance of its
| users ? Because a search engine that indexes only services
| like that won't really solve the problem _if_ the problem is
| to respect users' and community's freedom and privacy.
| grumbel wrote:
| It's doesn't really matter what the service is doing when
| you aren't using the service in the first place. Right now
| I can use `yt-dlp`, download videos from Youtube and watch
| them in a video player of my choice. I never have to
| interact with the Youtube platform directly for this, it
| just acts as dumb server that hosts `.mp4` files. Same is
| true for a lot of other services.
|
| The missing part is a good way to discover those videos in
| the first place. Subscriptions and recommendations are not
| something your average Web browser or search engine
| provides, yet are really important for discovering content.
| That's the kind of features I'd like to see implemented in
| a service independent manner. RSS went that direction, but
| not far enough, as it generally depend on the service
| itself to provide that information, instead generating it
| automatically from information found via webscraping.
| rakoo wrote:
| You don't care about most users, and you don't care about
| creators, that's alright, but please don't behave as if
| they didn't matter. You are not representative of useful
| population if you use yt-dlp to bypass issues. It's nice
| that you _can_ do it, but it 's a shitty situation that
| you _have_ to do it to evade pervasive surveillance and
| the madness capitalism brings us into.
|
| YouTube doesn't want you to see their videos outside
| YouTube. They let you do it at the moment because it's
| more profitable this way, but you'll always be fighting
| against them. Why not propel a platform you don't have to
| fight against ? One that serves your needs because it is
| a digital commons ? yt-dlp and any other means of
| accessing content can be built _with_ the platform
| instead of against.
|
| You behave as if you were totally independent from
| platforms, but it's wrong: as a user you depend on them.
| You depend on developers maintaining it and making it
| better, on admins running it, on business people allowing
| you to freeride. It doesn't make sense to live in a
| society where we are adversaries by default, it's such a
| waste of time and energy.
| grumbel wrote:
| > Why not propel a platform you don't have to fight
| against?
|
| That does not exist and fundamentally _can 't_ exist. A
| platform is by definition a thing I have no control over.
| Somebody else runs the thing and they can do with it as
| they please. And even if a platform is nice to use today,
| it sooner or later will get enshittified.
|
| The only actual solution is to move as much data to the
| client and let them decide how to handle it. Especially
| when it comes to metadata, that shouldn't be that
| difficult. There is no reason why something like channel
| subscription can't be handled locally.
| mikae1 wrote:
| Also, switching costs are high when big tech has the first
| mover advantage. The Digital Markets Act might stir things up.
| Meta being designated as gatekeepers are the only reason
| they're considering connecting Threads to the fediverse.
|
| Imagine if YouTube was a PeerTube compatible instance in the
| fediverse that displayed videos from other PeerTube instances.
| We wouldn't have to "switch platforms".
|
| The interoperability that Doctorow preaches needs to be
| implemented by law. Or else the status quo will remain.
| alex_duf wrote:
| I think it's possible to use peertube to create a service that
| does what you describe.
|
| Maybe the way forward is peertube provides the technology, and
| someone else focuses on how best to use that technology to
| fulfil that user story.
|
| Any volunteer?
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > YouTube (and other mainstream providers) solves user stories.
| The user story is "I want to find and watch interesting videos"
| and they nail it.
|
| You miss another user story: IT department wants to self host a
| video distribution platform on their intranet and users need to
| embed video in intranet CMS (blogs, wikis, kb, etc.) and they
| will watch those videos at home, at the office and in between
| places.
|
| Thinking audience and monetization, is basically thinking
| "youtube clone", and that narrows outlooks on what peertube
| brings to the table.
|
| > The user story for this, judging by their homepage
| (https://joinpeertube.org), seems to be "I want a boring
| lecture on how bad Big Tech is"?
|
| Just pick a different paragraph then: What is
| PeerTube? PeerTube allows you to create your own video
| platform, in complete independence.
| ploum wrote:
| At some point, someone literate enough to understand how bad
| Big Tech is but still promoting Big Tech should be face it.
|
| It is like smoking. People say "I know that smoking kill, I
| don't want to be reminded all the time".
|
| Well, as long as you are polluting and killing innocents by
| smoking in their vicinity, you are the asshole. You don't
| seem to understand so people keep telling you (and, guess
| what, in the case of Peertube, they even tell you in a
| friendly way with cute mascots.)
| DeIlliad wrote:
| Comparing using Youtube to smoking is why I can never take
| these conversations seriously.
| rakoo wrote:
| And yet the comparison is apt. Both provide ephemeral
| positive signals to the brain at a cost that is
| detrimental to individuals' or society's health (not even
| talking about environment, which is a part of society's
| health).
