I use youtube a lot, and for a huge range of topics. I don't have any interest in creating an account on a niche-specific instance and I think the average user who doesn't even understand what federalization does even less. However, I literally don't even understand how to make an account on what, as far I can tell, is supposed to be the go-to instance - https://peertube.social. If there's no main platform where you can watch and discover general content then there's nothing that you can point new users to.
As a developer, if you want to host a niche video site, then peertube looks great. As a user, if you want to move off of youtube then I don't think this is how you're going to do that.
> Signups are currently closed, but you can get an account by sending a message (including your desired username) through the "contact administrator" button above. Please read the terms first.
There are plenty of video makers that have an audience that would follow them them to a new platform and PT is one way to do that and (possibly) keep more of the cut that YT is currently taking now.
As long as YT stays dominant they’re always going to have the advantage of availability and discovery so it’s honestly not worth competing for makers on that front.
I'm not debating you but just want to highlight the 1st sentence from the article of this thread: ", we have been developing a software to free us all from YouTube & Co for a year."
Whether the dev team really thinks PeerTube's architecture can replace Youtube for "all of us" instead of just niche content, I can't say.
Keep more of what cut? AFAICT, YouTube creators make money from two primary sources: YouTube ads and Patreon. The latter is independent of YouTube (i.e. YouTube doesn't get a cut). The former seems very closely tied to YouTube. How would an independent creator even go about sourcing ads to show on their independent site? Do they want to put in the effort? Would they really have enough leverage to get paid substantially more than their cut of YouTube's ads?
https://peertube.social/about/instance "Peertube instance for leftist and non-commercial content. Unlimited uploads (up to 500 MB per day)"
I never used youtube account so as long as video are accessible without login on peertube it's a small bother, but yeah v3 should have some OpenID like mechanism.
On that note, if we were to ever get efficient AV1 encoding/decoding in the browser it may be possible to eliminate the large conversion and bandwidth overhead that currently makes competition quite difficult
Also the actual content there seems lacking. Lots of non-English content (would it not be better to have some language filter?) and further down feet-tickling and NSFW videos...
I don't know why this came across so darn funny.
Being "distributed" over p2p/federated architecture opposes the end-user convenience of search/discovery/ranking/recommendations because of speed-of-light limitations. I wrote a previous comment about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17578332
Also, the previous last reply by posting2fast of a partial-centralized server doesn't really replace Youtube because his proposed idea creates new problems of spam videos and untrusted/fake videos. E.g. the central index of metadata says "www.johndoehomeserver.com" has a tutorial video for Algebra but when you actually stream the video from "johndoehomeserver.com", you get a spam video for Viagra instead of math instruction. Therefore, users will naturally gravitate toward the centralized servers that have both the metadata and the actual video content. This emergent group behavior of preferences would end up recreating another "Youtube"-like clone.
p2p architecture and torrents works well for things like pirated Photoshop or ripped Marvel Avengers movies because the users already have the content's title _preloaded_ in their brain and therefore a centralized index for discovery/serendipity of unknown content isn't necessary.
Anyone then could build a search index and build a good search experience.
To combat spam, instances should reveal up/downvotes to indicate quality, I guess your fake math video would not get much love from the community.
Speed of light is not the bottleneck in reaching 1000ms search response time anywhere on earth. Calling it a speed-of-light limitation does a disservice to your point, which really is that querying many peers for search results is slow, for reasons that have nothing to do with the speed of light.
> E.g. the central index of metadata says "www.johndoehomeserver.com" has a tutorial video for Algebra but when you actually stream the video from "johndoehomeserver.com", you get a spam video for Viagra instead of math instruction.
That some video content may not reflect its supposed category or title is not a new problem, is it?
Discover heavily sponsored content from content farms. As an experiment, even with an old account, start just browsing the content Youtube highlights. You will soon end with a recommendation page full of shit with 500K+ views using the same template.
I have a very old account and browse suggestions using my brain, not randomly. While not perfect, almost every recommendation right now looks like something I could watch.
Bicycling, civil engineering, cat toys, and weird metal music mashups, which are all similar to things I intentionally watched, but haven't watched.
LBRY is similar to PeerTube in open and decentralization, but all content metadata is written to a blockchain, which means everyone/anyone can access the index. This blockchain can then be searched (https://github.com/lbryio/lighthouse) or extracted to SQL (https://github.com/lbryio/chainquery).
