[HN Gopher] PeerTube is recognized as a digital public good by D...
___________________________________________________________________
PeerTube is recognized as a digital public good by Digital Public
Goods Alliance
Author : fsflover
Score : 663 points
Date : 2025-12-09 17:08 UTC (1 days 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...
| yanokwa wrote:
| I run [ODK](https://getodk.org). It's a offline mobile data
| collection platform that has been an DPG since 2022.
|
| In practice, being a DPG makes your project slightly easier to
| choose in UN and government procurements. In most cases,
| they're choosing your platform because it's free, so it's
| unlikely that money or code contributions will come your way.
| It can even be a downside, because your software may end up
| deployed on an under-provisioned government server that
| generates a flood of support requests. Ask me how I know...
|
| You may also get a bit more visibility and become eligible for
| some DPG-related funding calls. But in my experience, funding
| ultimately depends on demonstrated impact, donor relationships,
| alignment with national digital strategies, and the ability to
| deliver at scale.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Thank you for your response!
|
| So I thought that having an open source project in DPGA would
| be really great but it seems that everything that glitters
| isn't gold like how you mention support requests etc.
|
| I have a question tho, What are the best foundations or
| labels (like DGPA) that an open source software can qualify
| for which might give it more exposure and funding
|
| Personally I am starting to believe it might be NLNET
| (https://nlnet.nl/) but what are your thoughts on it?
| yanokwa wrote:
| I think open-source leaders who want sustainable resourcing
| should focus on building obvious paths for people who find
| ongoing value in their project to contribute. That to me is
| the best return-on-investment.
|
| If it's a library, make it easy for developers to
| contribute code.
|
| If it's an app, make it easy for individuals/businesses who
| value it to pay (e.g., cloud hosting).
|
| I gave a talk about this at the launch of WHO's Open Source
| Program Office[1].
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/live/yNK27_6MrF8?t=1215s
| 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
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| ursinewave@tv.gravitons.org :
| https://tv.gravitons.org/a/ursinewave/video-channels "Roberta
| Fidora is a genre-bender from the Isle of Wight, UK, hopping
| between field recordings in space, industrial-tinged
| electroclash, guerrilla puppeteering and wildly maximalist,
| mildly-anarchic pop music."
|
| meljoann@tv.gravitons.org :
| https://tv.gravitons.org/c/meljoann/ "Meljoann is an extremely
| physically attractive Irish multidisciplinary artist. They've
| been supported by Pitchfork, Beats Per Minute, XLR8, KEXP, Dan
| Hegarty, Cian O Ciobhain, Jenny Greene and Tara Stewart of RTE
| radio, Irish Times, Nialler9, Hot Press, BBC's Gemma Bradley,
| Dummy Mag, HMUK and the Arts Council of England. She's
| currently releasing a series of self-directed video singles.
| 'HR', their anti-capital concept album, is out now. Their third
| album, 'Status', releases in 2025"
| 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
| RobotToaster wrote:
| LBRY did that, the US government killed it.
| 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).
| corndoge wrote:
| By "my own stuff" I mean that I use my instance to upload
| videos I would otherwise upload to youtube - videos I made
| that I intend to share with people. The usual reasons for
| transcoding apply.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| The funny thing is that YouTube has now enshittified to the
| point where people routinely DO wait well over 5 seconds to
| watch the video they actually wanted to watch while
| interstitials and other commercials are jammed in. Even with
| adblock enabled, the latest YouTube code won't unlock the
| first frame of the actual video till some period of ad time
| has passed so you just sit there looking at a black screen.
| This on its own definitely isn't enough to get people to
| leave the platform, but it's still notable how much worse the
| experience has gotten compared to a few years ago.
| llbbdd wrote:
| On what setup? All YouTube videos load and start playing
| instantly for me. Every time I've experienced otherwise in
| the last couple years, it's been my first indication that
| e.g. AWS is exploding that day
| alisonatwork wrote:
| I wonder if it depends what country you are in. I only
| notice it occasionally when the video won't play in
| FreeTube or PipePipe (which always has the pause at the
| start since the last few months) and I'm forced to open
| an incognito browser tab to watch, and then I realize
| just how many ads other people are being subjected to
| before they can even watch the video.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| You likely pay for YouTube premium if you aren't noticing
| adds
| llbbdd wrote:
| I do pay for premium but my impression of the parent was
| that this was independent of ads. The test I did in the
| other comment didn't trigger an ad for some reason even
| though I was logged out, which may be why it loaded so
| fast.