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| "I want to find something to do other than smoking. I find
| I smoke the most when I"m bored."
|
| "Have you considered attending this lecture about the
| dangers of smoking?"
| jpc0 wrote:
| > You miss another user story: IT department wants to self
| host a video distribution platform on their intranet and
| users need to embed video in intranet CMS (blogs, wikis, kb,
| etc.) and they will watch those videos at home, at the office
| and in between places.
|
| It's not missed, that story doesn't exist.
|
| In any place where IT can even think about self hosting video
| they likely control the user's entire tech stack and don't
| need a super flexible player, they can just use a video
| tag...
|
| On the other hand a company like this is more likely to use a
| SaaS product because they would have done a cost benefit
| analysis and figured spinning up a server and allocating
| bandwidth which could include significant network stack
| upgrades would cost far too much money to self host video.
|
| Also it's free to stick the video on YouTube as an unisted
| video and embed the player... There is also other platforms
| that can be paid for the exact same service...
| austin-cheney wrote:
| I get so tired of hearing about tech stacks. Tech stack
| discussions are 90% developers spinning their wheels and
| 10% money. Its really closer to 80/20, but most developers
| cannot get out of their own heads enough to reach a 20%
| discussion about money and business expenses.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| In the current scenario with companies cost-cutting, I
| would say money is 30% or 40%.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > > You miss another user story: IT department wants to
| self host a video distribution platform on their intranet
| and users need to embed video in intranet CMS (blogs,
| wikis, kb, etc.) and they will watch those videos at home,
| at the office and in between places.
|
| > It's not missed, that story doesn't exist.
|
| Sure it does. We have been discussing it for weeks with
| colleagues and bed testing it. Next step is to consider
| using v5 or v6.
|
| > In any place where IT can even think about self hosting
| video they likely control the user's entire tech stack and
| don't need a super flexible player, they can just use a
| video tag...
|
| I had written a longer comment but if you equate slapping
| an mp4 URL in a video tag with what peertube brings then I
| frankly don't see the point. Not sure what _controlling the
| user 's entire tech stack_ even means then.
|
| > On the other hand a company like this is more likely to
| use a SaaS product because they would have done a cost
| benefit analysis and figured spinning up a server and
| allocating bandwidth which could include significant
| network stack upgrades would cost far too much money to
| self host video.
|
| Pretty sure peertube and its variable bitrate and
| resolution will use less bandwidth than a user's original
| mp4 file in a video tag would but okay.
|
| edit:
|
| > Also it's free to stick the video on YouTube as an
| unisted video and embed the player...
|
| Yeah, right. What can go wrong uh...
| immibis wrote:
| Taking control of your digital life will always be unappealing
| because it means you have to do the drudge work. There is no
| possible escape from massive corporations.
| fny wrote:
| That's not true. A nonprofit/coop could in theory run single
| peertube instance.
| immibis wrote:
| Then you're beholden to it, and it will not be as lenient
| as Google is in some legal grey areas, because it cannot
| afford any legal liability.
|
| For example, it would ban Louis Rossmann after just one
| cease-and-desist from Apple, because it couldn't afford to
| withstand a SLAPP lawsuit from Apple. (A SLAPP lawsuit is
| when you sue someone who hasn't done anything wrong,
| because you're a big company who can afford to bankrupt
| them with legal fees)
| persnickety wrote:
| It's totally viable to create an entity in a jurisdiction
| where lawsuits are not automatically ruinous and stick to
| your principles.
|
| On top of that, a small entity would not be as lenient
| about Google in terms of customer support or taking
| advantage of your personal data.
| DoItToMe81 wrote:
| Peertube takes under twenty minutes to set up. It's really,
| really not hard.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| It's quite sad that Peertube is not on Sandstorm [1], where
| it becomes a one click install.
|
| [1] https://apps.sandstorm.io/
| greentea23 wrote:
| Youtube could disappear or, more realistically, become heavily
| censored (internally or externally) at any time for a variety
| of reasons. The true value of this project and other federated
| or fully distributed and open source alternatives is to have a
| freedom friendly alternative should the need present itself.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| Most end users don't care about the "what if?" They care
| about the _right now._ What does this offer _today?_
|
| Maybe I'm being unfair and this isn't targeted at end users
| but professionals. Is that the case? Then the landing page
| makes a lot more sense.
| cchance wrote:
| This app is pointed at the people who do care, and not to
| end users, end users aren't running servers or video
| platforms.
| cchance wrote:
| The story on peertubes site isn't directed at the "i want to
| find and watch interesting video" crowd, it's for the "i want
| to run a site where people can watch videos, but i hate big
| monopolies" crowd
| agumonkey wrote:
| It's a short analysis, youtube is centralized and acts as a
| hub, it's amazing to feel you have access to everything but it
| quickly devolves into mediocre content.
|
| There's good content on peertube, surely not as much, but this
| era is overcooked with too much content, it's nice to have
| less.
|
| My main issue is how to get a large view of what is available
| because you end up on isolated islands and you're never sure
| what is there.
| Aachen wrote:
| Peertube is something I've been meaning to use, so I'm interested
| but don't know much about it.
|
| The post says they dropped webtorrent in favor of HLS. Does this
| mean Peertube is no longer peer-to-peer?
|
| HLS is a codec or container format or something, whereas
| webtorrent sounds like a method to have peers stream video data
| to each other such that the server doesn't easily bog down under
| traffic spikes. That seemed like a fundamental advantage of
| Peertube over other platforms and I thought that's why the name
| was chosen. Am I misreading it or has this truly been dropped
| now?
|
| The post says HLS is also a brick in peer-to-peer streaming but..
| it's not? I've used it, it's a container format that encapsulates
| video data, something like MP4 or MKV, not something that sets up
| peering sessions. HLS data would rather be something that
| webtorrent could be gossiping, if webtorrent weren't removed.
