Framasoft should run a Peertube-as-a-service and pitch the platform to those who may be Google-averse or have a need to keep content on their own domain name (govs, institional orgs, etc).
btw I think this is what Eugen, et al, should be doing with Mastodon gGmbH.
It would only work while the service is not popular and almost on one uses it. As soon as they attract the attention of copyrights holders, they will be forced to implement the same type of BS we see at youtube. The tech might might be decentralized, but you lose 99% of the benefit of decentralization when you pay a company to host it for you. Whatever good intention they may have, it's all gonna go out the window they the owners are facing a decade behind jail and/or tens of millions of dollars in fines.
It's the exact same thing with most platforms that people think will kill youtube. The only reason why they avoided implementing all the crap we hate about youtube is that they are not popular.
Or the hosting provider can just drop you at the first sign of attack and it's up to you to migrate your domain and restore from backup at a new provider.
Genuinely curious, if nobody at all is making any advertising money from it, and hosting costs are decentralized (even if that concept is fraught in practice), will copyright holders and/or trolls be as aggressive?
Here in Germany torrent users have always been pretty aggressively pursued. The most common way is for copyright holders to upload their own content, collect IPs, sent out mass infringement notices and collect a few hundred bucks per case. There's an actual industry around it.
Unless you're in a jurisdiction where that stuff isn't illegal I think the answer is, yes.
perhaps copyright owners could be more willing to share their content if they had a place they could do so from, and could also monetize to their hearts content.
this would effectively cut Google out of the rent-seeking loop.
I like the idea. When you say "keep content on their own domain name," do you mean the physical bits are on my servers as the owner of the content, exposed by my custom domain, or do you mean the bits are hosted on PeerTube's servers and merely exposed using my domain? The distinction is important.
I live in Los Angeles. I want the city to archive its city council meetings on a video platform. Preferably, these would be available from a subdomain of lacity.gov instead of being available through youtube or another company of that sort (there are all sorts of namespace issues with today's approach).
The example here doesn't need to be limited strictly to council meetings either, the city could host all sorts of video on its own instance of the PeerTube site. I know there's currently a "LACityClerk" channel, but I'm sure you could find other Youtube channels concerning the fire department, LAPD, Department of Transportation, City Library, etc:
I (as a constituent) don't really care about the underlying hosting. Framasoft, seeing as how they are intimately familiar with how Peertube works, can sell that underlying hosting. The benefit for the city is they can centralize administration and control over this rather than just give all their content to Google.
Cool. So if I understand you correctly, you effectively want to decouple hosting (where the bits are) from exposure (how I as a user find and view them).
The Wordpress equivalent of YouTube, with discovery and federation plug-ins. Anyone can host a Wordpress instance, but you can also pay Automattic to host it for you (your data is also portable and you can move from hosted to self hosted and vice versa).
Cities aren't the only ideal client to make this pitch to either, there are all sorts of art collectives, educators, museums, even commercial interests who would probably benefit to move off of YouTube perhaps simply for the privacy and data collection concerns.
Agreed. Framasoft really needs to consider becoming the Automattic equivalent to Peertube, which could then spin up the revenue flywheel for further development. Donations have worked so far, but only work up to a point. You need dedicated engineering, product management, customer support, etc if you want to take on Youtube, and the vast majority of customers don't want to do this work themselves (in my experience). They want to provide a payment method and either be turned loose on the product or have their hand held.
I made some edits to my parent comment to further explain my pitch and what the benefit to my hypothetical example city would be if they were to be a Framasoft / Peertube customer.
Using PeerTube for hosting VODs from my past Twitch streams, gaming videos and programming videos. Can't really speak much for running it at scale, since for now I just link the occasional video to friends, but I have to say that overall it's a great project!
It's especially nice that the videos are optimized when you upload them and thus seeking them is way better versus just uploading an .mp4 to Nextcloud and linking that. You can even configure how many videos and threads you'd like to allot to processing videos, so even my old box with a 200GE CPU in it runs great (even if slowly), without the actual front end breaking or anything.
Though of course I assume that all of the federation features and whatnot are great, too. Here's hoping that the project has a bright future ahead of it!
