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What the people who want decentralized services don't realize is that the content creators want centralized services (whether they realize it or not). In the o

What the people who want decentralized services don't realize is that the content creators want centralized services (whether they realize it or not). In the old days we needed YouTube because you needed a Flash encoder if you wanted to make video accessible on the web to everyone. Now anyone can host video on anything. You can throw even throw some comments on the bottom if you want. But what those who create want is an audience. They want a community. There is a cycle of drama on YouTube that everyone feeds off of. Hell, some of the most popular videos people make are videos of people complaining about YouTube. Make a normal video, get a few thousand views. Make a rage video about how your normal video got demonized, get a million views. How many attempts at decentralized social networks have failed? All of them.

phoe-krk 8y ago
Mastodon is going pretty well. I greatly enjoy using it and the conversations I have there.
- meesterdude 8y ago
  I've heard of it but didn't realize people really used it? How/where should people learn more about mastodon if they're interested? How do you use it?
  - stephenhuey 8y ago
    https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org
- lylecubed 8y ago
  Am I the only one who finds the UI of mastodon nearly unusable? Then again, I also find tweetdeck and the twitter webpage a struggle to use.
  - drb91 8y ago
    It doesn't seem any worse than Twitter itself.
  - valeg 8y ago
    There are other UIs for Masto e.g. https://pinafore.social/ https://pinafore.social/ or https://brutaldon.online/ https://brutaldon.online/ The benefits of open source :).
not_that_noob 8y ago
This one I think has legs. Quite a few content creators are upset with YouTube policies, and can drive users to PeerTube using other social services. Once you have a core group of users, others see that it’s viable and adoption rises.
bobajeff 8y ago
I think getting viewers wouldn't be a problem since videos are shareable and searchable in the all the ActivityPub networks.
elago 8y ago
How many centralized social networks have failed too? Most of them. A lot of successful things have had similarities to previous failures. The first step is to actually try something new instead of sitting around nay-saying everything. Personally my opinion Youtube can keep the the drama rage videos, or they can fall off the face of the internet. I just want educational videos and music without constant ads, and I don't want to create some entity with absolute power to censor content for the rest of the internet.
- dragontamer 8y ago
  XMPP / Jabber isn't doing so hot though. I wouldn't call it a "failure", but Facebook / Google, especially with the "hangouts" thing cutting out XMPP support, definitely reduced XMPP's userbase. Decentralized can certainly fail, or at least shrink over time.
- hk__2 8y ago
  > How many centralized social networks have failed too? Most of them. That’s still infinitely more successful than decentralized social network attempts.
wongarsu 8y ago
youtube is great for building an audience, but not nessesarily good for keeping it. A lot of niches have great success with patreon, but great trouble with keeping their videos on youtube (and in some cases keeping them in their subscribers feeds even when they are not taken down). The issues range from youtube's automatic enforcement of content guidelines (which appears more or less random), their ever increasing strictness (explosions are suddenly bad?) to their aweful copyright system that enables serious abuse of false copyright claims. I suspect most content creators will stay on youtube for the audience, but there is lots of potential for backup channels to move off of youtube to some other, better provider. And as enough content is mirrored (and eventually vanishes from youtube as it gets taken down), the decentralized service becomes gradually more interesting to viewers.
- tehduder9 8y ago
  >youtube is great for building an audience, but not nessesarily good for keeping it. I wouldn't make that youtube's fault. People just grow out of content or like other content. And the overzealous community guidelines and copyright strikes are a result of hundreds of lawsuits against youtube by the movie industry, and a need to appeal to advertisers for their platform. Youtube barely makes any real income, just barely. People seriously seriously underestimate the amount time and tech that has gone into youtube. PeerTube/alternate youtube will also be subjective to the same things and similar things will happen. Copyright system has to inspect billions of hours of video in a day, you can't expect people to do all of that. Will the alternative that isn't already a huge company have the assets to deal with all the copyright infringement? To have the enourmous CDN and advanced AI filtering algorithms that is better than youtube?
  - mikec3010 8y ago
    The hypocrisy will be hilarious when people start ripping yt vids and putting them on pt, given how yt was born off pirated content and hid behind "safe harbor" laws to build a browsable catalog. The first clip that came from yt will be met with scathing rebuke from Google's legal team.
dragontamer 8y ago
> What the people who want decentralized services don't realize is that the content creators want centralized services (whether they realize it or not). I agree. The current Youtube creators have built their models on advertisement, clicks, favorites, etc. etc. PeerTube will never be for them. There's simply no money in PeerTube right now. That's fine however. There's a large section of creators, such as Blender, Education (think OpenCourseWare / MIT), Linux Conference publishers who will benefit from PeerTube. In these cases, people don't want to make money. They want to publish videos and foster a community. Youtube is no longer compatible with the OSS values, due to advertisements, copyright takedowns and such. You never know when someone's ringtone happens to be a copyright violation which takes down a 60-minute talk about C++ or something stupid.
- iknowverylittle 8y ago
  >There's a large section of creators, such as Blender, Education (think OpenCourseWare / MIT), Linux Conference publishers who will benefit from PeerTube. That's what I'm hoping for. Educational and instructional videos are my main use for YouTube, YT happens to be where they are hosted, I care very little about anything else related to the site so for me PeerTube could potentially be perfect for my use.
- albertgoeswoof 8y ago
  There's no reason you can't build in monetization to peertube, and let the peertube host choose to enable it or not.
  - dane-pgp 8y ago
    A monetization style I'd like to see more of is one where the videos are uploaded, but only a thumbnail or a clip is available by default, until a certain donation goal is reached, at which point the video becomes free for everyone to view, indefinitely. This looks game theoretically like it will produce a Tragedy of the Commons outcome, but there are plenty of streamers out there who rely on tips while allowing the majority of viewers to be "freeloaders". Of course, the incentives for donating during a livestream are different from the incentive to donate to unlock a video, but the software/UI could display prominently who it was that contributed to unlocking a video, and who are the major financial supporters of the channel.
willio58 8y ago
Podcasts are, for the most part, decentralized and seem to be still booming in popularity. I don’t see why a decentralized video platform couldn’t work too.
- gowld 8y ago
  Podcasts are lovely but the scale is miniscule compared to video. And video podcast technology exists but is deeply underused (perhaps in part because people choose podcasts when their eyes are busy) Suppose I want to use a podcast client app to watch what today is in my YouTube subscriptions. Why not just use YouTube? I'm not obligated to read the comments. There's also a pattern that goes: Post a video to YT, then post a link to reddit.com/r/mychannel (or an alternative, or on several alternatives) where users can watch the video as an embed and then engage in discussion under whatever commenting/moderation system I choose.
  - ballenf 8y ago
    > And video podcast technology exists but is deeply underused It's almost invisible, but the Apple Podcast app still seamlessly supports video podcasts, but it gets harder to find with every update. With the popularity of that app, I wonder why Apple doesn't push it more to create a Youtube alternative. I know part of the answer -- you have to do your own encoding and hosting (I think, info is hard to find), but you'd think Apple could step in and offer those services. About the only video podcasts I've seen that are recent are a couple churches and some weird local real estate services.
- Sangermaine 8y ago
  >Podcasts are, for the most part, decentralized No, they aren’t. Of course anyone can put up a podcast, but the successful ones tend to cluster into podcast networks of like shows or join the big podcast groups like Nerdist, Wondery, or Earwolf. Or be a part of an established media company like NPR or Slate. It’s easy to start a podcast but very hard to survive and expand alone.
