[HN Gopher] PeerTube is recognized as a digital public good by D...
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       PeerTube is recognized as a digital public good by Digital Public
       Goods Alliance
        
       Author : fsflover
       Score  : 326 points
       Date   : 2025-12-09 17:08 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.digitalpublicgoods.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.digitalpublicgoods.net)
        
       | toomuchtodo wrote:
       | https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/
       | 
       | https://framagit.org/framasoft/peertube/
       | 
       | https://joinpeertube.org/
        
       | crtasm wrote:
       | and v8.0 released today
        
         | toomuchtodo wrote:
         | https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/releases/tag/v8.0.0
        
       | Imustaskforhelp wrote:
       | Can someone please tldr me what digital public goods alliance
       | means and how peertube can benefit from being recognized as a
       | digital public good.
       | 
       | From what I can tell, it is UN affiliated/related project where
       | basically it tries to make countries integrate these digital
       | public goods in their country's ecosystem/ work on these
       | (products?)
       | 
       | Is there any amount of sponsorship money that come with this
       | classification or more tax benefits?
       | 
       | Or does UN (thus countries who fund UN) itself fund DPGA?
       | 
       | I find this idea fascinating now thinking about it if that can be
       | the case, for these countries a few millions or even billions
       | collectively might not mean much but it can mean a lot towards
       | open source and digital soveriegnity in my opinion too.
        
         | pogue wrote:
         | I would also like to know what this means
        
         | yunwal wrote:
         | Looks like it qualifies you for UNICEF grants
         | 
         | https://www.unicef.org/innovation/growth-funding#:~:text=Gro...
        
       | ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
       | Anyone wanna share some cool channels?
        
         | ikesau wrote:
         | My brother's got an instance for canadian urbanism and
         | fediverse engineering: https://video.canadiancivil.com
        
         | wrxd wrote:
         | https://tinkerbetter.tube/c/veronicaexplains/videos she's also
         | on YouTube but it doesn't hurt to use PeerTube and get out of
         | Google's reach
        
           | ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
           | I was watching the rsync video and she mentions the scenario
           | where you run rsync with the remote as source, and the remote
           | drive isn't mounted correctly and you end up deleting local.
           | LOL
        
         | Animats wrote:
         | I put up metaverse rendering tests on Hardlimit.
         | 
         | https://video.hardlimit.com/c/aninats/videos
         | 
         | (It's discouraging having put in so much effort on trying to
         | make the Metaverse work, and then having the entire sector
         | die.)
        
           | ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
           | I'm happy that it did. It was a trick to get people to spend
           | more time online so that facebook can make even more money
           | off people's time and attention.
        
         | butz wrote:
         | Makers @ https://makertube.net/
        
           | ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
           | Are these many users actually uploading their stuff there, or
           | is this downloading from youtube and re-uploading?
        
             | butz wrote:
             | I assume content creators are uploading their own content
             | to their peertube channels.
        
         | soundworlds wrote:
         | Self-promotion, but the music I release here is totally free to
         | use in your own projects. It's all CC0
         | 
         | https://makertube.net/a/johnoestmannmusic/video-channels
        
         | ekianjo wrote:
         | Our channel here
         | https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/c/boilingsteam/videos
        
       | prmoustache wrote:
       | peertube is in that weird space where the software is good
       | technically but is overkill for home users and small entities[1]
       | and moderation, bandwith and storage cost makes it a bit
       | difficult and expensive to host large public shared instances
       | unless you find a way to monetize it.
       | 
       | I guess it is more an alternative for Microsoft Stream than
       | youtube really as it is more likely to be used as an internal
       | video communication platform for a company than a public video
       | streaming platform.
       | 
       | [1] if the audience is small, you are just fine sharing vids
       | using the html video tags
        
         | graemep wrote:
         | > if the audience is small, you are just fine sharing vids
         | using the html video tags
         | 
         | Yet people do not do that.
        
           | zamadatix wrote:
           | I think that's more a measurement of demand volume than
           | anything. It's a VERY tight squeeze between "I'll just send
           | this file directly to the few people I want to show it" and
           | "I want to show this to anyone" to the point no matter what
           | is done by those people it'll seem like nobody does that
           | unless it's also done in the other categories.
        
         | cyberax wrote:
         | I actually run my own PeerTube instance. I'm mirroring videos
         | in my RSS feeds from Patreon and Youtube there. And I also have
         | a handful of my own family videos.
        