| moebrowne wrote:
| I bet you're using Chrome. Open a video in Chrome and the
| video is immediately playable, load the same video on the
| same machine in Firefox and you can expect to wait 5+
| seconds for the video to be playable.
|
| I suspect that non-Chrome browsers are being
| intentionally hobbled
| llbbdd wrote:
| I did a pretty low rigor test and just pulled up one of
| those 4K videos with the swirling ink in Firefox on my M1
| Mac and it seemed to load just as fast. The only
| difference was that it didn't autoplay the video (because
| I'm logged out I think) but I clicked it as the page
| loaded and it played instantly.
|
| I don't doubt at all that Google hobbles their sites on
| Firefox but at least on my machine they aren't doing a
| great job of it
| doublerabbit wrote:
| FreeBSD + Waterfox, or Firefox for that matter. YouTube
| really likes to strangle those who are not in their
| domain.
|
| If I set my user agent to something like Linux/Ubuntu, it
| loads just fine. If I set my user agent to some unheard
| Linux distro, it lags as the same with FreeBSD.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I shove 1080p mp4s onto a very cheap server and I get 2
| seconds of load time there versus somewhere between 1 and 2
| seconds on youtube. And looking at network requests, the
| first chunk of the file loads in well under a second so I'd
| expect something with the metadata preloaded could start
| playing at that point. So if peertube takes 5 seconds, I
| really wonder why.
|
| Is it inconvenient to transcode before/during upload?
| corndoge wrote:
| If you scale an instance you need to use object storage
| (s3/b2/etc). Fetch from object storage can occasionally
| have latency spikes.
|
| 5 seconds is somewhat exaggerating, I clicked through 10 or
| so videos on my instance to check and it's 2-3 seconds most
| of the time.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| We can exclude rare enough outliers.
|
| I've experienced B2 throwing a wrench into the dream of
| low latency, but some object stores are very fast. And
| more importantly you only need the first couple megabytes
| of each video to be on fast storage.
| corndoge wrote:
| I'm using B2, so maybe that's it. I have the instance
| configured to serve video directly from B2 rather than
| proxying it. Peertube has no facilities to keep the first
| few mb of each video local to the server that I am aware
| of.
| catapart wrote:
| Since you seem like you have practical knowledge here, I hope
| you don't mind me asking:
|
| Would it change the equation, meaningfully, if you didn't
| offer any transcoding on the server and required users to run
| any transcoding they needed on their own hardware? I'm
| thinking of a wasm implementation of ffmpeg on the instance
| website, rather than requiring users to use a separate
| application, for instance.
|
| Would you think a general user couldn't handle the workload
| (mobile processing, battery, etc), or would that be fairly
| reasonable for a modern device and only onerous in the high
| traffic server environment?
| corndoge wrote:
| > Would it change the equation, meaningfully, if you didn't
| offer any transcoding on the server and required users to
| run any transcoding they needed on their own hardware?
|
| I think the user experience would be quite poor, enough
| that nobody would use the instance. As an example a 4k
| video will transcoded at least 2 times, to 1080p and 720p,
| and depending on server config often several more times.
| Each transcode job takes a long time, even with substantial
| hwaccel on a desktop.
|
| Very high bitrate video is quite common now since most
| phones, action cameras etc are capable of 4k30 and often
| 4k60.
|
| > Do you think a general user couldn't handle the workload
| (mobile processing, battery, etc), or would that be fairly
| reasonable for a modern device and only onerous.
|
| If I had to guess, I would expect it be a poor experience.
| Say I take a 5 minute video, that's probably around 3-5gb.
| I upload it, then need to wait - in the foreground - for
| this video to be transcoded and then uploaded to object
| storage 3 times on a phone chip. People won't do it.
|
| I do like the idea of offloading transcode to users. I
| wonder if it might be suited for something like
| https://rendernetwork.com/ where users exchange idle
| compute to a transcode pool for upload & storage rights,
| and still get to fire-and-forget uploads?
| catapart wrote:
| Right on. Thanks for the consideration!