| j_maffe wrote:
| > We needed to settle a technical debt : v6 removes support for
| WebTorrent to focus on HLS. _Both are technical bricks used to
| get peer-to-peer streaming in web browsers_ , but HLS is more
| fitted to what we are doing (and plan to do) with PeerTube
| miyuru wrote:
| My read is there are trying to do a distributed CDN with
| peered(federated) instances. They already did that on past,
| the instances will stream from other peertube servers that
| had the same content.
| pzmarzly wrote:
| This is very confusing to me too. WebTorrents are just torrents
| over WebRTC Data stream, I guess by "P2P HLS" they mean sending
| HLS over either WebRTC Data or Video stream?
| hutzlibu wrote:
| But if you stream from the server, it still would still not
| be p2p. SO either they implemented their own custom p2p
| solution, where the peers stream HLS to other peers, or they
| abandoned p2p.
|
| edit: the main FAQ on the website still clearly says, it is
| p2p. But now I am curious if they really implemented their
| own p2p solution, or if this is outdated.
|
| https://joinpeertube.org/en_US#what-are-the-main-
| advantages-...
| jelv wrote:
| "WebTorrent is a wonderful library that allowed PeerTube to
| be created five years ago. But due to many limitations of
| the library we decided to implement and default to another
| P2P protocol used in coordination with HLS. This new HLS
| player works very well, and does not have all the
| limitations of the WebTorrent player. It also allowed us to
| implement live streaming in PeerTube."
|
| https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/5465
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Thanks, now I am really curious to try that out and see
| how it works under the hood. What I need, would also be
| the option to ask users first, if they want to upload as
| well. People on a mobile connection should be able to opt
| out. (Quick search did not reveal this).
| booteille wrote:
| You can find this option in "My Settings", in the left
| menu.
|
| "Help share videos being played"
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Oh, that was easy. Thx.
| errhead wrote:
| This is what they use
| https://github.com/chocobozzz/p2p-media-loader forked from
| novage a while back. Nice explanation with diagrams at the
| link.
|
| It has worked surprisingly well in my testing during
| livestreams when you can count on multiple simultaneous
| viewers.
| bilekas wrote:
| Their source code is on Github, though took a min to find.
|
| I'm still going through it, but I suspect so far they are
| transcoding via HLS and then streaming it out over the p2p
| connection.
|
| The p2p connetion itself is interesting again, I suspect a
| regular websocket that is sitting on their express server..
| but will dig some more. Was always curious .
|
| https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/client/s.
| ..
| booteille wrote:
| Hi!
|
| There is a page on official documentation
| (docs.joinpeertube.org) (which needs to be updated to reflect
| the removal of WebTorrent but is still relevant on hls parts).
|
| Here is the one concerning us:
|
| " - If using the HLS player (depending on the admin transcoding
| configuration): - The player loads the HLS
| playlist using hls.js from the origin server -
| PeerTube provides a custom loader to hls.js that downloads
| segments from HTTP but also from P2P via WebRTC
| - Segments are loaded by HTTP from the origin server + servers
| that mirrored the video and by WebRTC from other web browsers
| that are watching the video. They are used by hls.js to stream
| them into the <video> HTML element"
| glenstein wrote:
| Am I right in my understanding that sharing the load only
| happens for people viewing the same video?
|
| Could there be a benefit to P2P distribution of bandwidth
| that isn't just at the video level, but perhaps at the
| instance level, where they choose to federate with other
| instances that also agree to share the P2P load? Or rather,
| to share the P2P wealth?
| errhead wrote:
| That's the p2n layer that already exists in PeerTube
| through the redundancy feature in federation.
|
| Federated instances that enable redundancy copy all
| resolutions of a video that meet chosen criteria of
| popularity. When a user views the video on PeerTube, their
| browser grabs the sections of the video from any of the
| PeerTube instances that have a copy, creating an ad-hoc
| distributed CDN. This covers the mid-level of popularity
| and keeps the hosting instance from getting slammed on
| bandwidth.
|
| If something goes viral, or during livestreams which are by
| nature simultaneous, then the p2p in the browser between
| viewers kicks in and reduces load on the peering servers
| even more.
| glenstein wrote:
| That's great! And along the lines of what I was hoping
| might be true. A question though: It sounds like you are
| saying various instances can help each other on a per-
| video basis, for videos above a popularity threshold.
|
| But what about the prospects of distributing the load
| that isn't localized to a particular video? As in, users
| do some peer to peer load distribution of any and all
| videos above the threshold, regardless of whether it's
| the one they are watching?
| adtac wrote:
| WebRTC isn't great for non-realtime streams where quality is
| much more important than latency. I hope p2p WebTransport
| gets standardised soon.
| rezonant wrote:
| I assume they are using data channels for the transfer, not
| the webrtc a/v streams.
| unhammer wrote:
| > also from P2P via WebRTC
|
| Does this mean the list of IP addresses of people currently
| watching a video is necessarily public?
| Animats wrote:
| PeerTube is distributed _streaming_ , not distributed
| _hosting_. The master copy is hosted on some web site, yours or
| someone else 's. If enough people are watching, a peer to peer
| streaming distribution system kicks in to provide more
| bandwidth. It's just a way to have many viewers without needing
| huge hosting bandwidth.