  - zanny 8y ago
CompelTechnic 8y ago
demonitized -> demonized is a great freudian slip.
- themagician 8y ago
  Just a typo. I've got one of those shitty apple keyboards.
marsokod 8y ago
I believe the people behind peertube know about that. That is why Peertube is so much on federation with ActivityPub. If done properly this would allow anyone with an account on a website using ActivityPub (like Mastodon) to interact with the author of a Peertube video. Granted this a both a technical problem (that I believe solvable) and a financing problem. It is hard to compete with the GAFAM and their advertising departments.
deevolution 8y ago
I think open protocals will really help in shifting people away from centralized services and towards decentralized or federated services. Activity pub, for instance is awesome. I think once we have open social protocals paired with cryptocurrencies, we might finally get to a point where federated/decentralized networks become attractive to an audience and to content creators and to developers. We can have borderless, uncensorable, and resilient social networks. Anticipating some downvotes here because I mentioned cryptocurrencies.
- rspeer 8y ago
  That sounds like a way to end up with social networks made entirely of people who like cryptocurrencies. Sounds awful to me.
iknowverylittle 8y ago
I'm not sure that 'decentralized' in this case means decentralized in community. I understand it more as decentralized hosting since it's P2P. Now, peertube does state something about 'instances', so that might separate content from one accessable website. I don't know. YouTube's big point initially was video hosting was expensive and YouTube made it cheap (for creators). It is also is a centralized community so you can find a video on virtually any subject just from the search on the homepage. If peertube is able to do this in a similar fashion would aid it's potential adoption (though again, I don't know if instances hinder that). PeerTube still needs to be build a user base, attract users and creators from YouTube. Getting creators to use both platforms would help. Lastly though, since it's P2P I don't know if that means only popular videos would then load at a comparable speed YouTube or not.
- dragontamer 8y ago
  > I'm not sure that 'decentralized' in this case means decentralized in community. The idea of ActivityPub is to have a federated group of servers. Similar to XMPP and Email. So you can create an account as Alice@serverAlpha.com, while I can create an account as Bob@serverB.com. When I publish a video at serverB.com, it will notify serverAlpha.com that a new video was published, which eventually tells Alice to check out the new video.
  - iknowverylittle 8y ago
    Thank you! This is all new to me, so I don't know how it works. However, this does resolve my concern about 'instances'. It makes me excited and hopeful then that Peertube could become something pretty great.
    - dragontamer 8y ago
      > However, this does resolve my concern about 'instances'. On a surface level, it should. But given what I've seen over the past 15 years, no... it shouldn't resolve those concerns. Consider if Google / Youtube became PeerTube compatible with ActivityPub next year. But then, there are additional features that only exist on Youtube's implementation (spam monitoring, Twitter integration, Youtube integration, etc. etc.). Something that makes people prefer Youtube over other hosts. Eventually, Youtube can cut out ActivityPub, after it captures the ActivityPub marketplace. See XMPP and Google Hangouts if you want a historical example. Embrace, Extend, extinguish is the name of the technique, and it is quite effective at killing open standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... ---------- So the general community does need to be aware of it, lest another XMPP-extinguish effect comes around from the big players.
deltron3030 8y ago
> What the people who want decentralized services don't realize is that the content creators want centralized services (whether they realize it or not). Ideally you wouldn't decentralize the UI/UX, but the cloud server architecture it runs on. You could still maintain the same centrally accessible experience. That's the thing people need to understand, the frontend (UI) can be seperated and decoupled from the backend. Where the servers that power those sites are plugins installed on peoples home routers or personal assistants. They scale in performance with each added user and installed plugin.
- halflings 8y ago
  It's not just about UI/UX. You need a centralized backend to return recommendations in a reasonable time (if you need to query all the decentralized instances each time, it'll be incredibly slow)... which means that you go back to the scenario where a centralized instance is the source of traffic, decides what is recommended and what isn't. I guess there's still one advantage in that scenario: somebody can build a competing recommendation service while using the same underlying videos.
  - deltron3030 8y ago
    Couldn't you store information about all nodes/content in every node? What would change is that the new uploaded stuff just isn't instantly available, only after syncing the new index with all other nodes. Not really a big problem, because most youtubers, especially the professional ones, shedule their uploads anyway. Accessing your own node, the one your neighborhood or the next available one shouldn't be slower, the contrary I suppose. Key seems to be to store the information or index on all nodes and syncing them.
tejtm 8y ago
No,that is most definitely not what I want as a content creator. I do not want just any audience (that is the realm of people who require attention for validation or exploitation). By the time I have created something I have already gotten what I am going to get out of it, sharing it is just a courtesy and I would rather just share with people who care enough to make the effort to search for something relevant to their interests rather than a horde of mindlessly clicking eyeballs
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  I think most of the content creators also want to be paid for creating the content. I've not seen how PeerTube intends to help with that.
  - tejtm 8y ago
    I am not so sure, of course getting paid to do what you love would be great but so would be winning a lottery. Content that is a by-product of drive and passion is in my estimation largely distinct from passive income / rent seeking content. Plus if it is really that good (and most is not), a way will be found.
    - s73v3r_ 8y ago
      I think that's trying to hand-wave away the fact that many of these channels are the day job of the people making them.
jklinger410 8y ago
You left yourself open here by not elaborating on how centralized services benefit from profiting companies with marketing campaigns who draw users. Decentralized platforms will force these content creators to market their own platform. If they do a good enough job at that (which I doubt, compared to Google) then they may stand a chance to reach "viral momentum."
posting2fast 8y ago
https://framatube.org/ https://framatube.org/ Am I wrong, or does this list videos across instances? As long as there is one search interface for many instances, and only one account needed to follow whatever instance they are on, what more centralization do you need? I remember when Google Video still existed, and I wanted to try it out. I don't really make video, but I had random boring clips made with my digicam, and I uploaded one where slowly dropped a sugar cube into a cup of steaming, red fruit tea (the cube it absorbed the tea and fell apart). Just because in those days, signing up for free things and trying them out was something I liked to do. Then I forgot about the video, and after a while I got an email saying it got removed because it violated the terms. Maybe they thought it was blood, heh. At any rate, I don't even make videos and I already know 100% that I don't want centralized hosting, to be at the mercy of some faceless entity that might click the wrong button and then be difficult about it. It was funny in my case, but it could have been something important or something that required a lot of effort. > Make a rage video about how your normal video got demonized, get a million views. Yeah, which means people actually do care more than you think. Those videos would also get more views on decentralized hosting, compared to bland ones. It doesn't mean people actually secretly enjoy being mistreated because talking about that gives them views.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  You're not making videos, though. Thus, you don't really can't speak to what content creators want. And just because people complain about YouTube at times doesn't mean they want a decentralized service. And when they complain about demonetization, I'm not sure how decentralized services are supposed to help there, because I've not seen much in how decentralized services are supposed to help monetize videos. I'm pretty sure they're not going to be serving ads.
ReverseCold 8y ago