Maybe they could implement a naive "view tracking" by having the client do small proof of work when they interact with content?
Similar to voting in NotaBug? https://github.com/notabugio/notabug
So the view count publicly available and something like the Google search analytics already available? Personalized data offers a huge competitive advantage.
Ideally we’d see blogs return as the curated content mediators.
A big THANK YOU to those who contribute to this project.
Still, some of the most successful systems are decentralized: internet, telephone, email, torrent, bitcoin et al, the web (caveat that DNS is centralized), etc.
All of these examples are basically networks of people. Do we want these networks operated by private companies?
Fast foward EOM, what appeared to be the same user created an automated system to create a new user, upload 2GB and move to the next. Peertubes basic ui had no way to mass ban, set filters, nothing. I had a monster bill and just unplugged the whole thing because the users were coming from a wide range of ips.
While I hope that was an outlier, the UI still leaves a LOT to be desired, and slower instances are painful to use
But the tech is really interesting and as a federated alternative I could see it doing really well. Best of luck to the team!
Normal people don't want to hang around in a bar that allows nazis, and nazis from everywhere go there because it's the only place.
Peertube solves the easy problem (infrastructure) and ignores the hard problems: search, discoverability, moderation, accountability, handling all the relevant laws.
Therefore their mental model will equate Youtube (a service) with Peertube (an application used by multiple services). If illegal content is on some Peertube, it's "on Peertube" and it drags down all the other stuff that is "on Peertube". Just like how big advertisers withdraw all their campaigns from all of Youtube when a single popular Youtuber posts a particularly distasteful video. They don't recognize the substructure inside Youtube's community because, to the public majority, Youtube is a monolithic thing. It's going to be the same for Peertube. (Unless Peertube has a better marketing department than behemoths like Youtube, which it likely has not.)
Edit: "a system where videos require manual approval by administrators before posting them" If you're seeing a ton of porn, then clearly the sysadmin's beliefs/views don't align with mine.
Although paid streaming has certainly taken a chunk out of its market share, there remain to be many things that can't be had on the big streaming providers. For that, there is always the p2p system with the deepest content selection :)
Matrix is envisioning a transition to a complete p2p system in the future, if that ever proves possible.
Some stats are available on https://the-federation.info/info , such services have been recently coined as the "fediverse", and ActivityPub is a standard that emerged out of the will to unify those services and make them interoperable: mastodon, peertube and diaspora are interoperable, AFAIK.
This leads me to two thoughts/questions:
1. Maybe successful decentralization schemes should be made providing for some peers that will be private for-profit? I know that (for example) IPFS encourages building services.
2. What could we do to ensure that small private peers will continue to be viable, even if some large for-profit peers will dominate? Of course such measures should be reasonably resistant to being used by bad spammy/illegal actors etc. ("Bad actors being bad" is always a handy rhetoric for overcentralization, but the problem itself should be obviously addressed.)
I think if you take care of the basic concepts, the rest is easy. Technical details about server organization are not really that important. The root problem seems to be that people have trouble looking past the app/program that they interact with.
It is still quite common for people to think of the web as IE, Chrome etc. Because it is for them. It is a legitimate thing to think. There are undoubtedly people out there that think of Gmail as the thing that they use to communicate with people. That is unless they again consider the browser as the thing that does that.
I have a friend who refers to the XMPP network as "Xabber" simply because that is the app she uses to chat with me. She is entirely uninterested in any details of the network. Suggestions that she switch to a better XMPP client are met with confusion.
Perhaps we need to teach the concept of a "protocol" in school. There are a lot of important concepts we fail to teach people these days. That is probably one of them.
Perhaps we need to start accepting that not everyone wants to know the particulars of the things that we care about. The need to teach new things is one of the big forces standing in the way of wide adoption of a lot of open solutions.
The users expected to set up servers should be tech-savvy people (not necessarily with any programming experience) wanting to do something for their online and offline communities. This should be like hosting forums, which is still a thing here and there. Or WordPress.
This infrastructure should be in place when some major event strikes that would drive people from centralized platforms (compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21480623 ). Of course who knows what will happen. But at least, we should have a durable infrastructure as an alternative to big corporate players, even if only some people will use it in practice.