|
| Almost nobody uses PeerTube. Here's the "Trending" list on
| Hardlimit.[1] 217 views of the top video. A video I posted two
| days ago to illustrate a bug report is in 9th position, with 14
| views. This is pathetic.
|
| Maybe if they got Wordpress integration, so Wordpress sites
| could serve videos via Peertube, it might take off. And get
| more sites to support auto-embedding of PeerTube videos, so
| that just providing a link produces a playable video.
|
| [1] https://video.hardlimit.com/videos/trending
| goatmeal wrote:
| no need to be so dismissive. my instance of peertube doesn't
| even show up on that indexer you linked. lots of people who
| make different kinds of fediverse indexers end up excluding a
| ton of instances by accident or on purpose.
| apitman wrote:
| GP takes the time to upload his videos to PeerTube, which
| I'd say makes him less dismissive than pretty much
| everyone.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| This instance has been upgraded to 6.0.0-rc.2 if you want to give
| it a try: https://framatube.org/videos/local (see About:
| https://framatube.org/about/instance)
|
| Couldn't find one with stable v6.
| sertbdfgbnfgsd wrote:
| Oh I love that RSS is not an obscure feature like in YT.
| sertbdfgbnfgsd wrote:
| Is it possible to see someone hosting this, as an example?
| sschueller wrote:
| My test server you can reach at https://troll.tv/ . It has very
| limited federation as I need the content to pass the play store
| when I release an update to the android client.
| sertbdfgbnfgsd wrote:
| I'm listened briefly to some hard heavy metal.
|
| Where is this physically hosted?
| sschueller wrote:
| Switzerland, exoscale
| jelv wrote:
| Here is the curated list from Frama:
| https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances that is used for
| the serach engine: https://sepiasearch.org/
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| Yes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38444608
| moreati wrote:
| https://diode.zone has been running many years. It was the
| first peertube instance I came across. Edit:
| https://tilvids.com/ is another
| Avamander wrote:
| Removal of WebTorrent is sad, as it's still WIP in actual torrent
| clients (but those do move slow anyways, it's not WebTorrent's
| fault). So it was removed before it got a chance in an ecosystem
| that moves slow.
|
| It also takes PeerTube instances further away from being able to
| P2P without too many extra steps other than a shared infohash
| (and DHT). Video re-upload conflicts with such immutable
| solutions, but that's more of a positive. (Did you know the Crazy
| Frog uploaded years ago was VERY recently silently replaced with
| a different cut? https://youtu.be/k85mRPqvMbE?t=75 vs.
| https://hobune.stream/videos/k85mRPqvMbE) Reuploads should be
| reuploads, old versions should be separate.
|
| As a third order effect, it also makes it even more impossible to
| generate and find interoperable YouTube archives based on the
| same source. Archival and mirroring efforts all disjoint and
| duplicated.
| booteille wrote:
| Hi!
|
| Concerning WebTorrent, this techno was not used as a default
| since a long time. It's bound to how it was hard to implement
| Live Streaming with it (available since v3).
| jessehattabaugh wrote:
| Perhaps a fork is in order!?
| pzmarzly wrote:
| > but those do move slow anyways, it's not WebTorrent's fault
|
| Given how complicated WebRTC is, I wouldn't put the blame on
| torrent clients either. libwebrtc by Google is the de-facto
| standard, and afaik you need to compile all of it (including
| video and audio codecs) even though WebTorrent only cares about
| data streams.
|
| Even for Node.js, which should be an easy choice since
| webtorrent is written in JS, your choice is to either use wrtc
| (native addon that has to either be built from source or use a
| prebuilt binary - this is what webtorrent-hybrid uses - and
| this library hasn't seen an update in last 3 years) or electron
| (which bundles libwebrtc as part of Blink engine - afaik this
| is what webtorrent-desktop uses).
|
| I wish there was a better web API for P2P traffic - sadly
| WebTransport is not meant for P2P use cases, i.e. doesn't punch
| firewalls etc. Then we could see some real improvements done to
| P2P ecosystem, instead of everyone wasting time on figuring out
| how to build, use and ship libwebrtc.
| Sean-Der wrote:
| You have more choices then that for node.js
|
| * https://github.com/shinyoshiaki/werift-webrtc
|
| * https://github.com/murat-dogan/node-datachannel
|
| If libwebrtc fits your needs you totally should use it!
| Alternatives have existed for years though
| Almondsetat wrote:
| I still cannot grasp how supposedly tech literate HN users can't
| seem to understand the purpose of PeerTube.
|
| Do you have a company and do you want to self host your
| promotional videos? Make a PeerTube instance and embed them in
| your website.
|
| Do you have a conference and want to self host the recordings?
| Same
|
| Do you have an institution of any kind and want to self host the
| video material? Same.
|
| Nowhere it's touted as a rival to youtube in the popularity
| sense, just like you wouldn't call WordPress a rival to Twitter.
|
| And before the objections come: yes you can self host videos
| already, but which platforms employ the power of the torrent
| protocol to distribute bandwidth so you can run with minimal
| costs?