The biggest thing holding back p2p/"truly decentralized" networks (in my opinion) are NAT/Firewalls. You cannot reliably get past them on the inside without manual configuration. There's no way you can convince millions of people to try to port forward, and UPnP is very hit or miss. If that was solved, lightweight applications like 1:1 messaging could easily be fully peer to peer/decentralized/trustless.
- lylecubed 8y ago
  How does bittorrent get around this? It isn't particularly troubled by nats or firewalls unless you live on a college campus.
  - ReverseCold 8y ago
    The nice people you're downloading from have their ports forwarded. If possible, most clients try to use UPnP, but it doesn't always work.
- WJW 8y ago
  That is definitely a thing hindering adoption, but if there was really a big demand for decentralization, they would have been gone already. There are many more things holding back decentralized networks like the difficulty in filtering spam without easy coordinated effort, fixing network wide search and efficient monetization of content for creators.
  - ReverseCold 8y ago
    Yes, there definitely are other problems. For spam, you can have centralized blocklists that people can subscribe to. The iOS version of whatever would need it anyway to follow the App Store guidelines. If you feel you're being censored, unsubscribe from the list. Alternatively (or in addition to that), have everyone publicly publish who they blocked, and then trust what your friends or friend of friends blocked. Network wide search is a problem, yes, but for chat (which I really want to be decentralized :( ) it doesn't matter too much. Monetization for content creators also doesn't matter for chat. So maybe I should rephrase my initial comment: Lack of NAT/Firewall bypass is the largest (and maybe only) problem needed to be solved for decentralized chat.
bufferoverflow 8y ago
Youtube started banning politically inconvenient youtubers. And it's their right. That alone is a good enough reason for an alternative, centralized or not. The end user doesn't care about the underlying technology, as long as it works.
- halflings 8y ago
  Yup, but it has to work as in: provide good video recommendations, allow for low latency 720p streaming at the very least.
MR4D 8y ago
I think you're confuning centralization with a walled garden. Because if what you said were true, then why would Disney be buying Hulu? The larger of a content creator I am, the more I want to control distribution. Having my content on a site with someone else's rules sucks, because I am at their mercy. For example, with Disney owning Hulu, they can tell Google to go F-off, and never worry about their content being accidentally censored, deleted, etc. For a smaller content producer, the value might even be more significant, even if the dollars are less.
- marcusf 8y ago
  Huge difference between a brand likey Disney able to pull off a streaming service and smaller producers. Smaller producers need demand, and for video demand = youtube.
  - MR4D 8y ago
    I don’t think that right. For instance, let’s say I’m a comedian and have a thousand loyal followers. Why couldn’t I just pay $20/month for a PeerTube hosting service with my own brand. Then I can just tweet out the links. Why would I need YouTube? As another example, let’s say I’m a white supremacist, and I have a hundred followers. I can email a link out to them and never worry about censorship by YouTube. So demand can be small, and it still works. In fact, since I now have more control over the experience, it can be much more tailored than youtube.
nerdponx 8y ago
What the people who want decentralized services don't realize is that the content creators want centralized services (whether they realize it or not). You need a centralized discovery service (this is where Tor, I2P, Freenet, IPFS, etc. all fail). Centralized content hosting is different.
- lylecubed 8y ago
  Why couldn't you make the discovery service decentralized as well?
  - nerdponx 8y ago
    To clarify -- I don't mean that the service itself needs to be centralized. You just need a single place to find stuff.
  - jasode 8y ago
    Because the laws of physics (speed of light) makes a decentralized discovery service slower which means it's extremely inconvenient for typical users. For example, go to youtube.com and see how fast it loads the main landing page with 20+ suggested video thumbnails. On my computer, it loads in 1136 milliseconds. The same centralized-system's speed advantage happens for video search results such as "3d printing".[1] A decentralized system with DHT[2] or other peer-2-peer scheme cannot match that speed. Think about trying to query dozens (or potentially thousands) of p2p nodes to return a page of video thumbnails. If you try to "solve" the slow performance by "caching" results, you still have to cache it on a server somewhere. That "cache server" is an example of feature-creep towards centralization. People will put up with decentralized's inconveniences for illegal things like bittorrent pirated movies. For the vast majority of mainstream content, a centralized service is too attractive for billions of web users. [1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=3d+printing https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=3d+printing [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table
    - codefined 8y ago
gwbas1c 8y ago
I think you're on to something. > How many attempts at decentralized social networks have failed? All of them. When I've tried to build decentralized code, it's 10x harder. IMO, the real problem with creating a decentralized replacement for a centralized service is multi-fold: You have to really understand the use case that you're trying to replace, and the nuances that drive the general public to that particular service. Then, things like search and quality control become much harder. On top of that, "decentralized" isn't a feature that most people really care about, so your decentralized replacement has to have tangible improvements above and beyond the original service. Remember: The web is decentralized, but we rely on a few search engines. Email is decentralized, but most of us get email from a few providers. The web and email had tangible improvements over AOL, Compuserve, ect.
- qop 8y ago
  IRC, gnusocial, xmpp, sms to some degree, ham radio, etc. The absence of censorship I think will prove to be tangible enough to make products like peertube successful.
  - satsuma 8y ago
    how many of those have never seen real use/adoption above hobbyists/diehards, though? irc and sms is about it from that list. it was a drag getting people to drop skype for telegram, despite telegram being (in my opinion) more user friendly. getting them to go to something like gnusocial would be damn near impossible. decentralized youtube might be easier to get rolling, on the other hand. all it takes is sharing your videos through it instead of youtube. think about how most people found youtube -- someone linked them a video, statistically likely to be evolution of dance. no reason that can't be done with peertube.
    - qop 8y ago
      People made this argument about cars when they were still riding horseback. Let's not defend the worse thing here.
flatline 8y ago
Usenet is still a thing, going on 40 years now. It may not be uber popular but it's far from a failure.
- hk__2 8y ago
  > Usenet is still a thing, going on 40 years now. It may not be uber popular but it's far from a failure. Well, it’s not a failure, but it’s not far from abandon. Quoting from Wikipedia [1]: "AOL discontinued Usenet access in 2005. In May 2010, Duke University, whose implementation had kicked off Usenet more than 30 years earlier, decommissioned its Usenet server, citing low usage and rising costs. After 32 years, the Usenet news service link at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (news.unc.edu) was retired on February 4, 2011." [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Decline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Decline
jMyles 8y ago
> How many attempts at decentralized social networks have failed? All of them. This seems like a very, very premature assessment. Come back in 50 years and see if this is still true.
rhizome 8y ago
What the people who want decentralized services don't realize is that the content creators want centralized services (whether they realize it or not). Where do you draw the line? Social networks are already decentralized, so creators have to crosspost to reach their audience on all platforms. Seems to be working, at least for some.
CM30 8y ago
Nothing about any of that couldn't happen on a decentralised/federated network. The drama could obviously happen, though likely about different issues to those on YouTube. The discoverability could happen on a decentralised system, as could ad money/subscription payments, recommendations or anything else. Nothing about what makes someone successful on a site like YouTube needs it to be centralised to be possible.
- boron1006 8y ago