|
| I really appreciate you walking through that; it's an
| eye-opener! It seems like you not only deal with a
| considerable amount of five-minute-or-greater videos, but
| much higher quality than I was expecting, too.
|
| I also like the idea of user-transcoding because,
| honestly, I think it's better for everyone? I would love
| if every place I uploaded video or audio content offered
| an option to "include lower-quality variants" or
| something. Broadly, it's my product; I should have the
| final say on (and take responsibility for) the end
| result. And for high-quality stuff, the people who make
| it tend to have systems equipped to do that better
| anyway. So they could probably get faster transcoding
| times by using their own systems rather than letting the
| server do it. Seems like a win-win, even outside of the
| obvious benefits of "make a whole lot of computers do
| only the work they each need done, instead of making a
| few computers do the work that everyone needs done". With
| the only _slight_ downside of the "average user" having
| some extra options that they don't understand which cause
| them to use it wrong and then everyone hates your
| product. Yay, app development.
| corndoge wrote:
| I think offering client side transcode as an option, with
| server side transcode available for those who don't want
| to do it client side, is compelling. I would probably do
| it, as I have a powerful home system that can transcode
| much faster than my cloud host (I do use the remote
| transcoding feature in Peertube though).
| estimator7292 wrote:
| That's very much not what transcoding is for. You don't
| want transcoding so a client can render the video in a
| comfortable resolution. You _need_ transcoding to save
| bandwidth. If you want the client to do transcoding, you
| _must_ send them the full raw video file. Either end of the
| connection may not have enough free bandwidth for that. The
| client may not be _able_ to teanscode depending on size and
| format.
|
| You of course, can do this anyway. PeerTube allows you to
| completely disable transcoding. But again that means you're
| streaming the full resolution. Your client may not like
| this.
|
| If realtime performance is your concern I think PeerTube
| allows you to pre-transcode to disk. If there is a
| transcoded copy matching the client request, the server
| streams that direct with no extra transcode.
|
| To answer your question: shifting transcode onto the client
| won't improve performance and will greatly increase
| bandwidth requirements in exchange for less compute on the
| server. You almost certainly do not want this.
| corndoge wrote:
| I think GP meant making the user perform transcoding at
| upload time
| catapart wrote:
| Yep. As OP said: I meant the user could transcode the
| various versions on their machine and then upload each to
| the server. Sorry about the wording; I can see that it's
| vague.
| 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.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| People can have multiple facets of character? Or do you
| think that's not even possible?
| 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.
| stephen_g wrote:
| They're trying... They finally released a native iPad
| version of the app this year (after so many years), and its
| default pane is not the one that includes people you
| actually follow (like the phone app) - it's just reels, and
| you have to go looking for the right page in the menu to
| see anything from people you care about.
|
| It's very revealing about where they wish they could have
| taken the app already, where you don't follow anyone, just
| trust the algorithm to force-feed you content. Doing that
| too quickly would instantly kill it, so it's been years of
| boiling the frog.
|
| The 'Snooze suggested content in feed for 30 days' thing is
| already bad enough, if they stopped letting you do that
| Instagram would be insufferable to use.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >bypassing the permission system
|
| On Android you can't make a network service permissioned. And
| when you make a binder service permissioned it's up to the
| app itself to specify with what permission a caller needs in
| order to be able to use the service, or the service can
| choose to be unpermissioned. Either way apps on Android are
| free to host unpermissioned services that other apps on the
| system connect to. Chrome connecting to such a service did
| not have to bypass a permission since there was no permission
| protecting it.
| immibis wrote:
| What they were caught doing was opening some local port via
| TCP sockets (let's say localhost:9000) and then
| advertisements would connect to localhost:9000 to add
| themselves to your advertising profile even if you were in
| a private browser, had cookies blocked, or anything like
| that. Both Facebook and Instagram apps were caught doing
| it. Now, if they were formally caught by the legal system,
| they'd go to prison (,in countries other than the USA) so
| as soon as it made front page HN, they removed it from the
| apps.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >even if you were in a private browser
|
| Incognito mode is about not saving data or browser
| history to your computer. Sites can still identify you if
| you login or even just from your IP. It's not meant to
| make you anonymous. This is a common misconception which
| is why these modes show a big warning explaination when
| you enable them.