         | giancarlostoro wrote:
         | > find a way to monetize it
         | 
         | If only there were a smart way to build a cryptocoin without
         | the environmental mess of miners, but where you earn coinage
         | from seeding videos. I feel like you'd want people to have a
         | desktop client to let you seed in the background then award
         | some sort of virtual currency that can be sold later. I hate to
         | sound like a crypto-bro but I can't think of anything else more
         | fitting for something already decentralized.
        
           | IncreasePosts wrote:
           | What value would this virtual currency have? Okay, someone
           | seeded some videos and got a token - why should I go and pay
           | them for that token?
        
             | BigGreenJorts wrote:
             | Maybe the tokens are how you access the content? Seed to
             | get tokens, spend tokens to get new content. If you don't
             | want to seed, you buy from users who did seed (or
             | resellers).there are many token based comic apps, I wonder
             | how feasible this would be on a small scale like that.
        
           | immibis wrote:
           | I seed videos to my other computer all day and I'm a
           | trillionaire.
        
           | JimmyBuckets wrote:
           | Here are some attempts:
           | 
           | LBRY: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LBRY
           | 
           | BTT: https://www.kraken.com/learn/what-is-bittorrent-btt
        
           | rapnie wrote:
           | GNU Taler [0] perhaps. They are funded by EU grants, and have
           | a funding program [1] going to stimulate the ecosystem.
           | 
           | > We are building an anonymous, taxable payment system using
           | modern cryptography. Customers will use traditional money
           | transfers to send money to a digital Exchange and in return
           | receive (anonymized) digital cash. Customers can use this
           | digital cash to anonymously pay Merchants. Merchants can
           | redeem the digital cash for traditional money at the digital
           | Exchange. As Merchants are not anonymous, they can be taxed,
           | enabling income or sales taxes to be withheld by the state
           | while providing anonymity for Customers.
           | 
           | [0] https://docs.taler.net/
           | 
           | [1] https://www.taler.net/en/ngi-taler.html
        
         | corndoge wrote:
         | From hosting a peertube instance solely for my own stuff for
         | several years, I've come to appreciate just how difficult self
         | hosting a streaming video platform is. As you say, bandwidth
         | and storage requirements are significant; another less obvious
         | one is transcoding. When a user uploads an HD video file, it
         | needs to be transcoded into lower resolutions if you want there
         | to be a hope of people streaming it. While Peertube itself is
         | perfectly happy running on 2-4 vcpu cores on a cheap cloud vm,
         | if you use those cores to handle transcode jobs it can take
         | huge amounts of time (like 20+ hours) to transcode even medium
         | length 1080p videos. So you really need either a lot of CPU
         | that sits mostly idle, or hardware acceleration, both of which
         | are expensive when purchased from cloud providers. Or you can
         | use remote transcoding to offload transcode jobs onto your home
         | gaming pc or whatever, which works well, but can be complicated
         | and a bit touchy to set up properly, and now you have a point
         | of failure dependent on your home network...
         | 
         | And then, people watching videos are used to the YouTube
         | experience with its world class CDN infra enabling subsecond
         | first frame latencies even for 4k videos. They go on Peertube
         | and first frame takes like 5 seconds for a 1080p
         | video...realistically, with today's attention spans most of
         | them are going to bounce before it ever plays.
        
           | hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
           | What value do you get in transcoding your own stuff? I have
           | plex transcoding disabled on all local network devices that
           | stream it and run into minimal issues (codecs on TV devices,
           | mostly).
        
       | roughly wrote:
       | I've been working to get more involved with, eg, mutual aid
       | groups and other forms of local capacity and resiliency building
       | over the last year - one thing that's stuck out to me is how many
       | of these groups' public face is an Instagram site. That might not
       | have been existential a couple years ago, but given what we're
       | seeing now with, for instance, Paramount making a rival bid for
       | Warner based solely on their coziness with the current
       | administration, it doesn't feel like the corporate media
       | ecosystem is going to be an even "squint and you can kind of
       | pretend" neutral territory for organizing and information
       | dissemination going forward.
       | 
       | For all that tools like PeerTube, Mastodon, etc are clunkier and
       | more limited than things like YouTube, Bluesky, etc, I think that
       | argument is increasingly going to be irrelevant to their value -
       | we need to start ensuring our capacity to go from 0-1 on media
       | distribution, not from 10-100 or 100+.
        