  It's not impossible, but I think it's way, way less likely. The thing with YouTube alternatives is that they have to be at least as good as YouTube. Creators will only go where their audiences will go, so a site that doesn't offer a good user experience will immediately be off the table. Discoverability is way harder on decentralized systems, as is providing recommendations, stability, etc. Sometimes HN/reddit gets so starry eyed when anything about decentralized/distributed/open-source systems comes up that any sort of critique of the product becomes like a personal attack. A few months ago someone posted a decentralized "facebook alternative", where you had to download a bunch of stuff, and connect with an FTP client just in order to make a post. My grandma's on facebook, but she's not going to understand how to connect to a MySQL database. People think that defending decentralized/distributed systems at any cost makes them better, but I think it just makes them untenable in the long term. If you enjoy using a product, then prosthelytize all you want for it, but if you like the idea more than the product, then the product probably should change or evolve.
  - aninhumer 8y ago
    >The thing with YouTube alternatives is that they have to be at least as good as YouTube. Creators will only go where their audiences will go, so a site that doesn't offer a good user experience will immediately be off the table. Why do you assume they have to choose? A creator could upload to YouTube to get access to their audience, but then also encourage people to use PeerTube to get their videos.
  - jstarfish 8y ago
    > A few months ago someone posted a decentralized "facebook alternative", where you had to download a bunch of stuff, and connect with an FTP client just in order to make a post. That's the irony with decentralized services. Your entire architecture depends on people participating in it. When you make it as humanly cumbersome as possible for people to actually participate, you will not have any infrastructure. I've seen worms and botnets that were better architected than that. Recruiting and participation were done right, and made easy ;)
mirimir 8y ago
> ... content creators want centralized services ... Sure they do. Until their content gets nuked, with no recourse.
jordigh 8y ago
It's really grinding when the top comments of any sort of alternative thing to come out are always so negative. Long list of reasons why this will never work out. It's easy to be negative. It's more difficult but more fun to be inventive and industrious. To the peertube devs: don't let negative comments like this grind you down. Peertube has some great ideas and I think it can succeed.
- yroc92 8y ago
  The top comment of almost any post on HN is negative.
  - meko 8y ago
    I've noticed this and wonder why it is... Maybe developers /engineers are prone to seeking out, trying to identify constraints?
    - DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago
      There probably less incentive or pressure to comment if you agree. If you disagree, you presumably have an opposing view and rationale which you may be compelled to share.
      - charlchi 8y ago
        Criticising a technology for it's tech is one thing. Claiming that "X won't work because Y always works" casually but authoritatively isn't really criticism. And you can see a lot of people here getting upset over casual but massive sweeping statements like that without backup.
    - wpietri 8y ago
      I definitely was. It's much easier to appear smart when being critical than when being positive. One of the things that helped me was the notion of Appreciative Inquiry. Basically that when you are dealing with new things, you first look for the good points that you can amplify, not bad points to beat on. That said, I think coding is a powerful push back toward the negative. Code breaks so easily that we're thoroughly trained to be on the lookout for the next failure point.
resters 8y ago
Your assumptions are completely wrong. Content creators simply want a platform for gathering an audience. Youtube wants to play as many ads as possible. Let's not pretend that somehow those interests align perfectly in the product we know as youtube. The audience generation mechanics are an important ingredient for replacing youtube, but youtube has gone from being a free service that had little user generated content and focused on gray area "Napster model" hosting of copyrighted content.. and then gradually found content creators and introduced interruption advertising (full screen commercials). There are a lot of holes in youtube's profit model. Imagine what youtube could be if it didn't have the dark patterns everywhere (young kids get served algorithmically generated disturbing content!). It's so refreshing that an alternative model is getting some traction. Also, it would be fairly easy to just slurp up the best content from Youtube since most is in the public domain.
- themagician 8y ago
  I'm not wrong. We have moved towards a world of centralized services because that's what people want. To many people it's the centralized services that "are" the Internet: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—that's it. YouTube is the lowest common denominator of video. You aren't going to "fix" its problems with a more complex decentralized network. If you want to solve the problems with YouTube you have to do it with another YouTube. Build another centralized service that fixes the problems that YouTube has, because that's what people want. Not a federated network. Creators want do less work for a larger more consistent paycheck. Have we learned nothing from literally every single project the that has tried to "free" us from the evils of the centralized services? Here ya go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_pro... Slowly they all go from Active to Dead or Stalled. YouTube's audience doesn't care about anything at decentralized network has to offer. It's just entertainment for them. They just want to watch videos and shitpost in the comments.
  - smnplk 8y ago
    Another point of decentralised services is cutting out the middleman and this is what should be appealing to content creators.
onion2k 8y ago
How many attempts at decentralized social networks have failed? All of them. Practically every social network has failed in some way or another , decentralised or not. Very few of them have failed due to the tech though - tech seems to be the easy part in comparison to building a large enough audience to keep the network active.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  But for most decentralized social networks, the selling point, the focus, has been that it's decentralized. Which tends to point to the idea that most people don't care about decentralization.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
grahamburger 8y ago
> But what those who create want is an audience. They want a community. PeerTube seems to be aiming to provide exactly those things.
syrrim 8y ago
This is a very silly way of looking at the world. The reason people prefer centralized services is because: - they have greater capacity to add features - they have more ability to have search and other discovery Neither of these are inherent to a centralized service. All you need is a centralized website on top of a decentralized video host. Different websites can compete on features like search, while providing access to the same database of videos. The fact that no one has succeeded yet is not proof that this is impossible. Moreover, this would be to ignore protocols like email and the web, which are decentralized, and which are very popular. Centralization has been preferred because we are in a period of very rapid change, where centralized services can pivot ten times before a decentralized service even gets started. People are beginning to realize the downsides of centralized services, change is starting to slow down, and decentralized services are now able to make headway.
- sperm 8y ago
  This is a very silly way of looking at the world. The reason people prefer centralized services is because: - they have a monetization layer directly linked to their users' bank accounts. At the end of the day people need to pay bills in order to produce content for a living. Without that, you can't compete. With that, and you're not decentralized.
ekianjo 8y ago
> How many attempts at decentralized social networks have failed? All of them. Looks like you never heard of Mastodon. It's thriving.
znpy 8y ago
> How many attempts at decentralized social networks have failed? All of them. This is why we have to keep trying :)
adreamingsoul 8y ago
As a content creator, I disagree. Not all of us are driven to market our content on social platforms. I have my own peertube (as an experiment) instance running that allows me to control the entire viewing experience and that’s more important to me then views, likes, or subs.
tinus_hn 8y ago
There are more use cases for hosting video than monetized videos. A few weeks ago Blender was having issues with YouTube trying to twist their arm. They would do fine an another network as long as it’s reasonably easy to use.
8bitsrule 8y ago
What the people who want Stanley-steamers don't realize is, what they really want is better buggy-whips. Cites are centralized services. Communities can actually thrive outside of cities.
Fnoord 8y ago
> How many attempts at decentralized social networks have failed? All of them. PeerTube is to YouTube what Mastodon is to Facebook/Twitter. Could you explain how exactly -in your opinion- Mastodon has failed?