| Klonoar wrote:
| _> but which platforms employ the power of the torrent protocol
| to distribute bandwidth so you can run with minimal costs?_
|
| If TFA is to be believed, not PeerTube. ;P
|
| _> We needed to settle a technical debt : v6 removes support
| for WebTorrent to focus on HLS. Both are technical bricks used
| to get peer-to-peer streaming in web browsers, but HLS is more
| fitted to what we are doing (and plan to do) with PeerTube_
| georgyo wrote:
| I did some testing of peertube a little over a year ago, and
| in practice you never used the webtorrent stuff anyway.
|
| The webtorrent always had a static http seed which is how
| videos played fast, but that web seed was usually more than
| capable of serving all the traffic. More so, it _must_ be
| capable of doing so because not all your clients will be able
| to support webtorrent effectively.
|
| In order to use a webtorrent, you needed someone else to be
| watching the same exact video as you at the same time, talk
| to the tracker, create a p2p connection, negotiate chunks and
| hope the other side has those chunks.
|
| This just never happened. Even when I tried to force ideal
| scenarios it was just too slow to be usable.
|
| I did some similar experiments with IPFS and results where
| much better but got worse every time I revisited the tests in
| the months after. Then protocol-labs completely scrapped all
| the libraries I was using and it doesn't work at all.
|
| At the point I'm pretty uncertain if a p2p web browser video
| app can exist and be usable enough to have people actually
| want to use it.
| Kinrany wrote:
| I would imagine the main use case to be as fallback in
| times of peak usage.
| nisa wrote:
| > At the point I'm pretty uncertain if a p2p web browser
| video app can exist and be usable enough to have people
| actually want to use it.
|
| It's not webbrowser based but live torrent streams like
| acestream work really very well. Unfortunatly acestream is
| pretty shady and closed-source and associated with malware
| distribution and illegal sport streaming - but it looks
| like a modified python bittornado implementation. Porting
| this to webtorrent would be interesting as it would at
| least allow to share the bandwidth for live-streams. I
| assume from a technical point of view this is not
| impossible.
|
| I'm not aware of any open source implementations for the
| browser.
| treyd wrote:
| > At the point I'm pretty uncertain if a p2p web browser
| video app can exist and be usable enough to have people
| actually want to use it.
|
| People really need to give up on the idea that the browser
| is a good foundation for robust p2p protocols. There's too
| many restrictions and the way users conventionally interact
| with web pages means that running instances of the client
| tend to be very ephemeral, even if you design it as an SPA.
| WebRTC kinda works as a transport but it's still a
| misapplication of the technology.
|
| What PeerTube should do now is have some kind of opt-in
| peering between instances to mirror each others videos and
| provide secondary sources to share the load, and then later
| build some kind of desktop client for user mirroring of
| content.
| corobo wrote:
| > What PeerTube should do now is have some kind of opt-in
| peering between instances to mirror each others videos
| and provide secondary sources to share the load
|
| They've had this bit for a while:
|
| https://docs.joinpeertube.org/admin/following-
| instances#inst...
| treyd wrote:
| Oh that's fantastic! I hope this is supported on the new
| HLS-only streaming system.
| errhead wrote:
| HLS has been the default system for years, and yes, it
| works perfectly.
| infecto wrote:
| I think because many of us are not big fans of fediverse. For
| all of those examples you provided I would rather just pay for
| an existing service rather than burn time running PeerTube. The
| fediverse projects are interesting and glad people enjoy them
| but they are still not made for the masses (which I suppose is
| to the liking of those that enjoy the fediverse.
| indigochill wrote:
| > they are still not made for the masses (which I suppose is
| to the liking of those that enjoy the fediverse)
|
| I think more to the point, the fediverse is largely anti-
| commercial. You -can- advertise, but risk getting defederated
| if you do it in a way people disapprove of. And you -can- run
| a walled garden, but then what are you doing running a node
| that supports federation (this is one thing I'm still
| confused about with Threads, so I'm curious how that shakes
| out)?
|
| But the reason the web exploded (at least in my mental model)
| was because it evolved to support commerce, which then got
| businesses using it and users following to buy things online
| which was a lot more convenient than buying things in brick
| and mortar stores. So if the fediverse remains anti-
| commercial (which is the only version I'm interested in) then
| it will probably never get the kind of money that Web 1/2/3
| has, since every evolution has been funded by commerce, so it
| will probably always stay niche.
|
| There are also legitimate usability challenges, too, though.
| I expect those will be solved eventually, but not soon since
| there's no money in it and money has always been an
| accelerator of technical development to the point people
| assume tech is fast because they're so used to the massive
| amounts of money being poured into tech. Even when they are
| solved, though, I still expect the fediverse to remain niche
| due to the lack of commercial opportunity (and I say that as
| a big fan of the fediverse - as you suppose, I think it's
| actually to its benefit that it to some extent undoes the
| Eternal September).