It would be interesting if Alphabet would support some PeerTube-like initiative at some point, as an anti-antitrust measure.
BitChute certainly, if only in part. The website proper is centralized, but the video delivery is ran via BitTorrent. Currently the video quality is kept somewhat low (720p IIRC), but this means initial wait time is pleasantly short, on the order of 2...5 seconds.
I like https://datproject.org and the idea of https://beakerbrowser.com (with Beaker you can setup a website without needing a server)
Edit: There is also an Awesome Dat at https://github.com/dat-land/awesome-dat/blob/master/readme.m...
Not sure if you would consider it successful though.
Gun is being used successfully by a number of companies and projects AFAIK. Internet Archive, Hackernoon, NotABug.io, DTube (maybe they aren't anymore, not sure).
It performs better than webrtc in some use cases too
Git
> You could also imagine plug-ins to sort videos in reverse alphabetical order, or to add a Tipee, Paypal or Patreon button below videos!
Please don't consider or be tempted by those three proprietary platforms, I would much rather prefer donating using Liberapay instead.
Other than this, PeerTube has got huge potential and I would love to know what content creators (on YT or HN) think of it.
If I'm a creator and I've already got a Patreon userbase then forcing me to switch to another similar service just to use PeerTube is an unnecessary hurdle so I'll carry on the path of least resistance which is not using PeerTube.
That's a decision I respect, and I'm not saying it's a bad thing we have a pure donation platform. But I don't think Liberapay is a replacement for Patreon, because the economics and incentives for donations online are messy, and Liberapay doesn't help me navigate that mess.
I would love to have an Open donation platform that was more willing to get into that grey area between donations and purchases. Patreon isn't really that great of a platform, a replacement would be welcome.
Are you implying that there are literally no other payment platforms than ones that reduce to PayPal or Stripe?
A lot of universities are part of networks (e.g., the one I teach at, UNE in Australia, is part of the Regional Universities Network.) So they seem to fit the pattern of organisations that produce and host a lot of videos (course videos), don't like YouTube (we sometimes get told off for putting course videos there) and are part of networks that might like federated access to each others' video collections (while we mostly produce our own - it's not tv it's a teaching course and students usually want to hear from their teachers - sometimes we'll want to include something like a guest talk from industry).
Universities may be less interested in the bittorrent streaming aspect (they already successfully stream video and don't face the ridiculous peaks in demand because most videos aren't public) but ActivityPub to be able to search selected videos from each others' repositories could be interesting.
Many thanks to all the people who worked hard on getting PeerTube to what it is today.
I hope Peertube gains traction, but they're fighting an uphill battle when it comes to the centralized competition. The problem that PeerTube cannot solve is engagement and stability:
- Engagement: Unlike Youtube they cannot use a recommender system like for suggestions. Most Youtube views are from recommendations and related videos. - Stability: As a business or media outlet, I will link to a Youtube video but not a PeerTube video because I know Youtube will host it indefinitely.
If you want the video to stay up indefinitely (or at least as long as your company continues operating) you should probably host it yourself (e.g. on your own PeerTube instance), because YouTube might take it down whenever they feel like it.
Maybe they could recommend content by storing the content metadata/viewcounts/social graph in a FLOOD style network like Aether[1].
Then the content itself is just linked via an IPFS/DAT url within the metadata.
Also, a new platform doesn't have to solve every problem with the old one to be an improvement. Decentralized content delivery with a centralized recommendation engine might still be enough to compete if centralized content delivery platforms screw up badly enough.
I won't be missing yt's recommendations at all. If peertube can implement related videos only based on the current video and nothing else, that would be great though.
I find it interesting that the Madame Secretary episode I watched last night (from last week) dealt with the issue of deep fakes. Particularly how easy it is, if someone is willing to put in the time, to create and publish video showing someone doing/saying something they'd never do.
Decentralized trust and reputation metrics are going to be a big thing over the next decade.
A news organization could have their own wallet that they're sending currency from which acts as a verifier that it's them, then they store a hash/s of their video on the blockchain. Then you could have a facebook/twitter player that checks the hash of shared news video clips and could display a lock icon and message that says something like this video is verified non tampered from the CNN source.
Besides, I can’t stand articles that use the so called écriture inclusive. Either they write in the accepted, standardized version of French or they fork it but don’t call it French.
