10 ms·

PeerTube: A decentralized video hosting network, based on free software

414 points by programLyrique 9y ago

bringtheaction 9y ago
> Please don't install PeerTube for production on a small device behind a low bandwidth connection (example: a Raspberry PI behind your ADSL link) because it could slow down the fediverse. Sounds like PeerTube is vulnerable to a sorts of denial of service attack from bad actors that would join and then limit the bandwidth to extreme amounts. Hasn’t this been solved already in other P2P protocols? Couldn’t they have built upon an existing protocol that protected them against this?
- amelius 9y ago
  Regardless of that specific problem, it would be wise to build upon an existing protocol (e.g. IPFS), because it would help prevent future problems AND it would increase traction of federated content sharing. The more people use a single protocol, the more all applications benefit in latency, speed, availability; but also in future development.
  - detaro 9y ago
    It wisely is building on existing protocols.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - maeln 9y ago
    It use ActivityPub for the federation part and WebTorrent (which just implement the BitTorrent protocol over websocket if I remember correctly). It is using already using existing protocol.
    - aiham 9y ago
      WebTorrent uses WebRTC, not WebSocket.
      - nathcd 9y ago
        This is the part that I find somewhat unfortunate about Peertube. This means that only ActivityPub clients that support WebRTC will be able to access Peertube media. Right now, I think this basically means just modern web browsers. It bothers me somewhat that an early, potentially major ActivityPub service is going to limit full functionality to the few existing major web browsers. That's the opposite of what I want from a federated protocol. (Someone correct me if I've got any of this wrong.) Regardless, Peertube seems awesome, and I hope we keep seeing more and more services built on ActivityPub.
        rigelk 9y ago
        ActivityPub defines federation messages server to server and client to server. It is not a protocol per se, and rather a message exchange standard, which could perfectly be used only between servers, as is the case with federation of videos between PeerTube instances, and more recently for video comment feeds, that can interact with the larger fediverse (Hubzilla and Mastodon so far were tested). In no way it defines how you access media. That is defined by the use of WebRTC, which is supported by a growing number of browsers, and anyway provides a fallback to direct streaming (HTTP), so that any browser can interact.
        nathcd 9y ago
        > and anyway provides a fallback to direct streaming (HTTP), so that any browser can interact. Ah, that's awesome. That definitely assuages my fears somewhat. > [ActivityPub] In no way it defines how you access media. ActivityStreams (which ActivityPub builds on) does define an attachment property for messages [1]. Is this not a standard mechanism for clients to access ActivityPub media (via the attachment's type and url)? [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-attachment https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-attach...
  - gnarbarian 9y ago
    https://d.tube https://d.tube uses ipfs
  - dingdingdang 9y ago
    This issue (i.e. not building upon an existing protocols such as IPFS or bit torrent tech) is persistent within the alt-net / distributed-net community and means that MANY services have fickle/hacked-together (in the bad way) feel to them. Even stuff like Riot.im (which is built on top of the Matrix protocol) has a sluggish/react-js-overload feel to it.. plus the deep&wide stack makes it incredibly hard to understand/trust the system in a meaningful way. Also, I believe that part reason for the success of Hacker News and Reddit is largely their extremely simple, non-intrusive and non-animated interfaces - making flashy front-ends for distributed-net apps is a lost cause. Bittorrent took off because the tech was right; not because of a animated web interface that could correctly scale to mobile.
    - Arathorn 9y ago
      So speaking from the Riot/Matrix perspective, this is a really interesting phenomenon which we are painfully aware of. For context: we built centralised comms apps before creating Matrix. So we have a direct side by side comparison, and reckon it’s about 6x more effort to do the decentralised equivalent. On the UX side, our centralised apps were actually pretty polished and lightweight - sadly they are gone now (hence in part Matrix), but you can get an idea from stuff like https://web.archive.org/web/20170102145839/http://blah.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170102145839/http://blah.com/. So, how come decentralised apps can end up with worse UX than their centralised equivalents? My theory is: * Harder tech means that more resources get focused on the decentralisation bit * Harder to find UI/UX designers who understand the decentralisation requirements (although this is changing thanks to blockchain hype) * Decentralised early users tend to be geeky and push the product in a geeky direction But the key thing is that pre-decentralisation we probably had a 1:3 ratio of backend to frontend work. Then in Matrix it’s like 1:1, and the dilution on the frontend notices. That said, this can be fixed, and obviously it’s critical to Riot to fix it. We’ve contracted a proper UI/UX designer at last a few weeks ago and are hunting for more frontend devs. And evidence it can work: a good example of a decentralised project with decent UX is Mastodon.
      - Arathorn 9y ago
        (just to be clear: I’m responding to the “UX of decentralised apps is crap” bit of the parent post rather than “build on existing protocols”, given peertube and riot and mastodon etc all build on well defined protocols.)
- kuzko_topia 9y ago
  What's more it's a bit sad that only a small part of the content can't be served by those small peers making them useful instead of harmful to the network...
- maeln 9y ago
  The Tor network does some network metric on each Tor relay and give them a weight to each node based on their performance. It's not flawless but implementing something similar in WebTorrent might be possible and mitigate this form of attacks.
  - woah 9y ago
    If their goal is to be "decentralized" that might not fit the bill (depending on your definition of decentralized). I wouldn't consider Tor to be decentralized.
- nugi 9y ago
  There goes my primary use case. Small devices behind crappy connections is most people streaming video ime.
beedrillzzzzz 9y ago
https://D.tube/ https://D.tube/ is another one!
- hbakhtiyor 9y ago
  not open source!
  - detaro 9y ago
    what parts are missing?
    - jacobush 9y ago
      UX
- CrashOveride 9y ago