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > Nowhere it's touted as a rival to youtube in the popularity
| sense, just like you wouldn't call WordPress a rival to
| Twitter.
|
| But I also wouldn't give it a name that, to the casual
| observer, makes it _sound_ like a rival to Twitter.
| glenstein wrote:
| I think this speaks to the frustration that OP has which I
| also do, which is that the commentary has barely moved even a
| millimeter past first impressions.
|
| It's not in the form of any kind of principled objection to
| the project of building out the fediverse, any technical
| issue with the choice of technologies, or any affirmative
| argument in favor of the status quo where all this activity
| being captured by increasingly enshittified platforms. The
| motivations and the objectives are play are wrestling with
| important questions, and the peanut gallery thinks that
| talking about the first impression of the name counts as
| participating in that conversation, which is depressing.
| seydor wrote:
| You mean a name like Tumblr
| immibis wrote:
| Mastodon is called an alternative to Twitter.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| And?
| amelius wrote:
| It's because HN folks know that keeping a service running takes
| time and effort, and they can't believe that this is somehow a
| solved problem.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| How likely is it that my company's promotional videos will be
| federated to the extent that it'll actually reduce my bandwidth
| cost by a non-trivial amount? Will hosting videos like this
| increase reliability or reduce it? I genuinely don't know -
| i've never used it - but it would be far from my first pick for
| this kind of stuff.
|
| > but which platforms employ the power of the torrent protocol
| to distribute bandwidth so you can run with minimal costs?
|
| You mean apart from S3?
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/API_GetObjec...
|
| > Amazon S3 does not support the BitTorrent protocol in AWS
| Regions launched after May 30, 2016.
|
| oh.
| w8whut wrote:
| beside that... using a hosted service doesn't _quiet_ qualify
| as selfhosted either.
|
| And thats also ignoring the elephant in the room called
| pricing. egress is pretty expensive on AWS, you'd at least
| want to use their video streaming service instead of s3 for a
| consumer website.
| freedomben wrote:
| Yep, using s3 to serve video streams is one of the worst
| things you can do to yourself. If you've got the money and
| need, Cloudflare Stream is pretty damn good.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| "Do you have a company and do you want to self host your
| promotional videos? Make a PeerTube instance and embed them in
| your website."
|
| If I'm a small company, I'd use something like BunnyCDN to
| stream my videos, because no one else will watch them so the
| benefits of Peertube are not there.
|
| If I'm a company and I'm large I should have no problems paying
| for something and again would use something like BunnyCDN.
| jraph wrote:
| It isn't easy to handle playing videos just with a CDN. You
| have to handle:
|
| - the different formats because browsers support different
| stuff
|
| - different qualities because you have to respect bandwidth
| visitors' bandwidth
|
| - dynamic / adaptative quality
|
| - CSP stuff
|
| - nice UI for the video
|
| etc.
|
| At this point, PeerTube handles all this for you and it's
| easy to setup.
| jasode wrote:
| _> It isn't easy to handle playing videos just with a CDN.
| You have to handle: [... various video delivery tasks...]_
|
| I think gp's "BunnyCDN" was shorthand for the video-as-a-
| service _Bunny Stream_ : https://bunny.net/stream/
|
| That "turnkey" managed service from Bunny would be more
| feature-complete for businesses than self-hosting PeerTube.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| +1 I should have made that clearer, thank you for filling
| in my gaps.
| acdha wrote:
| Most CDNs have services for that but also that stuff
| matters much less if you're not Netflix or YouTube. A basic
| HTML5 video tag has better UI than half of the complicated
| players, H.264 at phone and desktop sizes will cover almost
| everyone, and you'll be fine for most businesses,
| conferences, etc. You need to have a LOT of traffic before
| the money you're paying for bandwidth is greater than the
| cost of screwing around with complex infrastructure, and
| unless you're streaming live events at high resolution
| having a CDN serving cached content is going to be faster
| than messing around with dynamic quality or trying to
| provide dozens of codec / resolution / quality
| permutations.
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| I think when you "cannot grasp how supposedly tech literate
| users can't seem to understand the purpose of" something, then
| sometimes you need to that as a signal and reevaluate.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Reevaluate what exactly? OPs not wrong.
|
| The newer crowds are so entwined with current CDNs/Stacks
| that their instant dismissal to a released product is wrong.
|
| It's common display that unless it's using some $cloud $lang
| its an instant dismissal of "You shouldn't do that,
| cloud/saas does this!"
|
| Nowadays folk don't understand the requirements of on-perm.
| The cloud aids but isn't a it-all.
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| I don't mean to disparage the project or argue against on-
| prem, I've built and hosted too many servers for that.
|
| I meant to suggest maybe it's useful, but more in a niche
| way.
|
| For example the growth in popularity has been steady but
| incremental.
| halflings wrote:
| > Nowhere it's touted as a rival to youtube in the popularity
| sense, just like you wouldn't call WordPress a rival to
| Twitter.
|
| ... the first image on the article linked here shows a monster
| called "Videorapter" with YouTube, Vimeo and Twitch logos, and
| calls for donations to "help push back Videoraptor"?
| twosdai wrote:
| Just to add to the noise. Tech literacy doesn't always
| translate into product or business literacy.
| loceng wrote:
| Nor critical thinking ability.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| > Do you have a company and do you want to self host your
| promotional videos? Make a PeerTube instance and embed them in
| your website.
|
| That video is likely to end up blocked by corporate users. If
| I'm a company I don't want to have my audience of potential
| customers looking things up on their lunch break reduced.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > but which platforms employ the power of the torrent protocol
| to distribute bandwidth
|
| Don't visitors need to watch the same videos at the same time
| for this benefit to materialize?