My personal pet peeve in regards to dealing with video production would have to be how WebM-VP8/Vorbis (libre) feels worse than MP4-H264/AAC for encoding, at least based on the speed and file sizes. Maybe using kdenlive isn't the best integration of these, but I think it uses ffmpeg under the hood and therefore should be a vaguely accurate representation of both of them.
Examples of config (quality settings for video/audio, kdenlive options output, though I'm not sure about the full command it uses internally):
Though that's not related to PeerTube in particular but rather the formats/encoders themselves, somehow the libre one doesn't hold up as well. But hey, it's nice to at least have options.
Yes monetisation and ads would attract more people, but I want a YouTube without ads and without monetisation. It's more than them just being annoying, it changes the entire way people produce content and present it.
Well by definition it's not a business. Maybe it's a bunch of friends just having fun doing good tutorials. Maybe it's a non-profit focused on financial literacy videos for the public.
Who will bear the cost of bandwidth, servers and maintenance? What if it's not just your friends thats mainly using it but millions of people who rely on generous few to keep the lights on? What happens if somebody uses multiple IP addresses to download and drain the bandwidth with other users complaining? Who will handle those tickets?
If big servers were the only ones paying for bandwidth this argument would make sense, but the way the internet works right now is everyone is paying for all the bandwidth they use so there's not a priori a reason to assume the bandwidth is entirely unpaid for.
As torrents demonstrate it's not necessarily bandwidth that's a problem, it's mostly durability and discoverability.
Well it's peertube so bandwidth is reasonable. Most cheap high bandwidth projects rack machines in datacenters where you pay for the pipe, not the gig.
Servers and other fixed costs can be handled by donations or selling merch.
Tickets and high bandwidth cases may not be a good fit for the project, or may be on a "as available" basis.
You are misunderstanding peertube. It's not "Youtube but self hosted". It is peer to peer bittorrent distributed streams. You still need seeds but bandwidth is reduced.
I think it's perfectly realistic for such a service to exist, but I also think Peertube has the wrong idea. IPFS is a little closer to how I'd prefer videos being hosted, but I also prefer the sharding/peering of a Magnet link. Once someone gets all of that under one umbrella, you'd have a service that is ostensibly both faster than YouTube and more distributed/decentralized.
Now, can we convince Mr Beast to join this platform? No, but I don't think most people will notice a discernible dip in quality. Most exploitation-tubers would probably scuttle off to Facebook or Instagram, but I think most of the Patron-supported content creators would buy-in to a well made alternative. Key operand being well made though...
This unquestioned given of "where's the monetisation?" is almost everything that's wrong with the internet today. It's seen as "gown up" and realistic, but doesn't even question it's own wisdom.
We don't have to speculate with hypotheticals on what an unmonetised service would look like either, it's literally how things used to work before the corporate takeover of the web.
I would very much like it if they didn't, and we went back to people doing it because they just love it.
EDIT: Though I'd have to add that there are ways to get paid which don't have the same downsides (changing the content to make it easier to monetise). It's like how people prefer films that keep their integrity, instead apealling to the lowest common denominator.
What I'm saying is that monetization changes the way videos are made. They generally tend to be padded out, with intros, attempts at social engagement, ("Please like and subscribe, and let me know how you feel in the comments!"). This style is actively encouraged by YouTube.
How's the censoring story on PeerTube? The good kind of censoring, I mean. If I'm to use a decentralized service which provides me with content, I want to be able to sensor it against terrorist propaganda, child pornography and the likes. Does it offer a solution to that? Genuinely curious.
With the federated model, someone can host whatever they want on peertube, and there's almost nothing you can do about it (just like any website).
The idea is that you join or self host some home server, and the admin of that server makes sure to only show content from decent sources.
To this end the admins have a few tools. They choose the list of servers to show new videos from in the publicly available lists ("new videos" etc). So these will come from servers with a history of good moderation.
As a user, you can also subscribe to content from servers not specifically approved by the admin. If the admin finds it really offensive they can block that also. Then, as a user, you need to either give up on that content or find a different home server.
Obviously an admin is also responsible for the content they themselves host.
It depends on the instance you are on. I don't think I have ever seen child porn or terrorist recruitment videos on peertube, but only about half of peertube is english-speaking so I can't speak on behalf of the whole network.