  Much LOVE to D.tube A true alternative for monetizing your content. (atleast thats the impression i get) and isnt ipfs tottaly opensource? (the file system where the content is hosted)
saverio-murgia 9y ago
Does this support ads and if not, what's the value proposition for content creatos other than maybe less censorship?
- prepend 9y ago
  If it’s low cost to run a server (<$100/year) then just the censorship (or maybe just fuckaroundary and bother is a better term than censorship). I got a simple Linux host on a cpanel admined shared server a long time ago for a random purpose. But it’s been very useful just to host stuff rather than bother with whatever free service exists. It’s not strong enough to host this or mastodon or other peer networks, but I think it would be worthwhile for me to pay to have this flexibility.
- hanbura 9y ago
  An increasing number of subcommunities have learned to rely on sponsors and patreon because YouTube demonetizes most of their videos. Meanwhile YouTube's three strike system is a constant threat to channels operating on fair use (reviewers etc) or producing content that YouTube's algorithms flag as showing content violating guidelines. There's plenty of content creators that would love to go anywhere else, but all alternatives fail to attract viewers.
- lakechfoma 9y ago
  All of the creators I follow either do it for free and fun, or some combination of patreon plugs and trinkets you can buy from them. Ads are not the only way for creators to find value in creating. Youtube became a crap platform in the search for the $$. Things like recommended videos used to be related to the video you just watched but now its whatever fail army is. I would like to see a new platform where monetization via ads and UX abuse doesn't exist because the experience is just awful now.
- alex_duf 9y ago
  Not that I encourage it, but you can create your own server and pay it with ads. Each server their own rules
- jhauris 9y ago
daveid 9y ago
PeerTube also federates using the W3C ActivityPub protocol, so Mastodon users can follow PeerTube channels and comment on videos as they would respond to other statuses :)
- Arkanosis 9y ago
  Exactly: https://peertube.cpy.re/videos/watch/da2b08d4-a242-4170-b32a-4ec8cbdca701 https://peertube.cpy.re/videos/watch/da2b08d4-a242-4170-b32a...
  - alex_duf 9y ago
    really nice!
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  This is awesome to see, I feel like a decentralized social format is really starting to come together, now that there's several reasonably popular pieces of software using the same compatible protocol.
- swiley 9y ago
  That's freaking awesome! I'm going to have to read more about ActivityPub!
0x4f3759df 9y ago
There's also bitchute, d.tube, dlive.io, the latter two being on the steem network. dlive supports live streaming so I think its gaining a lot of traction.
- drngdds 9y ago
  Bitchute? They really didn't think that name through, huh
- hbakhtiyor 9y ago
  they are not open source
- kawfey 9y ago
  add LBRY.io to the list. I wonder if anyone's developing a syndicator for posting their videos to all of these sites. It's getting pretty difficult to 1) keep awareness of every venue as they come out and 2) manually syndicate content across all of them too. Having all these d_apps installed on a single PC take a toll on resources too.
tom_mellior 9y ago
I clicked around some videos on some random server I chose from the list, and in many cases a video's preview picture has nothing to do with the video. As in, it never visibly appears in the actual video. Or it's the very first frame and not representative of the rest of the video. That opens up all sorts of clickbait/abuse issues. I don't know how YouTube deals with generating a representative preview image, but the result is certainly better.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  This was an issue at one point with YouTube as well. Heck, it's still an issue, with most thumbnails designed with emoting people, arrows, and words designed to increase click rates. However, this kind of things _does_ increase click rates for these videos. For a platform designed to get views, is that really a bad thing?
  - tom_mellior 9y ago
    It will not get views if users feel ripped off.
    - johndough 9y ago
      The users will feel ripped off after they have seen the video, in which case it is already too late.
      - tom_mellior 9y ago
        The users will feel serially ripped off after they have seen three such videos, in which case it is already too late. Too late to convince them to ever come back to a platform with such an offering.
        jobigoud 9y ago
        > Too late to convince them to ever come back to a platform with such an offering It's the exact same problem on YouTube with clickbait thumbnails and titles. It doesn't frustrate people off the entire platform, just the channels that are repeat offenders.
nyxxie 9y ago
I've always wondered why people want to decentralize hosting of content. This, IMO, is a much harder task which leads to such restrictions as > Please don't install PeerTube for production on a small device behind a low bandwidth connection (example: a Raspberry PI behind your ADSL link) because it could slow down the fediverse. Why not simply decentralize the content index and let other people worry about storage for videos? When I go to Youtube, I'm there because it's a platform where I can find a large variety of entertainment without putting any effort into it, not because Google is hosting them. I'm picturing the backend here being a decentralized database of video metadata (including where and how it is hosted), and some sort of frontend where every video in the index can be viewed through a unified player. If we're trying to give oppressed people the ability to host their controversial content, just have them host it behind Tor or over the bittorrent network and then add it to the index. Otherwise we could just let people link to videos on other video hosting sites or on their own personal websites.
- ManlyBread 9y ago
  Content discovery sucks nowadays. The search results bring up mostly bigger channels instead of relevant ones. Recommendations are based on view history and likes, which means you get more of the same instead of someting new. I constantly get videos I've seen already in my recommendations, these stay there for weeks until I click on them. The major feature I used for discovery is long gone - it was the ability to add video responses, which allowed me to not only find small, niche channels with great stuff but also built a sense of community. I don't get why did they remove this,but ever since they did the site just never felt the same.
  - james-skemp 9y ago
    I don't know if it actually does anything (yet), but you can hide videos from results. I mainly use it for videos I'm not interested in instead of ones that I've already seen (albeit it a while ago).