|
| >they'd go to prison
|
| That's for the courts to decide. The Facebook and
| Instagram apps may have already gotten consent from the
| user to share this information.
| immibis wrote:
| I don't understand your defense of Instagram. It's not
| even a very good defense. The fact that Facebook removed
| the code as soon as they were caught means they also
| think they would be in serious trouble.
|
| Unauthorized use of a computer is broadly illegal in many
| jurisdictions, including the USA federally. In Europe,
| misinformed consent is not consent. "Authorization"
| generally refers to a reasonable person's expectation of
| giving consent, and does not refer to any technical
| property such as Android permissions.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >as soon as they were caught
|
| They removed it after it stopped working due to Chrome
| rolling out an update.
|
| >Unauthorized use of a computer
|
| This is not a real thing. It's not like websites need to
| get your permission before they can use your computer to
| run javascript.
|
| >does not refer to any technical property such as Android
| permissions.
|
| I only brought that up due to someone else thinking it
| was related. I agree that the permission system of
| android is totally unrelated.
| 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.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > search is better
|
| Search is still awful, in part because a few people don't
| seem to want it. It needs substantial improvement.
| 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.
| getpokedagain wrote:
| Maybe this is ok?
|
| Many non open source apps do get critical mass but they
| eventually go bust. Emacs, git, Linux and I think even
| Mastodon have a slower uptake but do not seem to have
| such a high risk of collapse. While YouTube and Facebook
| et al seem to have an insurmountable moat and collection
| of users the reality is recent history is littered with
| boom to bust failures:
|
| MySpace, Vine, Yahoo all the way back to GeoCities.
|
| I would be patient and only worry if mastodon is actively
| dying.
|
| For me it's the only social media app I have installed.
| jahnu wrote:
| What is the aggressive mindeset of Bluesky?
|
| I have both Mastondon and Bluesky accounts and in my
| experience I find Bluesky is just simpler to use which
| attracted more of the types of accounts I wanted to
| follow. Nothing aggressive about that, just good UX
| resulting in a richer pool of accounts.
| 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.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Is this a "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded"
| moment?
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| More like texting, nobody likes the phone system, but
| everyone you know is on it
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| When texting took off, it was the easiest (only) way to
| send instant text based messages between friends wherever
| you were, even if the phone system is now heavily used by
| spammers and there are better options.
|
| When Facebook took off, every Myspace page was so full of
| garbage that they barely loaded on most people's
| computers, and Facebook was slick and shiny and easy. The
| real name policy made it super easy to connect with
| people you met IRL. Even if it's now confusingly slow and
| FB Messenger can't display your recent chats in the
| correct order for some reason, it was the easiest most
| obvious option at the time.
|
| I don't really understand why people use Twitter (at its
| best it just seems like a worse version of RSS), but the
| site presumably loaded quickly at some point and was easy
| to use, even if it's presumably worse now.
|
| And so on. They persist through momentum.
|
| Some things continue to persist, some things get beat out
| and die. But if you start off more confusing than your
| alternatives, at least compared to when they started, you
| won't get picked up in the first place.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| > I don't really understand why people use Twitter
|
| The honest answer is that it isn't the content(RSS
| feeds), but the combat sport nature of the platform. It's
| the only place where you can tell a billionaire any kind
| of awful thing you can think of. It's also the only
| social media that drives important people insane. The
| wealthier they are, the more insane they'll be driven.
|
| Facebook will drive your meemaw insane with AI generated
| ads of legless veterans being given a cake.
|
| Twitter will drive the richest man on earth insane. It
| will drive every journalist at any paper of merit insane
| by interacting with the insane billionaires. Nearly every
| journalist who uses twitter enough will develop delusions
| of grandeur that their brand of psychopathy is the
| solution to the nation's woes. Since their bosses have
| also been driven insane via twitter, it's the kind of
| writing that gets published. This writing will take the
| insane delusions of the insane billionaires at face
| value. It will go along with conspiracy and never beg any
| question that actually needs answering.
|
| It's truly a unique and addicting environment.