Moderation depends on the instance. The sysadmins choose what videos to ban and what other instances to federate with. Most users choose a single homeserver that reflects their values on moderation.
Diode.zone is an example of a popular "heavily moderated" instance. It has some decent videos.
The less-moderated instances tend to federate more so I think a lot of the unpopular stuff gets drowned out with "popular" stuff (which apparently includes a lot of european TV news, linux stuff, liberal/libertarian rants, video games, public domain films, and "my little pony" videos). There is very little NSFW content at all because the default behavior is to blur the thumbnails and many instances just block it anyways.
Edit: actually I just found some sort of vlog channel run by nudists that didn't mark their videos as NSFW. LOL
But what can law enforcement do against decentralized networks with anonymous hosters? With torrents for example, the ISPs go after peers using their service but the content itself will stay up until all peers stop seeding.
My understanding is that peertube still uses a single host to store the data. It works like P2P only when there are multiple viewers on a video for bandwidth-saving reasons.
First off, thanks for making great software. This is state of the art stuff.
As I see it, the main blocker on adoption is the extreme difficulty of deploying this giant piece of software. The setup steps is long, complicated and requires implicit knowledge on production level systems, which very few developers have.
I've really smashed my head into this trying to get PeerTube to work and I just can't. Other software I deploy is always in a docker container. I don't care how complicated the software solution is, deployment is always a breeze if it's containerized. In fact, deploying docker contains can be considered a "no-code" solution for services like DigitalOcean and Render.com.
Docker PeerTube would be an absolute game changer.
Right now, PeerTube requires that I have a stable URL which can't change ever. Can this be changed? If it's docker, the actual url may not be necessary at all.
Please please please, make a docker deployment the top priority for PeerTube. It will multiply the number of developers that will be able use it and contribute back.
I don't understand what PeerTube is for, concretely. (I've read parts of your docs before, and understand what federation is.)
I would like to be able to host videos inexpensively, perhaps in an s3 bucket or on a raspberry pi. The free / cheap version needs to scale to at most 2-10 concurrent viewers (a more expensive version that scales indefinitely would be nice for commercial use).
It would be optionally password protected in a way that is client side encrypted (probably in a way that is transparent to the end user; such as via a key in a url, that loads a bit of javascript that fetches and decrypts the video).
That way, amazon or whoever won't accidentally decide my video is a pirated win95 iso or whatever. Also, the people in my videos won't (necessarily) have their images harvested for bulk survelliance.
I should have final say in whether the content is taken down (and own the domain name, in case I want to move to a new cloud provider).
It should be trivial to set up.
I get the impression that PeerTube meets zero of these requirements.
>I don't understand what PeerTube is for, concretely. (I've read parts of your docs before, and understand what federation is.)
I get the impression that it's for personal video sharing. Technically competent users will host their own personal instances and host instances for their communities. These instances are federated into larger social networks where users can interact across instances.
>I would like to be able to host videos inexpensively, perhaps in an s3 bucket or on a raspberry pi. The free / cheap version needs to scale to at most 2-10 concurrent viewers (a more expensive version that scales indefinitely would be nice for commercial use).
I do not think something proprietary like an s3 bucket would be compatible with Peertube, but I have not maintained an instance. The system works with webtorrent (a version of BitTorrent that runs over WebRTC), so it depends whether the concurrent viewers are all watching the same video or not (because then they will seed the videos to each other using webtorrent).
>It would be optionally password protected in a way that is client side encrypted (probably in a way that is transparent to the end user; such as via a key in a url, that loads a bit of javascript that fetches and decrypts the video). That way, amazon or whoever won't accidentally decide my video is a pirated win95 iso or whatever.
The fact that your VPS host is untrustworthy and temperamental is not peertube's fault. Consider a better VPS provider perhaps.
>I should have final say in whether the content is taken down (and own the domain name, in case I want to move to a new cloud provider).
>It should be trivial to set up.
These two things are in conflict. Merely getting ahold of a domain name is non-trivial, although I suppose you could operate it as a Tor onion service or something on the other end of zooko's triangle.
S3 itself allows for client-side encryption. Get a bucket with no public access and use your favorite encrypted messenger service or email to send a pre-signed url and decryption key to 2-10 of your friends.
... and then configure the bucket for https, put up an HTML landing page with a JavaScript widget; make sure the widget still works next year, etc, etc...