  - nyxxie 9y ago
    I'm not sure there's an algorithm in the world that would be able to recommend videos that aren't similar to the ones you currently watch but that you would still like. I think the best route is to just reccomend videos that are similar and rely on external sources (friend/community recommendations, Reddit, etc) for lateral movement across genres.
arsalanb 9y ago
Youtube is more than just a tool, it's a store of culture almost. Imagine Youtube suddenly disappeared. A wealth of information and video would be lost, like rare videos which are only on youtube. Sure, someone somewhere will have a copy but on the whole you can't access them seamlessly like you can with Youtube. Of late I have began to think this is too much power for a company to hold. I trust Youtube to not fuck up so bad that all videos are gone, but I would sleep a bit sounder at night if it was decentralised.
- phkahler 9y ago
  If you're worried about rare videos going away, don't just watch them on YouTube. Archive them yourself. You are the one who sees value in them, so do your part to keep their storage decentralized. Just a thought.
  - sinatra 9y ago
    I never understand this “If you’re so worried, take action” argument. We all have concerns about thousands of things. I’m concerned about kids’ education in the whole world, I’m concerned about animals getting killed for fun, I’m concerned about Comcast being my only realistic ISP, I’m concerned about thousands more such things. I should be able to have and show concern even if I can’t actively do much about them due to my focus on other, even greater concerns (even if they’re selfish concerns like taking care of my family).
    - superkuh 9y ago
      You don't understand him suggesting a completely straightforward and easy solution to the problem? If you don't want a solution and just want to talk about it that's fine. But his comment was productive and useful. I use youtube-dl almost daily to archive interesting videos locally.
      - anigbrowl 9y ago
        a completely straightforward and easy solution to the problem But it isn't, due to the lack of coordination or standards. That's why protocols get established in the first place; without them, valuable stuff tends to get lost.
darkstar999 9y ago
More ISPs are going with bandwidth caps. I don't think things like this will take off.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  It's a challenge, but it might be helped along by mesh networking.
  - woah 9y ago
    www.altheamesh.com
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      Oh yes, I saw that working a few weeks ago. Quite promising.
dotsh 9y ago
So developers are building "social media" for developers with famous 30 minut install, make new instance or manage it by yourself kind of thing. Typical social media users will never get into fediverse as they still are using shortcut to google.com as their "internet connection". But great that technology is moving forward.
- nightpool 9y ago
  One developer or sysadmin running an instance can support hundreds of non-technical users per server. This is a model that's already validated by mastodon, which has >1M registered users across thousands of servers (and ~40k weekly active users)
  - dotsh 9y ago
    And who writes on Mastodon? Mostly devs or Trump? Maybe Obama? Ellen? No? So no one will use it, ever. I'm not against technology as it is great, but looking on this as a normal user it's not appealing to me. Mastodon is like old fashion phpBB forums 15 years ago, closed groups who talk with each other. ;) Mastodon will need to find business model sooner or later as internet isn't free as in beer because beer costs money and you can't handle 100m users with donations.
    - ColanR 9y ago
      > Mastodon is like old fashion phpBB forums 15 years ago, closed groups who talk with each other. ;) As long as the members are part of several disparate groups, that's probably more of a good thing. Closer, tighter communities. Also, I thought the bandwidth came from the users, since it's decentralized?
      - dotsh 9y ago
        People still need to pay for it. FSF would also die of hunger if it were not for people donating them money they have to earn first... so nothing is free.
    - 9y ago
seany 9y ago
Seems like integrating this with something like IPFS would be a good match.
sametmax 9y ago
> PeerTube is a free/libre software financed by a French non-profit organization: Framasoft. That's a very, very good news. Framasoft is one of the oldest, most trustworthy and passionate FOSS actor I've met in my life. They are basically the reason I became a computer scientist.
- mlinksva 9y ago
  Please write this up in longer form (or point out where you have already) if you get a chance! I'm vaguely aware that the French FOSS community is possibly the strongest (which includes having strong institutions like Framasoft) in the world, but know hardly any details, and I think very few people in the English speaking FOSS world even have that vague awareness.
  - boramalper 9y ago
    I think same goes with Germany, and maybe Spain as well. Chaos Computer Club is famous, but guifi.net[1] deserves to known more (than it currently is)! > Guifi.net is a free, open and neutral, mostly wireless telecommunicationscommunity network, with over 33,000 active nodes and about 46,000 km of wireless links (as of April 2017). The majority of these nodes are located in Catalonia and the Valencian Community, in Spain. but the network is growing in other parts of the world. The network is self-organized and operated by the users using unlicensed wireless links and open optical fibre links. > The nodes of the network are contributed by individuals, companies and administrations that freely connect to an open network of telecommunications and extend the network wherever the infrastructure and content might not otherwise be accessible. Nodes join the network following the self-provision model since the whole structure is explicitly open to facilitate understanding how it is structured, so that everyone can create new sections as required. That results in an network infrastructure commons that provides abundant connectivity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guifi.net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guifi.net [1]: https://guifi.net/en/node/38392 https://guifi.net/en/node/38392
  - sametmax 9y ago