| wreckk wrote:
| Twitter drives them all insane the same way that we used
| to marvel at the way celebrities got driven insane by
| fame. The feedback is going straight to their heads and
| they are losing touch with reality isolated in their
| little bubbles the same way celebrities get isolated from
| reality through their wealth.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Instagram makes texting look positively motherly
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Typically crowds don't shove billboards every third
| person
| jszymborski wrote:
| There are some technical barriers to approaching fediverse
| platforms, but I personally see the main barriers being
| cultural.
|
| I'm a big proponent of Mastodon and still love using it, but
| the culture (especially early on) was exceptionally
| protectionist and lots of people got bullied off for very
| silly reasons. I think the attitude is less like a children's
| secret club and more chill generally.
|
| All this to say, I think this is will get better, but the
| best way to help the fediverse is to join it, be active, and
| be chill.
| zenmac wrote:
| >but the culture (especially early on) was exceptionally
| protectionist and lots of people got bullied off for very
| silly reasons.
|
| Had no idea that was happening. What makes your say that?
| danielheath wrote:
| I was there in the early days, loads of folk joined and
| their first posts got replies like *
| stop posting photos without a text description *
| stop posting like that without a CW * don't spell
| your hashtags that way
|
| Because you couldn't see replies from other servers,
| they'd get quite a few of these.
| api wrote:
| To me a fatal flaw in ActivityPub systems is that your
| identity is tied to a server. Yes you can port it, but it's a
| hassle. That means the server ops become these little lords
| over little fiefdoms and a server just dying takes your
| identity with it.
|
| This also means your reach and what you see depends on your
| choice of server. I very much don't want that.
|
| It's also confusing to non-technical people. Join Mastodon!
| But which one? How do I pick one?
|
| Technically speaking, Nostr is better. Your identity is a
| key. Servers are just dumb relays.
|
| Unfortunately it seems to be nothing but crypto bros talking
| about crypto, or was last time I checked. Nobody uses it.
| ezst wrote:
| > That means the server ops become these little lords over
| little fiefdoms and a server just dying takes your identity
| with it.
|
| Or that means that everyone can be their own little lord
| reigning over their own little server, to the point that it
| doesn't matter, because effectively, network nodes don't
| need to be "big" to be relevant in a federated ecosystem.
| I'm not so much into ActivityPub, but I run an XMPP server
| for my family. I'm not saying that this is for everyone,
| but close-enough.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| >everyone can be their own little lord reigning over
| their own little serve
|
| Only if it's simple for the average person
|
| And only until an admin of a big sever dislikes something
| you say and adds your server to the censorship list on
| fediseer.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Agreed, nostr makes a lot of sense when you read about it
| and then you go there... Once.
| nunobrito wrote:
| Just to say that I'm using NOSTR on my apps, most people
| using those apps don't even know about NOSTR at all but
| they all enjoy the quick login procedure without emails nor
| phones.
| greentea23 wrote:
| Any libraries you recommend? Do you host a dedicated
| relay for your own apps?
| fsflover wrote:
| > To me a fatal flaw in ActivityPub systems is that your
| identity is tied to a server
|
| In contrast to Instagram, Facebook and co?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| A handful of servers vs thousands.
|
| Are you on Instagram?" is easy to understand for someone
| not on it; they search for "Instagram", install the
| client app, sign up and done.
|
| "Are you on Mastodon?" doesn't work the same way as they
| would need to pick a server to sign up against, which
| seems like an important decision (what happens if I pick
| wrong? Do I have to pick the same server my friend has?
| And so on?).
| fsflover wrote:
| > Are you on Instagram?
|
| > Are you on Mastodon?
|
| In both cases, you have to share the user handle, which
| is just a bit longer in the latter case.
|
| > what happens if I pick wrong?
|
| You move to another server.
|
| > Do I have to pick the same server my friend has?
|
| No.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| You and I both know the answers to those questions; my
| point is that the average non-technical user does not and
| this presents significant extra friction that Instagram
| doesn't have.
|
| (this kind of attitude of asserting technical superiority
| and blaming non-tech users for not understanding it and
| not willing to bother figuring it out is exactly why the
| free/libre software movement achieved zero impact with
| non-technical users; you have to meet your users where
| they are... or a competitor will happily do so.)
|
| If you're not being contrarian for the sake of being
| contrarian, you are welcome to search my username and
| "mastodon"/"fediverse" to see my thoughts on it in more
| detail and why it will never be a serious competitor to
| mainstream social media platforms. Happy to engage with
| serious arguments.
