YouTube got traction before Google bought it and before Google bought it they tried to make Google videos and failed, what peertube lacks is contributors
And discoverability, it still has ways to go on the social networking integration. I still don't know how to go from watching a peertube video on a peertube instance to liking/boosting it on another fediverse service, even if I wanted to.
That said, I have been following Peertube for a couple of years, and the progress has been incredible. It makes sense to create a solid foundation for video playback first, and a lot of people seem to not understand the extent of the innovation Peertube has made in that regard. Social media tools obviously come second after providing a solid service, and I have no idea it will develop in great ways in the coming years. :)
The only one I can find is TILVids, which has a few of the bigger Linux content creators but not much more than that. Content worth watching is really the one thing PeerTube is lacking, and that has to come from users, but that’s really a catch-22. You need more quality content to bring in more users, but you need more users to provide that quality content.
On top of that, not many unique users are going to be drawn to a platform that can’t provide avenues for monetization and which costs money to run on top of that, even with all the policies at YouTube all these creators whine about in every other video, which they only mostly whine about because it affects their monetization. So it’s either live with YouTube’s policies reducing your potential income or live with a negative income to set up or join a PeerTube instance: slightly reduced profit vs guaranteed loss. They’ll pick the slightly reduced profit every time.
Even further, the ones who get kicked off of YouTube and need to find an alternative or care enough about “free speech” to branch out are… mostly niche creators, to put it politely, and the unique content they provide to these alternative platforms tends to discourage other creators who still have YouTube channels from syncing their channels from YouTube to PeerTube in order to not be associated with those more niche creators. Other platforms such as Rumble and Odysee have similar issues. That said, PeerTube does have an advantage over Rumble/Odysee in this regard, in that instances that want to avoid that type of content can moderate and set up their federation to limit that association, but at that point they may just find it too much effort to put into bringing in too small an audience to be worth it.
The Fediverse appears to work well enough for user generated content that doesn’t take much effort or expense to provide, such as Twitter, Facebook or Reddit-type content, as the rise of Mastodon and Lemmy are showing, but when users have to put in the work and expense of publishing a video, the return on investment of PeerTube (in both money and views) compared to just staying on YouTube may just be too small to work.
But theoretically, if someone set up an instance to host their videos, they could serve banner ads right? Wouldn’t that at least partly diminish the monetization problem?
Framasoft is good at coding but not so good at marketing, usability testing or philosophy.
I want Peertube to be a thing but Its just not build on a study organization. It would be better if piped or invidious started federating like peertube.
I mean, they can start federating, nothing but time and money is stopping them most likely. Maybe you could drive an effort in their respective developer communities to get the ball rolling?
I want to use it but I don’t fully understand how it works. Does it use my device a storage for videos? Or does it only use it as a sharing device without storing the video on it? Does it only use the bandwidth on my device? Could someone please explain? I already read about it, but I’m still lost
I’ve been running my PeerTube instance for more than a year now so hopefully I can help :
if you only watch, it doesn’t use your device for storage, only some of your bandwidth if P2P is enabled. If you want to host content, e.g a video of yourself explaining how to design your own smart speaker using only FOSS, then you should setup a server which will need storage for your videos.
Happy to clarify more if you need. Overall you can watch content from video.benetou.fr and most likely all bandwidth will come from my server. You can not upload your videos there though (unless if I accept making an account for you, which I won’t). There are other servers though, public ones, which allow registration and where you can thus upload your content too.
Thank you. I just want to watch, no more no less and I’m ok with using my bandwidth to push the video around if that helps, since my ISP doesn’t have that bullshit cap. And by bandwidth we are talking Internet, right?
It is part od the Fediverse, so commenting, likes, following, etc. should regarless of what ActivityPub-enabled service you use for interactions (for example can comment from Mastodon account).
The “Peer” part of “PeerTube” means that the video player itself is based on torrent technology. It is not saved on your device (unless you decide to), just when you watch you also send the video to cut off some of the server’s bandwidth. Videos are not shared between servers, only the information that they exists, only on uploader’s server and between user’s devices.
It is not to preserve videos online, for that we have other tools like proper torrents, this is ment to be alternative to YouTube. TLDR Here ActivityPub is for statuses, Torrent is for helping the servers.
So, my device/bandwidth is basically a tunnel so to speak that helps push the video (that is saved on the uploader’s server" to others? So peertube only uses my Internet and my device’s CPU?
No. [I was wrong. In addition to being distributed between servers like I said, you can also enable P2P sharing to distribute the bandwidth even further.]
If you have a server that allows users to sign up, the stuff they follow/watch (you'd have to look at details if you want to host to see exactly how it's distributed) goes through your server.
The flip side to this is that, when your user uploads an extremely popular video (or you personally do if you don't allow signups), you don't have to stream every video to every individual user. You send it on to other federated instances that those users are signed up to, but if one instance has 100 users view your video, you don't have to send it 100 times. (This is likely less efficient than YouTube, because they can control exactly how load is spread between their delivery network with a comprehensive view of everything, but it dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for an individual to get involved or handle the distribution demand of a popular video.)
Just as a client, you don't serve anyone else. It's a website (or app) that works much like YouTube does. It's on the server side where the load is distributed.
It uses just the same as other video sites plus some upload bandwidth that is usually unused anyway. Also there is an option to download the video purely by HTTP without torrenting if someone wants to.
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