    Well basically framasoft is a mature community (created 17 years ago) around free software. First, they were just a portal (https://framasoft.org/ https://framasoft.org/) listing good FOSS you could download for windows and a forum to help each other. It was the best, most stable and reliable source for that kind of info at the time, and lead a lot of people gaining trust in FOSS, trying out Linux, or like me, dig more and start programming. Eventually they got to write informative and engaged blog posts. They always took the time to explain why and what, and I'm very grateful for that. It's transparent attitude I respect. Because of this they got echoed by framous voices such as Tristan Nitot (from Mozilla at the time) and Sebsauvage (pretty much the most famous nerd blog in the country). Among their projects, they made the "portable" versions of free software quite popular, to the extend of creating a USB key where you could store your fav stuff (OOo, Firefox, vlc, etc) and carry a decent working environment anywhere you went, with a launcher on the systray. Then they got involved politically, especially against the DADVSI law in France. They also teamed up with "la quadrature du net", a quite tenacious group trying to defend the free Web (that teamed up with wikimedia :)). The impressive feat here is the fact they are a small team, with very low budget, but yet managed to involve the "Conseil d'Etat" and the "Conseil constutionnel". I like the fact they did it every time in a formal, respectful manner. In politics, it's quite hard to do. The last accomplishment of framasoft is to be alive. It's all about the constant work they've done, again and again, as they didn't have major actors to help them or a big source of income. Today they host a load of open source web services to offer alternative to google agenda, google doc, dropbox, twitter, etc. In total 27 ranging from doodle clones to pastebins. The service are not as good as the original ones, but they work damn well and are free, using open formats. I make sure I donate to them once in a while even if I don't go to their site that much anymore. But I do use their agenda, syncing it on thunderbird and my android phone.
cobbzilla 9y ago
It still possible for creators to get paid without built-in monetization. Sponsorships, patreon, etc. Agencies will emerge to represent popular YouTubers who move to other platforms if there is sufficient advertiser demand for the (presumably sizable) audience drawn to the content. In fact, it's probably better to decouple monetization from distribution, at least initially. It's another layer on top. We are just beginning to standardize social protocols, let's let them develop naturally.
granitosaurus 9y ago
How is this different from https://mediagoblin.org/ https://mediagoblin.org/? I'm quite sad that media goblin isn't getting more usage - such a cool project. I guess the difference is that PeerTube is federated?
adrusi 9y ago
It looks like this doesn't offer any way for video creators to get paid? Right now a lot of major video creators are looking to leave YouTube because YouTube is marking their videos as ineligible for monetization. That's the market you want to capture if you want to succeed as a YouTube alternative. Sites like d.tube and steemit.com and bitchute.com are offering this. Getting major video producers with a following on YouTube to use your alternative platform is how you get enough viewers to achieve critical mass. They won't come if they can't get paid. Now there's a problem here, because the average YouTube channel suffering from demonetization is a right-wing political channel, and attracting too many of them is a great way to make no one else want to come to your platform. These aren't the only video producers who are suffering from demonetization; the most egregious case I know of is science education channel CodysLab[1], which has been barred from uploading new videos a couple times on account of violating youtube's content guidelines for microwaving crickets to show that crickets are too small to be hurt by microwave radiation, and using black powder explosives. A federated network might be better able to handle this problem, giving the right-wing creators a platform on some instances, but not on others. But if peertube offers no monetization options, then it will never compete with YouTube. [1] https://youtube.com/user/thecodyreeder https://youtube.com/user/thecodyreeder
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Houshalter 9y ago
  Is advertising really necessary? Most youtubers are making more money from donations than they are from ad revenue. Many of them also do paid promotions that pay better than youtube ads. The ad rate is really bad. And you can get demonetized for all sorts of random things that have nothing to do with politics The bigger problem is network effects. If you don't post your videos on youtube, no one will ever see them.
  - exolymph 9y ago
    > Most youtubers are making more money from donations than they are from ad revenue. Citation needed.
rcMgD2BwE72F 9y ago
https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances
wyck 9y ago
Unfortunately these things don't work because the general public needs something simple, centralised, rich in content, and which has the momentum of actual people using it. Technology doesn't help, it's about timing it the right application at the right time.
ggggtez 9y ago
> Issue 226: Be GDPR compliant. I had a good laugh at that. Does anyone really think this service is going to be competitive in terms of privacy to what a centralized provider can do?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
d--b 9y ago
Can anyone comment on how this works space-wise? Does that mean that each node will carry a copy of the whole database? Is there some geography-based sharding or something? Cause I won't run a node of that if that means I'll need some petabytes of space and an awfully large bandwidth.
- quietlemon 9y ago
  > Does that mean that each node will carry a copy of the whole database? It is specified in the project README. Your server will only host/share its own videos: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube#backend https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube#backend As a server admin you may subscribe to other servers to have their videos presented on your server as well, but those remote servers would be in charge of seeding the content (each server is an actual Bittorrent tracker, it seems). The subscription system is not ready just yet, it should be implemented in the coming weeks/month. If some people feel like contributing code… :-)
wemdyjreichert 9y ago
This wont work really well until everyone has fast fiber links. Streaming needs a seamless connection, unlike normal downloads.
LifeLiverTransp 9y ago
How and by what is content moderation applied to this? If not at all- what does prevent the competition- from oploading content disapproved by society, and then smear the network as a host for pirated content, snuff and illegal pornography? Is there some jury duty for everyone- so every third video, you must watch something flagged for moderation, and judge it?
stevedekorte 9y ago
It looks like it would be (as with Mastodon) more accurate to call this federated instead of decentralized.