phoe-krk 8y ago

Mastodon is going pretty well. I greatly enjoy using it and the conversations I have there.

meesterdude 8y ago
I've heard of it but didn't realize people really used it? How/where should people learn more about mastodon if they're interested? How do you use it?
- stephenhuey 8y ago
  https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org
lylecubed 8y ago
Am I the only one who finds the UI of mastodon nearly unusable? Then again, I also find tweetdeck and the twitter webpage a struggle to use.
- drb91 8y ago
  It doesn't seem any worse than Twitter itself.
- valeg 8y ago
  There are other UIs for Masto e.g. https://pinafore.social/ https://pinafore.social/ or https://brutaldon.online/ https://brutaldon.online/ The benefits of open source :).

not_that_noob 8y ago

This one I think has legs. Quite a few content creators are upset with YouTube policies, and can drive users to PeerTube using other social services. Once you have a core group of users, others see that it’s viable and adoption rises.

bobajeff 8y ago

I think getting viewers wouldn't be a problem since videos are shareable and searchable in the all the ActivityPub networks.

elago 8y ago

How many centralized social networks have failed too? Most of them. A lot of successful things have had similarities to previous failures. The first step is to actually try something new instead of sitting around nay-saying everything. Personally my opinion Youtube can keep the the drama rage videos, or they can fall off the face of the internet. I just want educational videos and music without constant ads, and I don't want to create some entity with absolute power to censor content for the rest of the internet.

dragontamer 8y ago
XMPP / Jabber isn't doing so hot though. I wouldn't call it a "failure", but Facebook / Google, especially with the "hangouts" thing cutting out XMPP support, definitely reduced XMPP's userbase. Decentralized can certainly fail, or at least shrink over time.
hk__2 8y ago
> How many centralized social networks have failed too? Most of them. That’s still infinitely more successful than decentralized social network attempts.

wongarsu 8y ago

youtube is great for building an audience, but not nessesarily good for keeping it. A lot of niches have great success with patreon, but great trouble with keeping their videos on youtube (and in some cases keeping them in their subscribers feeds even when they are not taken down). The issues range from youtube's automatic enforcement of content guidelines (which appears more or less random), their ever increasing strictness (explosions are suddenly bad?) to their aweful copyright system that enables serious abuse of false copyright claims. I suspect most content creators will stay on youtube for the audience, but there is lots of potential for backup channels to move off of youtube to some other, better provider. And as enough content is mirrored (and eventually vanishes from youtube as it gets taken down), the decentralized service becomes gradually more interesting to viewers.

tehduder9 8y ago
>youtube is great for building an audience, but not nessesarily good for keeping it. I wouldn't make that youtube's fault. People just grow out of content or like other content. And the overzealous community guidelines and copyright strikes are a result of hundreds of lawsuits against youtube by the movie industry, and a need to appeal to advertisers for their platform. Youtube barely makes any real income, just barely. People seriously seriously underestimate the amount time and tech that has gone into youtube. PeerTube/alternate youtube will also be subjective to the same things and similar things will happen. Copyright system has to inspect billions of hours of video in a day, you can't expect people to do all of that. Will the alternative that isn't already a huge company have the assets to deal with all the copyright infringement? To have the enourmous CDN and advanced AI filtering algorithms that is better than youtube?
- mikec3010 8y ago
  The hypocrisy will be hilarious when people start ripping yt vids and putting them on pt, given how yt was born off pirated content and hid behind "safe harbor" laws to build a browsable catalog. The first clip that came from yt will be met with scathing rebuke from Google's legal team.

dragontamer 8y ago

> What the people who want decentralized services don't realize is that the content creators want centralized services (whether they realize it or not). I agree. The current Youtube creators have built their models on advertisement, clicks, favorites, etc. etc. PeerTube will never be for them. There's simply no money in PeerTube right now. That's fine however. There's a large section of creators, such as Blender, Education (think OpenCourseWare / MIT), Linux Conference publishers who will benefit from PeerTube. In these cases, people don't want to make money. They want to publish videos and foster a community. Youtube is no longer compatible with the OSS values, due to advertisements, copyright takedowns and such. You never know when someone's ringtone happens to be a copyright violation which takes down a 60-minute talk about C++ or something stupid.

iknowverylittle 8y ago
>There's a large section of creators, such as Blender, Education (think OpenCourseWare / MIT), Linux Conference publishers who will benefit from PeerTube. That's what I'm hoping for. Educational and instructional videos are my main use for YouTube, YT happens to be where they are hosted, I care very little about anything else related to the site so for me PeerTube could potentially be perfect for my use.
albertgoeswoof 8y ago
There's no reason you can't build in monetization to peertube, and let the peertube host choose to enable it or not.
- dane-pgp 8y ago
  A monetization style I'd like to see more of is one where the videos are uploaded, but only a thumbnail or a clip is available by default, until a certain donation goal is reached, at which point the video becomes free for everyone to view, indefinitely. This looks game theoretically like it will produce a Tragedy of the Commons outcome, but there are plenty of streamers out there who rely on tips while allowing the majority of viewers to be "freeloaders". Of course, the incentives for donating during a livestream are different from the incentive to donate to unlock a video, but the software/UI could display prominently who it was that contributed to unlocking a video, and who are the major financial supporters of the channel.

willio58 8y ago

Podcasts are, for the most part, decentralized and seem to be still booming in popularity. I don’t see why a decentralized video platform couldn’t work too.

gowld 8y ago
Podcasts are lovely but the scale is miniscule compared to video. And video podcast technology exists but is deeply underused (perhaps in part because people choose podcasts when their eyes are busy) Suppose I want to use a podcast client app to watch what today is in my YouTube subscriptions. Why not just use YouTube? I'm not obligated to read the comments. There's also a pattern that goes: Post a video to YT, then post a link to reddit.com/r/mychannel (or an alternative, or on several alternatives) where users can watch the video as an embed and then engage in discussion under whatever commenting/moderation system I choose.
- ballenf 8y ago
  > And video podcast technology exists but is deeply underused It's almost invisible, but the Apple Podcast app still seamlessly supports video podcasts, but it gets harder to find with every update. With the popularity of that app, I wonder why Apple doesn't push it more to create a Youtube alternative. I know part of the answer -- you have to do your own encoding and hosting (I think, info is hard to find), but you'd think Apple could step in and offer those services. About the only video podcasts I've seen that are recent are a couple churches and some weird local real estate services.
Sangermaine 8y ago
>Podcasts are, for the most part, decentralized No, they aren’t. Of course anyone can put up a podcast, but the successful ones tend to cluster into podcast networks of like shows or join the big podcast groups like Nerdist, Wondery, or Earwolf. Or be a part of an established media company like NPR or Slate. It’s easy to start a podcast but very hard to survive and expand alone.
- zanny 8y ago