I get that it's not a big technical lift. I don't get why this doesn't exist in a polished form.
Is there a "recommended" feed of peertube videos where I can discover content? Or a upvote-like system? Or something curated? Where do I find trending and interesting content on the ecosystem?
Choose a homeserver you like and go to the discover or trending page. here are some big instances to try (many are european, you may want to choose an english language one):
A lot of my friends use diode.zone . That is like a more electronics-focused instance. There are views and likes, but mostly I just check my subscriptions. The popularity of a video depends a lot on traffic from external websites as well as how many instances federate it.
With the federated model, peertube isn't one site, and so in the model there isn't a way to get a list of all the content. It would be like getting the recommended list for WordPress.
I think the root issue for PeerTube is that video monetization has not been figured out. Established YouTubers won't switch away from existing revenue streams unless there's parity. New YouTubers will focus on building a business and will go where the money is.
Rock and a hard place. That's where I would focus on platform improvements though.
I see how this is true for programmatic ads. But do you think the same goes for sponsored videos? If sponsored videos are paid for X number of views why wouldn't that work for peertube?
Getting a realistic number of views out of a p2p service is... difficult. It's too easy to fudge. Youtube acts like a neutral party that won't cheat, because it has no reason to. There's no neutral party in peer tube to provide the count.
> Youtube acts like a neutral party that won't cheat, because it has no reason to.
Actually it has a huge reason to, and sometimes large advertising companies do get accused of such cheating. [0]
You're right, though, that getting accurate numbers is hard even for companies with large budgets to invest in stopping "fake" clicks, which usually involves all sorts of fingerprinting and surveillance tech.
Trying to recreate all that in a transparent and privacy-preserving way, across a network of nodes in different jurisdictions, and with no contractual obligations, is... well, if not impossible, then let's just say it's going to need a lot more blockchain to make it work. ;)
You laid out a really good point here, advertisers with big wallets are not going to bet their brand on a decentralized video platform without any centralized moderation.
And without those large advertisers your CPM will be extremely low which will just invite even more content aimed at capturing that market (spam, low quality videos).
People forget that decentralization doesn't work well for some industries, especially ones that rely on ad revenues (centralized entities) that rely on centralized control over audiences and content allowed on the platform.
There's a reason Youtube works so well and its because of its censorship and AI led moderation to appease the big advertisers. You can't rely on some regular joe advertising his Token on PeerTube to continue paying in crypto and neither can creators rely on PeerTube to be able to convert tokens on a third party exchange that is facing insolvency.
It's amazing to me how quickly people forget the on-ramp and off-ramp of money is still fiat, nobody is going to hold on to PeerTube's tokens for decades.
This is a manifestation of how we’ve sleepwalked a situation where Google probably should have fallen foul of antitrust legislation but haven’t.
They have a pretty tight control over video hosting, video monetisation and video discovery, making it impossible for an incumbent to enter into one of those markets without challenging Google in all three.
> They have a pretty tight control over video hosting, video monetisation and video discovery, making it impossible for an incumbent to enter into one of those markets
You're kind of putting the cart before the horse here in asserting that those are three independent markets. I could just as easily say that restaurants participate in the "food cooking, table bussing, and patron seating" markets, and that it's way too hard for my upstart kitchen to compete in the food cooking market due to Cheesecake Factory having such tight control over the seating and serving markets. But the reality is, maybe my cuisine just sucks, and the singular market won't entertain it.
Independent content aggregator sites that don't host the content they promote exist. You're on one right now. Independent video hosting that doesn't do frontend also exists, that's just any file hosting service. And independent video monetisation also exists. Many Patreon users don't host their content on Patreon. So yes, they are independent markets.
Independent content aggregator sites that don't host the content they promote exist. You're on one right now. Independent video hosting that doesn't do frontend also exists, that's just any file hosting service. And independent video monetisation also exists. Many Patreon users don't host their content on Patreon. So yes, they are independent markets.
Isn't this comment explaining why Google isn't facing anti-trust issues?
Look at how incentivising running an instance made cryptocurrencies a hot topic. Without some kind of compensation, contributing hardware and bandwidth to an idea like PeerTube means it will remain niche.
Likewise, cash for creators means better content and not needing YouTube.