> Please don't install PeerTube for production on a small device behind a low bandwidth connection (example: a Raspberry PI behind your ADSL link) because it could slow down the fediverse. Sounds like PeerTube is vulnerable to a sorts of denial of service attack from bad actors that would join and then limit the bandwidth to extreme amounts. Hasn’t this been solved already in other P2P protocols? Couldn’t they have built upon an existing protocol that protected them against this?

amelius 9y ago
Regardless of that specific problem, it would be wise to build upon an existing protocol (e.g. IPFS), because it would help prevent future problems AND it would increase traction of federated content sharing. The more people use a single protocol, the more all applications benefit in latency, speed, availability; but also in future development.
- detaro 9y ago
  It wisely is building on existing protocols.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- maeln 9y ago
  It use ActivityPub for the federation part and WebTorrent (which just implement the BitTorrent protocol over websocket if I remember correctly). It is using already using existing protocol.
  - aiham 9y ago
    WebTorrent uses WebRTC, not WebSocket.
    - nathcd 9y ago
      This is the part that I find somewhat unfortunate about Peertube. This means that only ActivityPub clients that support WebRTC will be able to access Peertube media. Right now, I think this basically means just modern web browsers. It bothers me somewhat that an early, potentially major ActivityPub service is going to limit full functionality to the few existing major web browsers. That's the opposite of what I want from a federated protocol. (Someone correct me if I've got any of this wrong.) Regardless, Peertube seems awesome, and I hope we keep seeing more and more services built on ActivityPub.
      - rigelk 9y ago
        ActivityPub defines federation messages server to server and client to server. It is not a protocol per se, and rather a message exchange standard, which could perfectly be used only between servers, as is the case with federation of videos between PeerTube instances, and more recently for video comment feeds, that can interact with the larger fediverse (Hubzilla and Mastodon so far were tested). In no way it defines how you access media. That is defined by the use of WebRTC, which is supported by a growing number of browsers, and anyway provides a fallback to direct streaming (HTTP), so that any browser can interact.
        nathcd 9y ago
        > and anyway provides a fallback to direct streaming (HTTP), so that any browser can interact. Ah, that's awesome. That definitely assuages my fears somewhat. > [ActivityPub] In no way it defines how you access media. ActivityStreams (which ActivityPub builds on) does define an attachment property for messages [1]. Is this not a standard mechanism for clients to access ActivityPub media (via the attachment's type and url)? [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-attachment https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-attach...
- gnarbarian 9y ago
  https://d.tube https://d.tube uses ipfs
- dingdingdang 9y ago
  This issue (i.e. not building upon an existing protocols such as IPFS or bit torrent tech) is persistent within the alt-net / distributed-net community and means that MANY services have fickle/hacked-together (in the bad way) feel to them. Even stuff like Riot.im (which is built on top of the Matrix protocol) has a sluggish/react-js-overload feel to it.. plus the deep&wide stack makes it incredibly hard to understand/trust the system in a meaningful way. Also, I believe that part reason for the success of Hacker News and Reddit is largely their extremely simple, non-intrusive and non-animated interfaces - making flashy front-ends for distributed-net apps is a lost cause. Bittorrent took off because the tech was right; not because of a animated web interface that could correctly scale to mobile.
  - Arathorn 9y ago
    So speaking from the Riot/Matrix perspective, this is a really interesting phenomenon which we are painfully aware of. For context: we built centralised comms apps before creating Matrix. So we have a direct side by side comparison, and reckon it’s about 6x more effort to do the decentralised equivalent. On the UX side, our centralised apps were actually pretty polished and lightweight - sadly they are gone now (hence in part Matrix), but you can get an idea from stuff like https://web.archive.org/web/20170102145839/http://blah.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170102145839/http://blah.com/. So, how come decentralised apps can end up with worse UX than their centralised equivalents? My theory is: * Harder tech means that more resources get focused on the decentralisation bit * Harder to find UI/UX designers who understand the decentralisation requirements (although this is changing thanks to blockchain hype) * Decentralised early users tend to be geeky and push the product in a geeky direction But the key thing is that pre-decentralisation we probably had a 1:3 ratio of backend to frontend work. Then in Matrix it’s like 1:1, and the dilution on the frontend notices. That said, this can be fixed, and obviously it’s critical to Riot to fix it. We’ve contracted a proper UI/UX designer at last a few weeks ago and are hunting for more frontend devs. And evidence it can work: a good example of a decentralised project with decent UX is Mastodon.
    - Arathorn 9y ago
      (just to be clear: I’m responding to the “UX of decentralised apps is crap” bit of the parent post rather than “build on existing protocols”, given peertube and riot and mastodon etc all build on well defined protocols.)
kuzko_topia 9y ago
What's more it's a bit sad that only a small part of the content can't be served by those small peers making them useful instead of harmful to the network...
maeln 9y ago
The Tor network does some network metric on each Tor relay and give them a weight to each node based on their performance. It's not flawless but implementing something similar in WebTorrent might be possible and mitigate this form of attacks.
- woah 9y ago
  If their goal is to be "decentralized" that might not fit the bill (depending on your definition of decentralized). I wouldn't consider Tor to be decentralized.
nugi 9y ago
There goes my primary use case. Small devices behind crappy connections is most people streaming video ime.

beedrillzzzzz 9y ago

https://D.tube/ https://D.tube/ is another one!