| fsflover wrote:
| To me it just looks like some kind of fear of a new
| thing, because technically there is nothing really
| complicated about Mastodon. Still, I do understand that
| switching to a new platform corresponds to some non-
| negligible effort and one would have to substantiate it
| with sufficient benefits. We, technical people, should
| not feel superior but explain that the benefits are
| stronger than the downsides and switching is worth it in
| the long term, especially due to the ongoing
| enshittification of all popular for-profit platform
| managed by megacorps.
| abc123abc123 wrote:
| Moving to another mastodon instance is simple. It takes 2-3
| clicks and off you go. I think what you say was probably
| true in the past, but today, nothing could be simpler than
| taking your stuff to another instance.
| petterroea wrote:
| Users are also happy with clunkiness if it gives them other
| things they value. Ask any Windows user. Also, video game
| modding.
|
| My general experience is that clunky software is what made
| people tech literate, and now that everything has safety
| barriers and protects the user from everything tech literacy
| has fallen.
| cons0le wrote:
| Windows is also just convenience. Most use it because it
| comes with the computer
| moebrowne wrote:
| Or because don't know (or care) that they have a choice.
| Same with browsers. Most users will click the 'internet
| button' to get online
| dmix wrote:
| The main reason is the better alternative costs twice as
| much.
| voakbasda wrote:
| Wow. I didn't know Linux cost that much! /s
| bluGill wrote:
| Cost isn't only money. In the case of linux it is time to
| learn to use it (which is a sunk cost on windows: already
| paid it). Then you need to download and install it -
| again windows comes by default so a sunk cost.
| mdotmertens wrote:
| This is acceptable. We now understand that privacy-focused
| solutions are not appropriate for individuals with average
| technological literacy, and we cannot depend on companies
| to self-regulate.
|
| At present, the emphasis is on the potential of large
| language models (LLMs) and the related ethical
| considerations. However, I would prefer to address the
| necessity for governments or commissions to assume
| responsibility for their citizens concerning "social"
| media, as this presents a significantly greater risk than
| any emerging technology.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > Users are also happy with clunkiness if it gives them
| other things they value. Ask any Windows user.
|
| In that case, the alternatives are also clunky. I use
| Windows, MacOS and Linux regularly, and all of them got
| serious UX problems.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| > Their value is going to stay limited if people don't want
| to actually use them.
|
| Namely, in the case of PeerTube, content creators. Youtube is
| convenient because it comes with builtin monetization. You
| can probably expect loud objections (rightfully so) from some
| of them if you download their stuff from Youtube to upload it
| to PeerTube.
|
| If you don't have the content creators, you don't have
| content consumers and you cannot bootstrap a network effect
| (some services did bootstrap a network effect with plain and
| simple piracy, though).
|
| I believe the UX is secondary to available content. People do
| make the necessary efforts if they think the benefit is worth
| it.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| This situation is so frustrating to me, and despite my
| attempts, nobody seems to get why it's problematic. I still
| have a Facebook account from over a decade ago that I use
| occasionally to access stuff that is only visible on Facebook,
| but by the time Insta kicked off I had already decided social
| media was bad, so I never got one, and it didn't seem like a
| great loss because I wasn't that interested in looking at other
| people's photos anyway.
|
| Except now, apparently - and I'm still not exactly sure how -
| business owners and activist groups and event promoters
| communicate everything about what is going on via... photos?! I
| suppose it's the digital version of flyers, except you could
| see flyers posted up all over town, in all the record stores or
| cafes you already frequented, friends could hand you them when
| they saw you out and about, you'd get bombarded with them when
| you left related events... And none of those situations forced
| you to enter a heavily-surveilled gated community owned by a
| spectacularly wealthy foreign company notorious for enabling
| genocide, live streaming murder etc.
|
| I was at some event a couple weekends ago and an organizer came
| up to me saying that there was going to be an after and just
| check the Insta for the address, and I'm like... But I don't
| have that? Can't you tell me now? And because the site is
| login-walled even when at some point later in the day the
| thumbnail did appear, trying to click on it to see the details
| resulted in the login block and so I missed out.
|
| But I am well aware that I am a teeny tiny minority of people
| involved in this boycot and so I'm only really hurting myself.