|
| If so, it seems unlikely for the examples you mention (promo
| videos, conference recordings) and so I don't know that that is
| an effective selling point.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| Relatedly, Mastodon is a) too hard for me to sign up for and b)
| a failed experiment. That the former was being repeated by
| people here still makes me chuckle.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| https://mastodon.social/auth/sign_up
|
| here you go
| surajrmal wrote:
| What is the incentive to self host when embedding YouTube
| videos is free and easy? Peer tube might make it easy but it
| adds a lot of maintenance complexity and server costs. Is the
| avoiding risk associated with YouTube over the video control
| worth that cost? For some maybe, but most I imagine not.
| neltnerb wrote:
| I mean, I personally deleted every video I put on YouTube
| once they wanted to start putting ads into my media to
| monetize them when I put them up for people to see for free.
|
| Embedding youtube videos means tracking javascript for users,
| potentially ads for other companies showing up (if not now,
| later), it just doesn't seem sustainable.
|
| Peertube seems not so good because of the overhead of
| federating, but the upside of course is anyone on other
| services like Mastodon can just add comments... no need for
| yet another 3rd party vendor with their own tracking
| javascript to handle comment threads... and people can
| trivially share your video on other federated services.
|
| But it does have a lot of overhead if it's federating a lot.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _What is the incentive to self host when embedding YouTube
| videos is free and easy?_
|
| If your videos include any of the verboten topics, then
| Youtube is not free and easy. Also they can change those
| topics at any time on a whim, and start retroactively
| removing/striking/banning. They'll drop a ban-hammer on you
| for multiple "violations". For example, imagine you wanted to
| discuss Covid 19 in any non-CDC approved way during
| 2020/2021? If you mentioned the Lab Leak Theory back when it
| was politically incorrect, or questioned the efficacy of
| cloth masks, your content was removed and you were given a
| strike. Your entire presence could be deleted, and by the
| time it turns out you were right (or at least possibly
| right), you're already disappeared.
|
| (ftr I am sympathetic to YT because I do think there needs to
| be _some_ moderation. It 's a hard problem and I don't have
| all the answers)
| rakoo wrote:
| "Free (price) and easy" are not the values peertube is
| pushing forth, so it's not really relevant. Peertube makes it
| so you own your infrastructure, your data, and can do
| whatever you decide to do. You are not subject to foreign
| laws like with YouTube, you are not dependent on ads that are
| a problem by design, you are not beholden to ecocidal
| capitalism to display videos, you do not have to give more
| power to a company that employs children and refugees to
| build their AI. You are building a saner world just by not
| using YouTube. That's kinda hard to beat.
| babypuncher wrote:
| It doesn't help that their name heavily implies it is a P2P
| YouTube replacement.
|
| It also doesn't help that, at least outside HN, every thread I
| see complaining about YouTube has commenters telling everyone
| to switch to PeerTube.
| tetris11 wrote:
| Does it plan to use yggdrasil[0] on ipv6 side of things, or is
| that not even relevant?
|
| 0: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/
| rigelk wrote:
| Yggdrasil in the browser? Come on.
| sertbdfgbnfgsd wrote:
| OT and speaking of decentralization.
|
| Does anyone understand why exactly we don't have a _decentralized
| search_ for torrents?
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Torrent clients that provide search then lose the legal
| plausible deniability that they are not specifically creating
| software for breaking the law.
|
| Besides torrent search websites and big uploaders make a lot of
| money from ads. Difficult to include ads in apps.
| sertbdfgbnfgsd wrote:
| > Difficult to include ads in apps.
|
| lol what?
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Let me restate. Difficult to include ads in apps, when
| multiple excellent open-source torrent clients exist.
| xd1936 wrote:
| > We needed to settle a technical debt : v6 removes support for
| WebTorrent to focus on HLS (with WebRTC P2P). Both are technical
| bricks used to get peer-to-peer streaming in web browsers, but
| HLS is more fitted to what we are doing (and plan to do) with
| PeerTube
|
| Sad to see WebTorrent support go. I'm a big believer in the idea
| of Torrent over WebRTC, and PeerTube seemed like a great use of
| the technology. It really solves the "this video is going viral
| and I'm being hugged to death" problem. I haven't heard much
| about P2P HLS... Hope to hear more.
| hardcopy wrote:
| I recommend giving this recent video a watch on PeerTube/Mastodon
| if you're interested!
|
| https://urbanists.video/w/n7xyeV1kbW8mUKr4ncchhs
| cousin_it wrote:
| I love the idea of this project. But unfortunately there are
| economic reasons that make PeerTube unlikely to win. It's not
| even about the cost of video hosting, it would apply even if
| hosting was free.
|
| Imagine yourself as a popular creator. You can put up your videos
| on an ad-free platform where users can watch them without
| distractions and be happy. Or you can put them on an ad-supported
| platform and get a cut of the sweet ad money. As your videos
| become more popular, the temptation to go for (2) will become
| stronger. So the free platform will experience a drain of the
| most popular content, and viewers will flock away accordingly
| too.