hbakhtiyor 9y ago
not open source!
- detaro 9y ago
  what parts are missing?
  - jacobush 9y ago
    UX
CrashOveride 9y ago
Much LOVE to D.tube A true alternative for monetizing your content. (atleast thats the impression i get) and isnt ipfs tottaly opensource? (the file system where the content is hosted)

saverio-murgia 9y ago

Does this support ads and if not, what's the value proposition for content creatos other than maybe less censorship?

prepend 9y ago
If it’s low cost to run a server (<$100/year) then just the censorship (or maybe just fuckaroundary and bother is a better term than censorship). I got a simple Linux host on a cpanel admined shared server a long time ago for a random purpose. But it’s been very useful just to host stuff rather than bother with whatever free service exists. It’s not strong enough to host this or mastodon or other peer networks, but I think it would be worthwhile for me to pay to have this flexibility.
hanbura 9y ago
An increasing number of subcommunities have learned to rely on sponsors and patreon because YouTube demonetizes most of their videos. Meanwhile YouTube's three strike system is a constant threat to channels operating on fair use (reviewers etc) or producing content that YouTube's algorithms flag as showing content violating guidelines. There's plenty of content creators that would love to go anywhere else, but all alternatives fail to attract viewers.
lakechfoma 9y ago
All of the creators I follow either do it for free and fun, or some combination of patreon plugs and trinkets you can buy from them. Ads are not the only way for creators to find value in creating. Youtube became a crap platform in the search for the $$. Things like recommended videos used to be related to the video you just watched but now its whatever fail army is. I would like to see a new platform where monetization via ads and UX abuse doesn't exist because the experience is just awful now.
alex_duf 9y ago
Not that I encourage it, but you can create your own server and pay it with ads. Each server their own rules
jhauris 9y ago

daveid 9y ago

PeerTube also federates using the W3C ActivityPub protocol, so Mastodon users can follow PeerTube channels and comment on videos as they would respond to other statuses :)

Arkanosis 9y ago
Exactly: https://peertube.cpy.re/videos/watch/da2b08d4-a242-4170-b32a-4ec8cbdca701 https://peertube.cpy.re/videos/watch/da2b08d4-a242-4170-b32a...
- alex_duf 9y ago
  really nice!
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
This is awesome to see, I feel like a decentralized social format is really starting to come together, now that there's several reasonably popular pieces of software using the same compatible protocol.
swiley 9y ago
That's freaking awesome! I'm going to have to read more about ActivityPub!

0x4f3759df 9y ago

There's also bitchute, d.tube, dlive.io, the latter two being on the steem network. dlive supports live streaming so I think its gaining a lot of traction.

drngdds 9y ago
Bitchute? They really didn't think that name through, huh
hbakhtiyor 9y ago
they are not open source
kawfey 9y ago
add LBRY.io to the list. I wonder if anyone's developing a syndicator for posting their videos to all of these sites. It's getting pretty difficult to 1) keep awareness of every venue as they come out and 2) manually syndicate content across all of them too. Having all these d_apps installed on a single PC take a toll on resources too.

tom_mellior 9y ago

I clicked around some videos on some random server I chose from the list, and in many cases a video's preview picture has nothing to do with the video. As in, it never visibly appears in the actual video. Or it's the very first frame and not representative of the rest of the video. That opens up all sorts of clickbait/abuse issues. I don't know how YouTube deals with generating a representative preview image, but the result is certainly better.

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
This was an issue at one point with YouTube as well. Heck, it's still an issue, with most thumbnails designed with emoting people, arrows, and words designed to increase click rates. However, this kind of things _does_ increase click rates for these videos. For a platform designed to get views, is that really a bad thing?
- tom_mellior 9y ago
  It will not get views if users feel ripped off.
  - johndough 9y ago
    The users will feel ripped off after they have seen the video, in which case it is already too late.
    - tom_mellior 9y ago
      The users will feel serially ripped off after they have seen three such videos, in which case it is already too late. Too late to convince them to ever come back to a platform with such an offering.
      - jobigoud 9y ago
        > Too late to convince them to ever come back to a platform with such an offering It's the exact same problem on YouTube with clickbait thumbnails and titles. It doesn't frustrate people off the entire platform, just the channels that are repeat offenders.

nyxxie 9y ago

I've always wondered why people want to decentralize hosting of content. This, IMO, is a much harder task which leads to such restrictions as > Please don't install PeerTube for production on a small device behind a low bandwidth connection (example: a Raspberry PI behind your ADSL link) because it could slow down the fediverse. Why not simply decentralize the content index and let other people worry about storage for videos? When I go to Youtube, I'm there because it's a platform where I can find a large variety of entertainment without putting any effort into it, not because Google is hosting them. I'm picturing the backend here being a decentralized database of video metadata (including where and how it is hosted), and some sort of frontend where every video in the index can be viewed through a unified player. If we're trying to give oppressed people the ability to host their controversial content, just have them host it behind Tor or over the bittorrent network and then add it to the index. Otherwise we could just let people link to videos on other video hosting sites or on their own personal websites.

