12 ms·

The PeerTube content bootstrap fund

189 points by ddevault 6y ago

dmix 6y ago
I remember visiting some PeerTube sites and being turned off by the UI. But it looks like there has been some significant improves and pageload speeds are super fast. Glad to see it making progress. Peertube should partner with Patreon or a similar service for premium content. And hopefully more major Youtube content creators link to it in their video descriptions and other social media platforms. Vimeo carved out their own niche with more professional content creators. Any Youtube competitor will have to find a few niches in order to seed their initial user base.
- yummypaint 6y ago
  If their copyright takedown system has a less asymmetrical power balance that YT, movie reviewers and musicians might be good to target.
  - ajayyy 6y ago
    There is no "they". PeerTube is a software package that allows you to host your own YouTube-like site. However, it also has ActivePub (Mastodon) federation allowing you to also follow people from other instances (if allowed by your instance). It is up to to the website's host to deal with DMCA and other complaints.
dewey 6y ago
I understand that PeerTube is an interesting project but every time I look into it it seems hostile to any kind of "normal" user so I'm just assuming that's not the goal of the project to become some kind of popular alternative? I tried to pretend I'm a normal user and looked at the website and right now it goes like this: Let's say you are interested in the project, maybe you heard that it's a more open alternative to YouTube and you are intrigued. So you end up on: https://joinpeertube.org https://joinpeertube.org There's no content visible or anything that would spark any interest in a person looking for a video site. I realized that joinpeertube.org is the site of the open source project and I have to look at a specific instance to get a more "YouTube"-like experience. So I click on "Instance list" which brings me to: https://joinpeertube.org/instances#instances-list https://joinpeertube.org/instances#instances-list The first entry in the instance list is "No Censorship Tube" and you don't really see if it's an active instance, popular or anything as it just says "Follows 0 instances" which makes it seem like an abandoned project. Am I using it wrong?
- ddevault 6y ago
  In my opinion, the main problem here is that PeerTube is more expensive to host than, for example, Mastodon or Pleroma. The model is not going to be well-suited to drive-by creators hoping to sign up and start uploading in 5 minutes, because the cost of hosting that user is pretty high for the instance administrator. With this initiative, I hope to start bootstrapping instances which are comparible to cooperatives. When money and content start flowing into the ecosystem, I hope it'll push for more development towards improving the user experience for non-creators, and provide a bunch of good content to incentivize federation. I hope to see more instances (and better upstream support for instances) which are not focused on uploading/creating - but on consuming - then make this the path that most users follow to participate in the network.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    It would be really useful that some instance managers out there give us a cost breakdown on how much it takes to run a "regular" instance with specific volume/traffic numbers and videos served. Transparency can help people to start in case the cost is lower than what they expected.
    - toohotatopic 6y ago
      As a rough estimate: 1 TB cost about $1.20 HD is 5MB per second, UHD is 25MB per second. [1] If you stream a 3min video in HD, that's about 200seconds which lead to 1GB traffic. So you can stream 1000 videos for $1.20, or one video for 0.12 cents. [1]https://www.epiphan.com/blog/bandwidth-for-streaming/ https://www.epiphan.com/blog/bandwidth-for-streaming/
      - chrismorgan 6y ago
        That’s megabits per second, not megabytes, so your numbers are off by a factor of 8. Where has that $1.20 per terabyte figure come from? It doesn’t match the sorts of rates that I’ve seen talked about. As an example of commercial retail (not wholesale) rates: Backblaze B2 cloud storage is one of the better options available, at $5/TB/month for storage and $10/TB for bandwidth per https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html. (AWS, Azure and Google Cloud are all at least five times the cost for traffic. Seriously.) Meanwhile, your standard $5/month VPS (Digital Ocean, Vultr, &c.) tends to include 1TB of traffic per month (and scale up at that rate for a bit, though not far), but charge overages at $10/TB. I have no idea what’s going on with that lot, because Digital Ocean does bandwidth pooling across all your droplets, so it’ll be cheaper to add a new e.g. $20/month droplet and get 4TB of bandwidth, rather than paying $40 for that 4TB of bandwidth. But remember with PeerTube that the idea is that some of your bandwidth is covered by peering. I have no idea at all what the expected fractions are, but it’s going to depend heavily on your workload: videos just released that everyone’s watching right now will get better peering than videos from some time ago with scattered viewing (where I would expect you would get just minimal peering effects, but my opinion is hunch only and lacks any actual knowledge). 5Mbps is on the high side for HD (1920×1080 @ 30fps) video streaming. I’d think 3.5Mbps was a more typical figure that people would speak of, and for many sorts of content even 2.5Mbps can be more than you need. 3.5Mbps for three minutes is less than 80MB, rather than your 5MBps’s 1GB. At B2 rates (which are drastically higher than what you quoted), each of your three minute videos costs 0.08 cents to view, and each hour of video costs about one and a half of your pennies of the United States of America.