| The way I've heard it described by activists is that using
| Insta (or X or YouTube) is like tacitly accepting that we
| already live in a panopticon and thus all resistance has to
| take place within full view of the authorities, it just needs
| to be smart and present itself as something that isn't actually
| resistance, or that works around censorship using codewords, or
| this, or that, "just like how it's done in China". And it's
| like, great, the new generation of western activists who
| actually still live in a society which grants them some civil
| liberties have decided they're all doomed to exist under the
| totalitarian jackboot and practice their resistance
| accordingly. After all, you can't build a movement out there on
| the actually free fediverse or the small web where there's only
| a smattering of nerds.
|
| I don't know if I should be depressed or just suck it up and
| get that stupid Insta account.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Facebook simultaneously makes it hard for you to access
| anything without an account (connecting the world?) while
| also having been known to change people's privacy settings
| from Friends to Friends of Friends or Public
|
| Zuck, you do not deserve to be spoken of in the same breath
| as actual internet pioneers
| Dusseldorf wrote:
| I'm on the same boat as you. Trying to find word about where
| the good local popup restaurants are, and apparently the only
| way to do it is to follow a bunch of random Instagram
| accounts. I finally tried to relent and make an account just
| to be able to read that stuff, but they wanted me to take a
| video of myself holding my government ID in order to prove
| my... identity, I guess? Not sure why that's necessary for an
| account I never even plan to post with, but it was enough of
| a barrier for me that I said nevermind. Now I just mention it
| whenever I'm chatting with organizers/proprietors, but I'm
| never exactly sure what to suggest as an alternative.
| staplers wrote:
| but I'm never exactly sure what to suggest as an
| alternative.
|
| Email newsletters are pretty easy and universal.
| wrxd wrote:
| As a workaround, next time someone forces you to use
| Instagram go to https://flufi.me/ to see public content
| without logging in.
|
| It's not the solution but I cannot get other people to stop
| posting on proprietary platforms
| duskdozer wrote:
| >flufi.me
|
| Naturally, gated by whatever Cloudflare setting it is that
| doesn't just block me but runs a CPU to 100% indefinitely
| unless I kill the tab
| jacobgkau wrote:
| Loaded in about one second for me (in regular Firefox
| with uBlock Origin installed, and Diversion running on my
| network).
| duskdozer wrote:
| It's depressing to me at least. I guess with things like this
| it works well if you fully buy in and don't understand or
| care about the privacy violations and psychological tricks
| they use. But even if I tried to ignore it, I just end up
| annoyed by the interfaces or workflows or stuff like that. I
| guess it's just the curse of having really non-standard
| preferences
| tegiddrone wrote:
| I have seen organizers get stuck in the dopamine loop of
| focusing on inspiring content that "increases engagement" and
| getting fixated on moderating trolls that it actually gets in
| the way of doing impactful work. I definitely on the
| depression train on this front. It's far worse than digital
| versions of flyers, people aren't incentivized to focus show
| up when they can just keep scrolling for their fix.
| iszomer wrote:
| I "trade" my content in kind -- garbage in, garbage out
| style -- combining my short form renders on my commute with
| songs I think will match the rhythm then publish as a music
| video.
|
| And I'm not chasing clicks, likes, nor monetization on that
| platform; I was fortunate to ignore FB's SSO with IG as I
| deleted that account a decade or longer ago.
| complianceowl wrote:
| I wish you were right, but you're wrong. It's a wishful
| thinking that I have been participatory in for decades.
| However, it will not come to fruition. Why? It's very simple:
| we, as a people and as a society, are not willing to give up
| convenience.
|
| Secondly, the corporate media have been straight up propaganda
| centers for decades now and anyone who has been paying
| attention has known that for a long time now. That is not
| something that we are on the edge of our seats waiting to
| happen. It happened a long time ago.
|
| Remember when CNN was meeting with the Pentagon so that the
| Pentagon could approve their stories during the Iraq War?
| Remember when the media constantly lied to us during COVID?
| Remember when they told us Biden's health was in pristine
| condition and that he was never better?
|
| Don't try and politicize this issue in one way or the other.