ManlyBread 9y ago
Content discovery sucks nowadays. The search results bring up mostly bigger channels instead of relevant ones. Recommendations are based on view history and likes, which means you get more of the same instead of someting new. I constantly get videos I've seen already in my recommendations, these stay there for weeks until I click on them. The major feature I used for discovery is long gone - it was the ability to add video responses, which allowed me to not only find small, niche channels with great stuff but also built a sense of community. I don't get why did they remove this,but ever since they did the site just never felt the same.
- james-skemp 9y ago
  I don't know if it actually does anything (yet), but you can hide videos from results. I mainly use it for videos I'm not interested in instead of ones that I've already seen (albeit it a while ago).
- nyxxie 9y ago
  I'm not sure there's an algorithm in the world that would be able to recommend videos that aren't similar to the ones you currently watch but that you would still like. I think the best route is to just reccomend videos that are similar and rely on external sources (friend/community recommendations, Reddit, etc) for lateral movement across genres.

arsalanb 9y ago

Youtube is more than just a tool, it's a store of culture almost. Imagine Youtube suddenly disappeared. A wealth of information and video would be lost, like rare videos which are only on youtube. Sure, someone somewhere will have a copy but on the whole you can't access them seamlessly like you can with Youtube. Of late I have began to think this is too much power for a company to hold. I trust Youtube to not fuck up so bad that all videos are gone, but I would sleep a bit sounder at night if it was decentralised.

phkahler 9y ago
If you're worried about rare videos going away, don't just watch them on YouTube. Archive them yourself. You are the one who sees value in them, so do your part to keep their storage decentralized. Just a thought.
- sinatra 9y ago
  I never understand this “If you’re so worried, take action” argument. We all have concerns about thousands of things. I’m concerned about kids’ education in the whole world, I’m concerned about animals getting killed for fun, I’m concerned about Comcast being my only realistic ISP, I’m concerned about thousands more such things. I should be able to have and show concern even if I can’t actively do much about them due to my focus on other, even greater concerns (even if they’re selfish concerns like taking care of my family).
  - superkuh 9y ago
    You don't understand him suggesting a completely straightforward and easy solution to the problem? If you don't want a solution and just want to talk about it that's fine. But his comment was productive and useful. I use youtube-dl almost daily to archive interesting videos locally.
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      a completely straightforward and easy solution to the problem But it isn't, due to the lack of coordination or standards. That's why protocols get established in the first place; without them, valuable stuff tends to get lost.

darkstar999 9y ago

More ISPs are going with bandwidth caps. I don't think things like this will take off.

anigbrowl 9y ago
It's a challenge, but it might be helped along by mesh networking.
- woah 9y ago
  www.altheamesh.com
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    Oh yes, I saw that working a few weeks ago. Quite promising.

dotsh 9y ago

So developers are building "social media" for developers with famous 30 minut install, make new instance or manage it by yourself kind of thing. Typical social media users will never get into fediverse as they still are using shortcut to google.com as their "internet connection". But great that technology is moving forward.

nightpool 9y ago
One developer or sysadmin running an instance can support hundreds of non-technical users per server. This is a model that's already validated by mastodon, which has >1M registered users across thousands of servers (and ~40k weekly active users)
- dotsh 9y ago
  And who writes on Mastodon? Mostly devs or Trump? Maybe Obama? Ellen? No? So no one will use it, ever. I'm not against technology as it is great, but looking on this as a normal user it's not appealing to me. Mastodon is like old fashion phpBB forums 15 years ago, closed groups who talk with each other. ;) Mastodon will need to find business model sooner or later as internet isn't free as in beer because beer costs money and you can't handle 100m users with donations.
  - ColanR 9y ago
    > Mastodon is like old fashion phpBB forums 15 years ago, closed groups who talk with each other. ;) As long as the members are part of several disparate groups, that's probably more of a good thing. Closer, tighter communities. Also, I thought the bandwidth came from the users, since it's decentralized?
    - dotsh 9y ago
      People still need to pay for it. FSF would also die of hunger if it were not for people donating them money they have to earn first... so nothing is free.
  - 9y ago

seany 9y ago

Seems like integrating this with something like IPFS would be a good match.

sametmax 9y ago

> PeerTube is a free/libre software financed by a French non-profit organization: Framasoft. That's a very, very good news. Framasoft is one of the oldest, most trustworthy and passionate FOSS actor I've met in my life. They are basically the reason I became a computer scientist.