CompelTechnic 8y ago

demonitized -> demonized is a great freudian slip.

themagician 8y ago
Just a typo. I've got one of those shitty apple keyboards.

marsokod 8y ago

I believe the people behind peertube know about that. That is why Peertube is so much on federation with ActivityPub. If done properly this would allow anyone with an account on a website using ActivityPub (like Mastodon) to interact with the author of a Peertube video. Granted this a both a technical problem (that I believe solvable) and a financing problem. It is hard to compete with the GAFAM and their advertising departments.

deevolution 8y ago

I think open protocals will really help in shifting people away from centralized services and towards decentralized or federated services. Activity pub, for instance is awesome. I think once we have open social protocals paired with cryptocurrencies, we might finally get to a point where federated/decentralized networks become attractive to an audience and to content creators and to developers. We can have borderless, uncensorable, and resilient social networks. Anticipating some downvotes here because I mentioned cryptocurrencies.

rspeer 8y ago
That sounds like a way to end up with social networks made entirely of people who like cryptocurrencies. Sounds awful to me.

iknowverylittle 8y ago

I'm not sure that 'decentralized' in this case means decentralized in community. I understand it more as decentralized hosting since it's P2P. Now, peertube does state something about 'instances', so that might separate content from one accessable website. I don't know. YouTube's big point initially was video hosting was expensive and YouTube made it cheap (for creators). It is also is a centralized community so you can find a video on virtually any subject just from the search on the homepage. If peertube is able to do this in a similar fashion would aid it's potential adoption (though again, I don't know if instances hinder that). PeerTube still needs to be build a user base, attract users and creators from YouTube. Getting creators to use both platforms would help. Lastly though, since it's P2P I don't know if that means only popular videos would then load at a comparable speed YouTube or not.

dragontamer 8y ago
> I'm not sure that 'decentralized' in this case means decentralized in community. The idea of ActivityPub is to have a federated group of servers. Similar to XMPP and Email. So you can create an account as Alice@serverAlpha.com, while I can create an account as Bob@serverB.com. When I publish a video at serverB.com, it will notify serverAlpha.com that a new video was published, which eventually tells Alice to check out the new video.
- iknowverylittle 8y ago
  Thank you! This is all new to me, so I don't know how it works. However, this does resolve my concern about 'instances'. It makes me excited and hopeful then that Peertube could become something pretty great.
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    > However, this does resolve my concern about 'instances'. On a surface level, it should. But given what I've seen over the past 15 years, no... it shouldn't resolve those concerns. Consider if Google / Youtube became PeerTube compatible with ActivityPub next year. But then, there are additional features that only exist on Youtube's implementation (spam monitoring, Twitter integration, Youtube integration, etc. etc.). Something that makes people prefer Youtube over other hosts. Eventually, Youtube can cut out ActivityPub, after it captures the ActivityPub marketplace. See XMPP and Google Hangouts if you want a historical example. Embrace, Extend, extinguish is the name of the technique, and it is quite effective at killing open standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... ---------- So the general community does need to be aware of it, lest another XMPP-extinguish effect comes around from the big players.

deltron3030 8y ago

> What the people who want decentralized services don't realize is that the content creators want centralized services (whether they realize it or not). Ideally you wouldn't decentralize the UI/UX, but the cloud server architecture it runs on. You could still maintain the same centrally accessible experience. That's the thing people need to understand, the frontend (UI) can be seperated and decoupled from the backend. Where the servers that power those sites are plugins installed on peoples home routers or personal assistants. They scale in performance with each added user and installed plugin.

halflings 8y ago
It's not just about UI/UX. You need a centralized backend to return recommendations in a reasonable time (if you need to query all the decentralized instances each time, it'll be incredibly slow)... which means that you go back to the scenario where a centralized instance is the source of traffic, decides what is recommended and what isn't. I guess there's still one advantage in that scenario: somebody can build a competing recommendation service while using the same underlying videos.
- deltron3030 8y ago
  Couldn't you store information about all nodes/content in every node? What would change is that the new uploaded stuff just isn't instantly available, only after syncing the new index with all other nodes. Not really a big problem, because most youtubers, especially the professional ones, shedule their uploads anyway. Accessing your own node, the one your neighborhood or the next available one shouldn't be slower, the contrary I suppose. Key seems to be to store the information or index on all nodes and syncing them.

tejtm 8y ago

No,that is most definitely not what I want as a content creator. I do not want just any audience (that is the realm of people who require attention for validation or exploitation). By the time I have created something I have already gotten what I am going to get out of it, sharing it is just a courtesy and I would rather just share with people who care enough to make the effort to search for something relevant to their interests rather than a horde of mindlessly clicking eyeballs

s73v3r_ 8y ago
I think most of the content creators also want to be paid for creating the content. I've not seen how PeerTube intends to help with that.
- tejtm 8y ago
  I am not so sure, of course getting paid to do what you love would be great but so would be winning a lottery. Content that is a by-product of drive and passion is in my estimation largely distinct from passive income / rent seeking content. Plus if it is really that good (and most is not), a way will be found.
  - s73v3r_ 8y ago
    I think that's trying to hand-wave away the fact that many of these channels are the day job of the people making them.

jklinger410 8y ago

You left yourself open here by not elaborating on how centralized services benefit from profiting companies with marketing campaigns who draw users. Decentralized platforms will force these content creators to market their own platform. If they do a good enough job at that (which I doubt, compared to Google) then they may stand a chance to reach "viral momentum."

posting2fast 8y ago

https://framatube.org/ https://framatube.org/ Am I wrong, or does this list videos across instances? As long as there is one search interface for many instances, and only one account needed to follow whatever instance they are on, what more centralization do you need? I remember when Google Video still existed, and I wanted to try it out. I don't really make video, but I had random boring clips made with my digicam, and I uploaded one where slowly dropped a sugar cube into a cup of steaming, red fruit tea (the cube it absorbed the tea and fell apart). Just because in those days, signing up for free things and trying them out was something I liked to do. Then I forgot about the video, and after a while I got an email saying it got removed because it violated the terms. Maybe they thought it was blood, heh. At any rate, I don't even make videos and I already know 100% that I don't want centralized hosting, to be at the mercy of some faceless entity that might click the wrong button and then be difficult about it. It was funny in my case, but it could have been something important or something that required a lot of effort. > Make a rage video about how your normal video got demonized, get a million views. Yeah, which means people actually do care more than you think. Those videos would also get more views on decentralized hosting, compared to bland ones. It doesn't mean people actually secretly enjoy being mistreated because talking about that gives them views.

s73v3r_ 8y ago
You're not making videos, though. Thus, you don't really can't speak to what content creators want. And just because people complain about YouTube at times doesn't mean they want a decentralized service. And when they complain about demonetization, I'm not sure how decentralized services are supposed to help there, because I've not seen much in how decentralized services are supposed to help monetize videos. I'm pretty sure they're not going to be serving ads.