| Anyone paying attention can see that there is no savior on the
| left or the right. It's the corrupt politicians vs. us.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> We need to start ensuring our capacity to go from 0-1 on
| media distribution, not from 10-100 or 100
|
| And a dozen pirate networks stand ready to fill that void at a
| moment's notice. From oldschool torrent, to cyberlockers, to
| the dark webs of Tor and FreeNet ... there is an entire
| ecosystem of hardened video distribution schemes out there.
| Youtube was aguably born from piracy and fights in the courts
| to this day. The next thing, whatever replaces youtube, will
| likely also come from shadows.
| 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
| weberc wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, what type of hardware are you hosting
| this on? It's very responsive.
| 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.
| pstuart wrote:
| These are good alternatives to have, but a solid chunk of the
| "youtube economy" is about selling ad time so creators can make
| a living creating content. I hate ads as much as the next
| person but we need to recognize that the issue is not purely
| technical.
| mfkp wrote:
| Definitely, hard to compete with YouTube as a revenue source.
| That being said, my instance is mainly for digitizing and
| hosting old VHS tapes from my family so they don't get lost
| over the years. No need for advertising there :)
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| You're not thinking fourth dimensionally!
| cantalopes wrote:
| Youtube used to have quality content (dare i say, content of
| much higher originality and quality) in times when there was
| no monetization yet
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| That's now on my to-do list, thanks for pointing it out. It
| looks clean and simple but with some nice features.
| mpingu wrote:
| Good news! good Non Profits are always amazing!
| jancsika wrote:
| So what are the top 10 (or top 100) videos in terms of being
| actively replicated across the largest number of Peertube peers?
| I can't find this anywhere.
|
| Prisoner's Dilemma Bonus: I'll upvote all responses if _no_
| responses attempt to explain Peertube 's philosophy to me.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Content discovery on it is still difficult, mostly because of the
| bizarre decision to make federation whitelist based.
|
| I'm also sceptical that activitypub is a good fit for video, IPFS
| could be a better solution.
|
| It's a shame the US government killed LBRY.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| > _the bizarre decision to make federation whitelist based._
|
| Given the multiple articles I've seen on how federation can
| easily _accidentally_ DDOS mastodon servers, which isn 't even
| a form of federation that primarily uses something as heavy in
| data usage as video, I do not find that so strange tbh. And
| that's before factoring in malicious actors or even just
| careless ones like all the AI scrapers.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| I can see that's probably the logic behind it, but when your
| biggest USP is federation it still seems like a bad idea to
| deliberately hobble it.
| styanax wrote:
| IMHO based on my use of the fediverse, fundamentally it's
| about porn and curtailing unwanted porn in your domain. I'm
| a user of mastodon.social in the "wee US hours" (before US
| mods are awake) and run across a lot of hit-and-run porn
| being pushed to Trending (and I report, etc.).
|
| It's a thing, it happens a lot and Lemmy instances have the
| same problems to fight. Unwanted porn in my eyeballs is
| sadly a not uncommon experience until you've put in effort
| to set up blocks and filters on your personal accounts.
| Peertube being explicitly video based is a natural target
| for porn pushers.
| sschueller wrote:
| It's not by choice.
|
| I built the original android native client. Every so often I
| would get an update rejected from the play store because of the
| default instance content.
|
| The app is currently still in a pending appeal because of a
| NSFW switch already for more than a year. I have abandoned it
| at this point.
|
| https://github.com/sschueller/peertube-android/issues/302#is...
| Beretta_Vexee wrote:
| Service reminder: Peertube is mainly developed by academics (at
| least half of whom are French) to host educational content.
| Competing with YouTube is not their priority. Their priority is
| to be able to present a history course on the Second World War
| without having to contort themselves to avoid saying 'Nazi' and
| pass under the radar of automatic moderation.
|
| It's a great project, but it's not a replacement for YouTube, and
| that's fine.
| fsflover wrote:
| See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_public_goods
| anarticle wrote:
| I've been using: https://github.com/graham-walker/youtube-dl-
| react-viewer with yt-dlp to create complete archives of channels
| I like because I have so many channels I learn from I don't want
| YT to randomly disappear them. Mostly language, but loads of deep
| ML long plays and other things.
|
| I'm looking forward to trying out PeerTube.
|
| Start archiving now, the internet is rapidly getting user
| hostile.
|
| Drives are cheap, data is expensive.
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