mlinksva 9y ago
Please write this up in longer form (or point out where you have already) if you get a chance! I'm vaguely aware that the French FOSS community is possibly the strongest (which includes having strong institutions like Framasoft) in the world, but know hardly any details, and I think very few people in the English speaking FOSS world even have that vague awareness.
- boramalper 9y ago
  I think same goes with Germany, and maybe Spain as well. Chaos Computer Club is famous, but guifi.net[1] deserves to known more (than it currently is)! > Guifi.net is a free, open and neutral, mostly wireless telecommunicationscommunity network, with over 33,000 active nodes and about 46,000 km of wireless links (as of April 2017). The majority of these nodes are located in Catalonia and the Valencian Community, in Spain. but the network is growing in other parts of the world. The network is self-organized and operated by the users using unlicensed wireless links and open optical fibre links. > The nodes of the network are contributed by individuals, companies and administrations that freely connect to an open network of telecommunications and extend the network wherever the infrastructure and content might not otherwise be accessible. Nodes join the network following the self-provision model since the whole structure is explicitly open to facilitate understanding how it is structured, so that everyone can create new sections as required. That results in an network infrastructure commons that provides abundant connectivity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guifi.net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guifi.net [1]: https://guifi.net/en/node/38392 https://guifi.net/en/node/38392
- sametmax 9y ago
  Well basically framasoft is a mature community (created 17 years ago) around free software. First, they were just a portal (https://framasoft.org/ https://framasoft.org/) listing good FOSS you could download for windows and a forum to help each other. It was the best, most stable and reliable source for that kind of info at the time, and lead a lot of people gaining trust in FOSS, trying out Linux, or like me, dig more and start programming. Eventually they got to write informative and engaged blog posts. They always took the time to explain why and what, and I'm very grateful for that. It's transparent attitude I respect. Because of this they got echoed by framous voices such as Tristan Nitot (from Mozilla at the time) and Sebsauvage (pretty much the most famous nerd blog in the country). Among their projects, they made the "portable" versions of free software quite popular, to the extend of creating a USB key where you could store your fav stuff (OOo, Firefox, vlc, etc) and carry a decent working environment anywhere you went, with a launcher on the systray. Then they got involved politically, especially against the DADVSI law in France. They also teamed up with "la quadrature du net", a quite tenacious group trying to defend the free Web (that teamed up with wikimedia :)). The impressive feat here is the fact they are a small team, with very low budget, but yet managed to involve the "Conseil d'Etat" and the "Conseil constutionnel". I like the fact they did it every time in a formal, respectful manner. In politics, it's quite hard to do. The last accomplishment of framasoft is to be alive. It's all about the constant work they've done, again and again, as they didn't have major actors to help them or a big source of income. Today they host a load of open source web services to offer alternative to google agenda, google doc, dropbox, twitter, etc. In total 27 ranging from doodle clones to pastebins. The service are not as good as the original ones, but they work damn well and are free, using open formats. I make sure I donate to them once in a while even if I don't go to their site that much anymore. But I do use their agenda, syncing it on thunderbird and my android phone.

cobbzilla 9y ago

It still possible for creators to get paid without built-in monetization. Sponsorships, patreon, etc. Agencies will emerge to represent popular YouTubers who move to other platforms if there is sufficient advertiser demand for the (presumably sizable) audience drawn to the content. In fact, it's probably better to decouple monetization from distribution, at least initially. It's another layer on top. We are just beginning to standardize social protocols, let's let them develop naturally.

granitosaurus 9y ago

How is this different from https://mediagoblin.org/ https://mediagoblin.org/? I'm quite sad that media goblin isn't getting more usage - such a cool project. I guess the difference is that PeerTube is federated?

adrusi 9y ago

It looks like this doesn't offer any way for video creators to get paid? Right now a lot of major video creators are looking to leave YouTube because YouTube is marking their videos as ineligible for monetization. That's the market you want to capture if you want to succeed as a YouTube alternative. Sites like d.tube and steemit.com and bitchute.com are offering this. Getting major video producers with a following on YouTube to use your alternative platform is how you get enough viewers to achieve critical mass. They won't come if they can't get paid. Now there's a problem here, because the average YouTube channel suffering from demonetization is a right-wing political channel, and attracting too many of them is a great way to make no one else want to come to your platform. These aren't the only video producers who are suffering from demonetization; the most egregious case I know of is science education channel CodysLab[1], which has been barred from uploading new videos a couple times on account of violating youtube's content guidelines for microwaving crickets to show that crickets are too small to be hurt by microwave radiation, and using black powder explosives. A federated network might be better able to handle this problem, giving the right-wing creators a platform on some instances, but not on others. But if peertube offers no monetization options, then it will never compete with YouTube. [1] https://youtube.com/user/thecodyreeder https://youtube.com/user/thecodyreeder

deleted 9y ago
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Houshalter 9y ago
Is advertising really necessary? Most youtubers are making more money from donations than they are from ad revenue. Many of them also do paid promotions that pay better than youtube ads. The ad rate is really bad. And you can get demonetized for all sorts of random things that have nothing to do with politics The bigger problem is network effects. If you don't post your videos on youtube, no one will ever see them.
- exolymph 9y ago
  > Most youtubers are making more money from donations than they are from ad revenue. Citation needed.

rcMgD2BwE72F 9y ago

https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances

wyck 9y ago

Unfortunately these things don't work because the general public needs something simple, centralised, rich in content, and which has the momentum of actual people using it. Technology doesn't help, it's about timing it the right application at the right time.

ggggtez 9y ago

> Issue 226: Be GDPR compliant. I had a good laugh at that. Does anyone really think this service is going to be competitive in terms of privacy to what a centralized provider can do?

deleted 9y ago
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d--b 9y ago

Can anyone comment on how this works space-wise? Does that mean that each node will carry a copy of the whole database? Is there some geography-based sharding or something? Cause I won't run a node of that if that means I'll need some petabytes of space and an awfully large bandwidth.

quietlemon 9y ago
> Does that mean that each node will carry a copy of the whole database? It is specified in the project README. Your server will only host/share its own videos: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube#backend https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube#backend As a server admin you may subscribe to other servers to have their videos presented on your server as well, but those remote servers would be in charge of seeding the content (each server is an actual Bittorrent tracker, it seems). The subscription system is not ready just yet, it should be implemented in the coming weeks/month. If some people feel like contributing code… :-)

wemdyjreichert 9y ago

This wont work really well until everyone has fast fiber links. Streaming needs a seamless connection, unlike normal downloads.

LifeLiverTransp 9y ago

How and by what is content moderation applied to this? If not at all- what does prevent the competition- from oploading content disapproved by society, and then smear the network as a host for pirated content, snuff and illegal pornography? Is there some jury duty for everyone- so every third video, you must watch something flagged for moderation, and judge it?

stevedekorte 9y ago

It looks like it would be (as with Mastodon) more accurate to call this federated instead of decentralized.