|
| The same argument applies more generally to free vs commercial
| platforms. It's basically the reason why the internet sucks so
| much today. If there's a way to square this circle, I don't know
| it.
| seydor wrote:
| It doesn't have to be ad-free, just someone has to have a nice
| interface and set up the advertisement/payments platform. There
| s clearly a market for advertising outside google: all those
| companies that sponsor videos. In fact it seems youtubers make
| more money from that than they make from google
|
| So someone has to make the effort.
| rakoo wrote:
| You can't seriously put out your 1-minute theory that goes
| against more than ample evidence to say this is going to happen
| to peertube.
|
| The premise itself is wrong: the conditions of "winning" are
| not the same, to the point that it's not even useful to use
| that word. The metric of success for Peertube, and Framasoft,
| is how free the society and its communities are. Seeing the
| trend of the fediverse and of Libre softwares being used more
| and more tells me they are on a very good trajectory.
| zoogeny wrote:
| To combat your pessimism - I would point to podcasts. In
| general, these were distributed on free platforms. The content
| became profitable through sponsorships. That is, the content
| creator does a deal directly with a brand to include a spot
| within the content read out by the presenter.
|
| So, there is a clear and well-trodden path to monetization for
| content creators even on free distribution platforms. Of
| course, as anyone who watches enough YouTube knows content
| creators double-dip on commercial platforms by including
| sponsorships _and_ getting a cut of AdSense - so there is still
| a major advantage to also publishing on YouTube. But for the
| _sponsorship_ , the value of the deal is related to overall
| _reach_ across all platforms. That might give incentive for
| creators to release on multiple platforms, as long as the main
| commercial platform doesn 't enforce exclusivity.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I don't have data about how common various podcast monetizing
| techniques are, but my impression is that it's quite common
| for the podcast hosting provider to inject ads into the audio
| file _at download time_ , enabling them to target ads based
| on the downloader's IP address or whatever other information
| they have about the downloader.
| pipo234 wrote:
| I don't have stats either, but working for a company that
| offers the shuffles for that kind of monetization for
| streaming media (jitm packaging and remix, drm,
| personalized ads, live2vod) and enthusiastic Podcast
| listener I tend to believe quite the opposite. (Jit ad
| insertion is popular in video (ie FAST) but we barely ever
| sell this to audio shops)
|
| Dominant (tech) podcasts seem to favour focus on
| production, not distribution. Spotify went in guns ablaze
| and mostly failed. Personally targeting outside walled
| gardens often misses basic stuff like ads in a matching
| language. Content catalogue is billboard-irrelevant class.
| Nothing remotely near classic product placement or creator
| curated ads.
| repelsteeltje wrote:
| > Of course, as anyone who watches enough YouTube knows
| content creators double-dip on commercial platforms by
| including sponsorships and getting a cut of AdSense - so
| there is still a major advantage to also publishing on
| YouTube.
|
| Maybe add _for the time being_. I mean yes sure some creators
| double dip - they probably need the money. For the moment
| YouTube might allow that, but them being the platform, they
| might change the rules any time. It your viewers aren 't
| yours, and the ads aren't either, you're not in a great
| position to profit from distribution of _your_ content.
| seydor wrote:
| bittorrent is not a CPU hog. But peer-to-peer WebRTC video is a
| major hog that makes it a pain to share video with more than ~7
| people. Is this also true for peertube?
| simbolit wrote:
| IIRC from about 2005-2010 there were intense experiments as to
| using torrents for video streaming. But, again iirc, the results
| were that there was too much competition for the earlier blocks.
| This was because unlike conventional file sharing, streaming is
| linear and people abandon videos halfway. Ultimately the savings
| over conventional hosted streaming were small. And so Blizzard
| and Nine Inch Nails used it, but the video players didn't.
|
| Do I misremember something, or has something substantially
| changed since then?
| agumonkey wrote:
| It's now a long term, well paced project. I kinda admire these :)
| kudos
| Dwedit wrote:
| For some reason, the page's html header identifies the page as
| language "fr-FR", so Firefox helpfully offered to translate this
| page into English.
| entrepy123 wrote:
| How do people rate the ease of installing and administrating
| PeerTube?
|
| Is there a way to install PeerTube that is as easy as MediaCMS
| [0, 1] installation [2]?
|
| I ask because I evaluated options for self-hosted video
| (basically YouTube replacements). PeerTube is more mature/popular
| than MediaCMS by far, by the looks of it. However, I really
| wanted "easy" and ended up landing with MediaCMS for now. I
| somewhat wonder about the project's potential longevity, but set
| that concern aside for lack of "better" options.
|
| If PeerTube can be spun up (single server will do) just as
| easily, I'd love to learn if it's possible/done. I know this is a
| tech site, but I do not want to spend time administering and
| configuring stuff a lot that is outside the scope of my main
| activities. I want it to just work as much as possible, but self-
| hosted (bare metal okay).
|
| I get that PeerTube is maybe much more, but any thoughts on
| taming (perceived or actual?) complexity related to hosting
| PeerTube would be most welcome. Thanks for any thoughts along
| these lines. [0] https://mediacms.io [1]
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25507204 [2]
| https://github.com/mediacms-
| io/mediacms/blob/main/docs/admins_docs.md#2-server-installation
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