And no matter how much AF wants people in France to say "fin de semaine", they won't. A language is defined by the body speaking it, and standards bodies can really only suggest things to them.
If we want to fix the problems of Youtube we need a service that allows creators to independently make their own video distribution website as easily as creating a Wordpress blog today. It means something that just works without technical knowledge, while the creator has 100% freedom and responsibility about what is hosted.
The www is decentralized by nature, no need to reinvent crazy and complex things. We just need to be able to create a video-distribution-website as easily as a facebook page or a youtube channel.
Do any of you know open source libraries, or documentation on SVC for mp4, VP9 or AV1? I don't think ffmpeg supports this at all, which is a shame.
From what I can tell SVC adds lower resolution streams to the H264 bitstream so that devices with weaker decoders can still decode the video. This would increase, not decrease, the bandwidth.
>Do any of you know open source libraries, or documentation on SVC for mp4, VP9 or AV1
It appears to be defined as annex G in the H.264 (mpeg4 part 10) spec, so it's not available in VP9 or AV1.
The status quo is to use Adaptive Bitrate, where you publish streams at different quality levels and have the client choose which stream to use to adapt to network conditions.
Not if that part of the stream isn't downloaded. It's quite easy to skip over some chunks in either HTTP (range) or bittorent.
> The status quo is to use Adaptive Bitrate, where you publish streams at different quality levels and have the client choose which stream to use to adapt to network conditions.
This works well if you have a good connection (uninterrupted, so that you can switch to adapt to the available bandwidth), however you cannot progressively load better and better quality content, as the low quality one will be wasted. Moreover, if the connection is interrupted, you cannot fall back to the low quality content, as you probably haven't downloaded it.
However, that's just wasteful, as it would "just" be a matter of presenting data in a manner that can be better chuncked. And for adaptative bitrate to work well, you need a reliable bandwidth estimate from the start...
Luckily, network infrastructure is improving everywhere. But that shouldn't be a reason to be that wasteful, especially given that a) most of Internet's bandwidth is dedicated to video b) it would lower transcoding energy costs as well c) if everyone gets the same file, it's much, much more effective for p2p, such as in that case (especially for a moderate number of viewers).
Edit:
> From what I can tell SVC adds lower resolution streams to the H264 bitstream so that devices with weaker decoders can still decode the video.
It's more like organizing the data so that some can be dropped, and it gracefully degrades quality (FPS, resolution...) instead of dropping some images. I tried to explain it with my own terms there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17307277 before knowing the proper name.
Searching HN, I found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18045494 which kind of answers my question.
here's a startup idea for you all. :-)
Not sure how would I like it if I hosted instance, paid storage and bandwidth costs while noone even visits my site and views all content on site with better SEO.
I'm pretty sure PeerTube isn't aiming to provide an easy way to host an ad-supported video site. They want to be an alternative to YouTube, not an exact equivalent. If you need money to produce or host videos, their current suggestion is to ask for it: https://joinpeertube.org/faq#what-is-peertube-s-remuneration...
It depends who's running the specific server running PeerTube.
I'm not going to spend hours moderating that, and I certainly don't want to explain myself to police.
And if I don't federate it's basically less convenient ftp.
It sounds like federation isn't an everything-or-nothing approach. You can federate with a specific instance that you trust, and even in that case, you won't host any videos on your device other than what you upload.
Would like to see confirmation, but it also seems like instances can follow in one-direction. IE, I could have a private server that follows no one, but allow other instances that want to include my public videos in their search results to follow me.
That assumes I understand the details correctly -- the FAQ is a tiny bit vague so maybe I'm misunderstanding.
LBRY appears to be some kind of cryptocurrency thing. I don't know. Looks shady.
We need a centralized video hosting website, with freedom of speech values, with huge funding, which markets to normal people.
The only way I see this happening is a single bored billionaire going for it.
And then we need countless people on the internet to buy, install, maintain and replace the hardware that powers all of this.
That's not easy.
No thanks, I prefer to go to bars without Nazis.
It'd be interesting if an instance could add them itself - I think doing it dynamically would mess with Webtorrent support?
This is a valid point, the majority of [YouTube] creators want to earn money from their content, which would make PeerTube more appealing to creators big & small IMO.
Look I don't really want this to fail. Would be great if streaming a video would no longer mean sending free money across the ocean. But they will have to change their attitude just a tiny bit.