None of this should utilize crypto may I add. Stripe and PayPal APIs are very comprehensive, especially for mass payouts, and split payment systems.
Sure, this happens on every platform owned by a third-party that gets enough users, it is a statistical inevitability. Even crypto wallets aren't immune to being manipulated. See Chivo.
FWIW, I've used PayPal since the 90s, I run a biz that uses it, clients use it every day and have used it every day for over a decade without any issues, and I have personally sent several thousand PayPal Invoices over the years. Automated billing also works just fine, far more reliable than charging a card that will eventually expire.
Further anecdote: whilst you point to PayPal, I've heard of more people having their bank account frozen for whatever reason, e.g. someone stole their card, suspected fraud etc. We can point to any of these things as a worst case scenario, but likely 99% of the time, it's working as intended. PayPal's support has also been some of the best to deal with when it comes to API queries.
I really love your idea, but... Here's my use case. Tried PT a few times and just couldn't. Here's why: 1) most of my computers are slow and while browser/js-based programs are a blessing for some, for me it's a nightmare, 2) most of the time my internet is slow and limited (paid traffic). So, while I can somehow download youtube vids at low resolutions, there's no way I could upload stream simultaneously. :( Anyway, good luck.
What exactly does PeerTube solve? People want to comment and explore libraries of videos. This is just a protocol for independent video sharing platform instances, HTML5 supports video playback.
A lot of the instances are poor quality, with flickering buttons. They outright look like the player ui’s that porn sites use….
Is there a way to explore content across all peer tube instances?
This also addresses the problem of bandwidth being super expensive and out of budget for small creators that want to self host. Users watching it are also uploading fragments, so if a video goes viral your AWS bill isn't gonna be $10,000 for bandwidth.
It also gives some decentralization because the original source can go completely offline, yet as long as there is a copy of each fragment on somebody's machine, everyone can watch the whole thing.
Never serve video from public cloud. AFAIK CDNs are not that expensive for video and combined with a spending limit I think self-hosting could be fine.
I usually try that if i'm trying to watch a video for free and I can't find it anywhere else. There are are servers that just re-upload documentaries and stuff.
I searched for a common term, "Linux", and of the top 5 results only one worked -- the rest times out before any content (html and all) loaded. On the first page, of the two videos available only one began loading, however playback did not begin for the minute or so I waited. Bummer.
This isn't a problem with the search engine, exactly, but it'd be useful if it filtered out unavailable content.
Interesting. I am sorry to hear that. You may be better off going to a large instance that follows many other instances and search for videos there. For example, kraut.zone seems to index many other instances:
Kraut.zone is fetching this guy's vlog from his personal server. But you don't need to visit this random guy's site yourself or run any of his JS in your browser. But if you are really concerned about security you shouldn't even be using JS in the first place. "Le Walled Garden" is not an exception.
I think a client that is able to subscribe to remote instances client side (without an AP account somewhere) would significantly improve the state of discover ability across peertube servers.
I think peertube needs to stick to the basics: a self hostable tube site server that federates over AP for comments and subscriptions.
They've got a great API, they've done fantastic work on live streaming, they have WebRTC implemented to distribute server load, and they've figured out searchability across multiple servers with sepia search. I don't see what needs improvement really.
Personally I think the 1 click monetization ad driven model is going to die, I don't think a lot of work should be put towards implementing something like this. People are moving towards a sponsorship model or patron model, and we are seeing all sorts of problems with the 1 click monetization with regard to patent trolling, content policing and the like, it just doesn't work out well. Of course with this transition comes a move away from monopoly on tube sites like what YouTube has, if someone is basing their revenue on patrons or sponsors they don't need to keep all their content on one website, peertube pretty obviously fits into this business environment well.
So I think as far as monetization, peertube should focus on tools for creators that help them accurately count their viewership and active subscriptions, and integrations that enable people to hide content behind a paywall for patrons, a plugin system for different payment methods would be fantastic.
Besides this I think peertube is pretty much feature complete, although some work could be done on decentralizing search.
I agree here. I think features that help the (general) patreon model are a winner for adoption. Maybe features that make it easier to host custom peertube instances for content creators.
btw I think this is what Eugen, et al, should be doing with Mastodon gGmbH.