ReverseCold 8y ago

The biggest thing holding back p2p/"truly decentralized" networks (in my opinion) are NAT/Firewalls. You cannot reliably get past them on the inside without manual configuration. There's no way you can convince millions of people to try to port forward, and UPnP is very hit or miss. If that was solved, lightweight applications like 1:1 messaging could easily be fully peer to peer/decentralized/trustless.

lylecubed 8y ago
How does bittorrent get around this? It isn't particularly troubled by nats or firewalls unless you live on a college campus.
- ReverseCold 8y ago
  The nice people you're downloading from have their ports forwarded. If possible, most clients try to use UPnP, but it doesn't always work.
WJW 8y ago
That is definitely a thing hindering adoption, but if there was really a big demand for decentralization, they would have been gone already. There are many more things holding back decentralized networks like the difficulty in filtering spam without easy coordinated effort, fixing network wide search and efficient monetization of content for creators.
- ReverseCold 8y ago
  Yes, there definitely are other problems. For spam, you can have centralized blocklists that people can subscribe to. The iOS version of whatever would need it anyway to follow the App Store guidelines. If you feel you're being censored, unsubscribe from the list. Alternatively (or in addition to that), have everyone publicly publish who they blocked, and then trust what your friends or friend of friends blocked. Network wide search is a problem, yes, but for chat (which I really want to be decentralized :( ) it doesn't matter too much. Monetization for content creators also doesn't matter for chat. So maybe I should rephrase my initial comment: Lack of NAT/Firewall bypass is the largest (and maybe only) problem needed to be solved for decentralized chat.

bufferoverflow 8y ago

Youtube started banning politically inconvenient youtubers. And it's their right. That alone is a good enough reason for an alternative, centralized or not. The end user doesn't care about the underlying technology, as long as it works.

halflings 8y ago
Yup, but it has to work as in: provide good video recommendations, allow for low latency 720p streaming at the very least.

MR4D 8y ago

I think you're confuning centralization with a walled garden. Because if what you said were true, then why would Disney be buying Hulu? The larger of a content creator I am, the more I want to control distribution. Having my content on a site with someone else's rules sucks, because I am at their mercy. For example, with Disney owning Hulu, they can tell Google to go F-off, and never worry about their content being accidentally censored, deleted, etc. For a smaller content producer, the value might even be more significant, even if the dollars are less.

marcusf 8y ago
Huge difference between a brand likey Disney able to pull off a streaming service and smaller producers. Smaller producers need demand, and for video demand = youtube.
- MR4D 8y ago
  I don’t think that right. For instance, let’s say I’m a comedian and have a thousand loyal followers. Why couldn’t I just pay $20/month for a PeerTube hosting service with my own brand. Then I can just tweet out the links. Why would I need YouTube? As another example, let’s say I’m a white supremacist, and I have a hundred followers. I can email a link out to them and never worry about censorship by YouTube. So demand can be small, and it still works. In fact, since I now have more control over the experience, it can be much more tailored than youtube.

nerdponx 8y ago

What the people who want decentralized services don't realize is that the content creators want centralized services (whether they realize it or not). You need a centralized discovery service (this is where Tor, I2P, Freenet, IPFS, etc. all fail). Centralized content hosting is different.

lylecubed 8y ago
Why couldn't you make the discovery service decentralized as well?
- nerdponx 8y ago
  To clarify -- I don't mean that the service itself needs to be centralized. You just need a single place to find stuff.
- jasode 8y ago
  Because the laws of physics (speed of light) makes a decentralized discovery service slower which means it's extremely inconvenient for typical users. For example, go to youtube.com and see how fast it loads the main landing page with 20+ suggested video thumbnails. On my computer, it loads in 1136 milliseconds. The same centralized-system's speed advantage happens for video search results such as "3d printing".[1] A decentralized system with DHT[2] or other peer-2-peer scheme cannot match that speed. Think about trying to query dozens (or potentially thousands) of p2p nodes to return a page of video thumbnails. If you try to "solve" the slow performance by "caching" results, you still have to cache it on a server somewhere. That "cache server" is an example of feature-creep towards centralization. People will put up with decentralized's inconveniences for illegal things like bittorrent pirated movies. For the vast majority of mainstream content, a centralized service is too attractive for billions of web users. [1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=3d+printing https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=3d+printing [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table
  - codefined 8y ago

gwbas1c 8y ago

I think you're on to something. > How many attempts at decentralized social networks have failed? All of them. When I've tried to build decentralized code, it's 10x harder. IMO, the real problem with creating a decentralized replacement for a centralized service is multi-fold: You have to really understand the use case that you're trying to replace, and the nuances that drive the general public to that particular service. Then, things like search and quality control become much harder. On top of that, "decentralized" isn't a feature that most people really care about, so your decentralized replacement has to have tangible improvements above and beyond the original service. Remember: The web is decentralized, but we rely on a few search engines. Email is decentralized, but most of us get email from a few providers. The web and email had tangible improvements over AOL, Compuserve, ect.

qop 8y ago
IRC, gnusocial, xmpp, sms to some degree, ham radio, etc. The absence of censorship I think will prove to be tangible enough to make products like peertube successful.
- satsuma 8y ago
  how many of those have never seen real use/adoption above hobbyists/diehards, though? irc and sms is about it from that list. it was a drag getting people to drop skype for telegram, despite telegram being (in my opinion) more user friendly. getting them to go to something like gnusocial would be damn near impossible. decentralized youtube might be easier to get rolling, on the other hand. all it takes is sharing your videos through it instead of youtube. think about how most people found youtube -- someone linked them a video, statistically likely to be evolution of dance. no reason that can't be done with peertube.
  - qop 8y ago
    People made this argument about cars when they were still riding horseback. Let's not defend the worse thing here.

flatline 8y ago

Usenet is still a thing, going on 40 years now. It may not be uber popular but it's far from a failure.

hk__2 8y ago
> Usenet is still a thing, going on 40 years now. It may not be uber popular but it's far from a failure. Well, it’s not a failure, but it’s not far from abandon. Quoting from Wikipedia [1]: "AOL discontinued Usenet access in 2005. In May 2010, Duke University, whose implementation had kicked off Usenet more than 30 years earlier, decommissioned its Usenet server, citing low usage and rising costs. After 32 years, the Usenet news service link at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (news.unc.edu) was retired on February 4, 2011." [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Decline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Decline

jMyles 8y ago

> How many attempts at decentralized social networks have failed? All of them. This seems like a very, very premature assessment. Come back in 50 years and see if this is still true.

rhizome 8y ago

What the people who want decentralized services don't realize is that the content creators want centralized services (whether they realize it or not). Where do you draw the line? Social networks are already decentralized, so creators have to crosspost to reach their audience on all platforms. Seems to be working, at least for some.