         | immibis wrote:
         | The problem is that everyone is reading Instagram.
         | 
         | I don't understand why. I made an account recently in order to
         | access a specific thing. I can confirm the app is 100% pure
         | garbage. The home feed is garbage and navigation is awful (to
         | keep you on the home feed). I uninstalled it after they were
         | caught bypassing the permission system to spy on you, by
         | binding localhost ports that web ads would access. The web app
         | is no better garbage-wise (but it can't bind ports).
         | 
         | And it's the subcultures that you'd expect to be the most
         | untied from corporate shackles, that are the ones most on
         | Instagram. I don't get it.
        
           | MichaelZuo wrote:
           | By definition someone's actions, if repeated sufficiently
           | often, define their real character.
           | 
           | You don't have to take claimed pretenses seriously.
        
             | fsflover wrote:
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wh
             | a...
        
             | roughly wrote:
             | This is a bit of a harsh take. These same groups use Signal
             | for all their internal messaging - by and large the will is
             | there, but they're not tech savvy and we haven't given them
             | viable alternatives.
        
           | ipaddr wrote:
           | Instagram is useless unless their are people you want to
           | follow or get people to follow you.
        
           | roughly wrote:
           | I think it's two aspects - one is that Insta started out as
           | the "not-facebook" platform and Meta's somehow managed not to
           | fuck that up, and the other is there's a massive network
           | effect - every tattoo artist, venue, and band are on
           | instagram now, and it all becomes very self-reinforcing.
        
             | timeon wrote:
             | > Meta's somehow managed not to fuck that up
             | 
             | But then they fucked up. Several years ago.
        
             | MangoToupe wrote:
             | > Insta started out as the "not-facebook" platform and
             | Meta's somehow managed not to fuck that up
             | 
             | Instagram has been synonymous with facebook for the better
             | part of a decade
        
         | TulliusCicero wrote:
         | > For all that tools like PeerTube, Mastodon, etc are clunkier
         | and more limited than things like YouTube, Bluesky, etc, I
         | think that argument is increasingly going to be irrelevant to
         | their value
         | 
         | Their value is going to stay limited if people don't want to
         | actually use them.
         | 
         | Technically proficient people may overlook something being
         | clunky if it suits their needs in other ways, but it's a harder
         | sell for the average user. And really, it _shouldn 't_ be an
         | issue. Good UX isn't trivial, but it's not especially
         | complicated or budget-busting either.
        
           | treyd wrote:
           | At least for Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse ecosystem
           | it does seem that people actually want to use them, and more
           | people every day.
        
             | jamesbelchamber wrote:
             | People moved on from Mastodon to Bluesky because it was
             | more responsive to user needs. I encouraged people to move
             | to Mastodon but then watched them move on.
             | 
             | It is what it is - but it's worth being clear-eyed about
             | what it is.
        
               | jmcnulty wrote:
               | It has actually improved a lot since then. The UI has had
               | changes, search is better, it has quote posts now. More
               | usability enhancements are under active development.
        
               | palata wrote:
               | Once "normies" have tried and moved away, I think it's
               | too late. Unfortunately such services don't get a second
               | chance.
               | 
               | It was probably hard enough to convince them to try once.
        
               | 7moritz7 wrote:
               | FOSS just does not have the aggressive scaling mindset.
               | Even success stories like Linux' game compatibility and
               | Chromium can be traced to just regular tech companies, as
               | opposed to non profits.
        
           | MangoToupe wrote:
           | > Their value is going to stay limited if people don't want
           | to actually use them
           | 
           | Nobody really _wants_ to use instagram either--there 's
           | basically nothing positive to say about the app or service
           | itself--it just has critical mass.
        
       | renewiltord wrote:
       | Is this the J D Power award for open source?
        
         | gnatman wrote:
         | the J D Great Responsibility award
        
       | vvladi wrote:
       | Video.edu.nl
        
         | ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
         | Is this run by the NL gov? I wish all govs would have something
         | like this. Unfortunately gov are usually about 1 generation
         | behind the state of the art in terms of understanding
         | technology at any point in time.
        
       | utopiah wrote:
       | Yeay, checkout my instance, been running it for 5 years now!
       | https://video.benetou.fr
        
       | glenstein wrote:
       | I've been wondering about "angles" to get interesting content on
       | there. I wonder, for instance, if one could reach out to a bunch
       | of bands and get permission for mirroring live show recordings on
       | peertube and be off to the races.
        
       | mfkp wrote:
       | I host a simpler youtube alternative based on
       | https://www.mediacms.io/
       | 
       | It's not a perfect platform, but generally does well enough from
       | my home server and a gigabit fiber connection.
        
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       (page generated 2025-12-09 23:00 UTC)