CM30 8y ago

Nothing about any of that couldn't happen on a decentralised/federated network. The drama could obviously happen, though likely about different issues to those on YouTube. The discoverability could happen on a decentralised system, as could ad money/subscription payments, recommendations or anything else. Nothing about what makes someone successful on a site like YouTube needs it to be centralised to be possible.

boron1006 8y ago
It's not impossible, but I think it's way, way less likely. The thing with YouTube alternatives is that they have to be at least as good as YouTube. Creators will only go where their audiences will go, so a site that doesn't offer a good user experience will immediately be off the table. Discoverability is way harder on decentralized systems, as is providing recommendations, stability, etc. Sometimes HN/reddit gets so starry eyed when anything about decentralized/distributed/open-source systems comes up that any sort of critique of the product becomes like a personal attack. A few months ago someone posted a decentralized "facebook alternative", where you had to download a bunch of stuff, and connect with an FTP client just in order to make a post. My grandma's on facebook, but she's not going to understand how to connect to a MySQL database. People think that defending decentralized/distributed systems at any cost makes them better, but I think it just makes them untenable in the long term. If you enjoy using a product, then prosthelytize all you want for it, but if you like the idea more than the product, then the product probably should change or evolve.
- aninhumer 8y ago
  >The thing with YouTube alternatives is that they have to be at least as good as YouTube. Creators will only go where their audiences will go, so a site that doesn't offer a good user experience will immediately be off the table. Why do you assume they have to choose? A creator could upload to YouTube to get access to their audience, but then also encourage people to use PeerTube to get their videos.
- jstarfish 8y ago
  > A few months ago someone posted a decentralized "facebook alternative", where you had to download a bunch of stuff, and connect with an FTP client just in order to make a post. That's the irony with decentralized services. Your entire architecture depends on people participating in it. When you make it as humanly cumbersome as possible for people to actually participate, you will not have any infrastructure. I've seen worms and botnets that were better architected than that. Recruiting and participation were done right, and made easy ;)

mirimir 8y ago

> ... content creators want centralized services ... Sure they do. Until their content gets nuked, with no recourse.

jordigh 8y ago

It's really grinding when the top comments of any sort of alternative thing to come out are always so negative. Long list of reasons why this will never work out. It's easy to be negative. It's more difficult but more fun to be inventive and industrious. To the peertube devs: don't let negative comments like this grind you down. Peertube has some great ideas and I think it can succeed.

yroc92 8y ago
The top comment of almost any post on HN is negative.
- meko 8y ago
  I've noticed this and wonder why it is... Maybe developers /engineers are prone to seeking out, trying to identify constraints?
  - DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago
    There probably less incentive or pressure to comment if you agree. If you disagree, you presumably have an opposing view and rationale which you may be compelled to share.
    - charlchi 8y ago
      Criticising a technology for it's tech is one thing. Claiming that "X won't work because Y always works" casually but authoritatively isn't really criticism. And you can see a lot of people here getting upset over casual but massive sweeping statements like that without backup.
  - wpietri 8y ago
    I definitely was. It's much easier to appear smart when being critical than when being positive. One of the things that helped me was the notion of Appreciative Inquiry. Basically that when you are dealing with new things, you first look for the good points that you can amplify, not bad points to beat on. That said, I think coding is a powerful push back toward the negative. Code breaks so easily that we're thoroughly trained to be on the lookout for the next failure point.

resters 8y ago

Your assumptions are completely wrong. Content creators simply want a platform for gathering an audience. Youtube wants to play as many ads as possible. Let's not pretend that somehow those interests align perfectly in the product we know as youtube. The audience generation mechanics are an important ingredient for replacing youtube, but youtube has gone from being a free service that had little user generated content and focused on gray area "Napster model" hosting of copyrighted content.. and then gradually found content creators and introduced interruption advertising (full screen commercials). There are a lot of holes in youtube's profit model. Imagine what youtube could be if it didn't have the dark patterns everywhere (young kids get served algorithmically generated disturbing content!). It's so refreshing that an alternative model is getting some traction. Also, it would be fairly easy to just slurp up the best content from Youtube since most is in the public domain.

themagician 8y ago
I'm not wrong. We have moved towards a world of centralized services because that's what people want. To many people it's the centralized services that "are" the Internet: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—that's it. YouTube is the lowest common denominator of video. You aren't going to "fix" its problems with a more complex decentralized network. If you want to solve the problems with YouTube you have to do it with another YouTube. Build another centralized service that fixes the problems that YouTube has, because that's what people want. Not a federated network. Creators want do less work for a larger more consistent paycheck. Have we learned nothing from literally every single project the that has tried to "free" us from the evils of the centralized services? Here ya go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_pro... Slowly they all go from Active to Dead or Stalled. YouTube's audience doesn't care about anything at decentralized network has to offer. It's just entertainment for them. They just want to watch videos and shitpost in the comments.
- smnplk 8y ago
  Another point of decentralised services is cutting out the middleman and this is what should be appealing to content creators.

onion2k 8y ago

How many attempts at decentralized social networks have failed? All of them. Practically every social network has failed in some way or another , decentralised or not. Very few of them have failed due to the tech though - tech seems to be the easy part in comparison to building a large enough audience to keep the network active.

s73v3r_ 8y ago
But for most decentralized social networks, the selling point, the focus, has been that it's decentralized. Which tends to point to the idea that most people don't care about decentralization.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

grahamburger 8y ago

> But what those who create want is an audience. They want a community. PeerTube seems to be aiming to provide exactly those things.

syrrim 8y ago

This is a very silly way of looking at the world. The reason people prefer centralized services is because: - they have greater capacity to add features - they have more ability to have search and other discovery Neither of these are inherent to a centralized service. All you need is a centralized website on top of a decentralized video host. Different websites can compete on features like search, while providing access to the same database of videos. The fact that no one has succeeded yet is not proof that this is impossible. Moreover, this would be to ignore protocols like email and the web, which are decentralized, and which are very popular. Centralization has been preferred because we are in a period of very rapid change, where centralized services can pivot ten times before a decentralized service even gets started. People are beginning to realize the downsides of centralized services, change is starting to slow down, and decentralized services are now able to make headway.

sperm 8y ago
This is a very silly way of looking at the world. The reason people prefer centralized services is because: - they have a monetization layer directly linked to their users' bank accounts. At the end of the day people need to pay bills in order to produce content for a living. Without that, you can't compete. With that, and you're not decentralized.

ekianjo 8y ago

> How many attempts at decentralized social networks have failed? All of them. Looks like you never heard of Mastodon. It's thriving.

znpy 8y ago

> How many attempts at decentralized social networks have failed? All of them. This is why we have to keep trying :)

adreamingsoul 8y ago

As a content creator, I disagree. Not all of us are driven to market our content on social platforms. I have my own peertube (as an experiment) instance running that allows me to control the entire viewing experience and that’s more important to me then views, likes, or subs.

tinus_hn 8y ago

There are more use cases for hosting video than monetized videos. A few weeks ago Blender was having issues with YouTube trying to twist their arm. They would do fine an another network as long as it’s reasonably easy to use.

8bitsrule 8y ago

What the people who want Stanley-steamers don't realize is, what they really want is better buggy-whips. Cites are centralized services. Communities can actually thrive outside of cities.

Fnoord 8y ago

> How many attempts at decentralized social networks have failed? All of them. PeerTube is to YouTube what Mastodon is to Facebook/Twitter. Could you explain how exactly -in your opinion- Mastodon has failed?