TACIXAT 6y ago
I would be happy to. I looked at peertube but didn't pull the trigger and instead went to YouTube. I think the upload limits held me back. I went through a lot of sites and some would not have video descriptions, some would have no monetization methods, others no audience. I'll definitely be dropping and email, I think the 5k would be best spent adding monetization and discovery features for creators though.
- seanyesmunt 6y ago
  Did you check out LBRY? If so what did you not like about it? I work on https://lbry.tv https://lbry.tv and the desktop app and am just curious.
  - mkl 6y ago
    Not OP, but multiple American political conspiracy theories/theorists featured on the front page doesn't seem like a good look, or something most people would want to be associated with.
  - unraveller 6y ago
    the moving thumbnails all at once everywhere is just atrocious.
    - seanyesmunt 6y ago
      That one is filed! https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-desktop/issues/3134 https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-desktop/issues/3134 Just haven't gotten to it yet. We're a pretty small team right now.
  - DeadSuperHero 6y ago
    Another key point is that LBRY and PeerTube have different philosophies on how to approach decentralization. I believe LBRY uses a Blockchain for media storage, but PeerTube is more built around the concept of data federation - people set up separate sites that can then seamlessly integrate with one another by passing messages around, rather than each site having to maintain a separate copy of the same ledger. Additionally, PeerTube is also compatible with the wider fediverse through the usage of the ActivityPub protocol, meaning that channels can be followed via a dozen or so other platforms that all speak the same federation language. Theoretically, it would be possible to write an entirely new project from scratch (in a completely different language even) that's capable of federating videos with existing PeerTube installations. This is not to say that there's anything specifically "wrong" with LBRY, just that one approach already integrates with a broader set of platforms due to what community it was developed out of.
slushhut 6y ago
Drew needs to quit spending Sourcehut's money on whatever he wants. Back in October, he also hired "Sourcehut's first developer", but he gets paid to work on Drew's personal or favored projects (like Sway), not anything directly related to Sourcehut: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2019-10-15-whats-cooking-october-2019/ https://sourcehut.org/blog/2019-10-15-whats-cooking-october-... Sourcehut is in an alpha state, and is barely functional in a lot of ways. People are paying for it anyway because they support the site's vision and what it could be, and want Drew and the site to have the resources they need to continue working on it, so that it can eventually become something that's actually worth paying for. Those people are paying for Sourcehut with the expectation that the money will be reinvested into Sourcehut and used to maintain and improve it. None of them are doing it because they want Drew to buy random people microphones so they can make videos for Peertube. For someone that writes so vehemently about topics like tech and business ethics, it's extremely hypocritical for him to keep using Sourcehut's money as his personal slush fund. Maybe someday if Sourcehut is incredibly successful and they can't even figure out how to spend all their money this will be a reasonable thing to do, but right now it still needs these resources that are inexplicably being redirected to other projects instead.
- ddevault 6y ago
  The mission has always been "to improve the free and open source ecosystem", not just "to make a cool code forge". On many occasions (e.g. [0][1]) I have made it clear that the goal is to invest our profits back into the broader open source ecosystem. [0]: https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3C20190426160729.GC1351%40homura.localdomain%3E https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3C2019042616072... [1]: https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CBVRVZEWYB30Q.3HGIC803LDBH7%40homura%3E https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CBVRVZEWYB30Q.... I would rather not be the kind of company which pockets millions for its founders and investors with money built on the backs of the FOSS community. An explicit, stated goal is to spread the wealth and raise up the ecosystem as a whole. If you don't believe in that, then don't pay for it, it's your money. SourceHut-the-software-forge is not going to be any worse off because we spend $5K giving PeerTube a leg up. We spend more on that for a single build host for builds.sr.ht.
Naac 6y ago
This is great, and looks similar to of Drew DeVault's ( creator of Sourcehut ) other offer of paying you to write a blog: https://drewdevault.com/make-a-blog https://drewdevault.com/make-a-blog I think wanting and encouraging usage of Free and Open Source software is important, and I commend Drew for putting his money where his mouth is.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  If that's any indication, the previous initiative to motivate people to write a blog is a failure since most of the blogs listed there as recipients never made it past a few blog posts.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    Actually, 10+ of them are still going strong. I have been meaning to sort the list by activity rather than award date. I feel like I got my money's worth with that initiative.
    - ekianjo 6y ago
      Can you separate them from the list?
      - ddevault 6y ago
        Check back on Monday, I'll try to find time to sort it then.
        ekianjo 6y ago
        Thanks, will do.
ekianjo 6y ago
It's a little strange that they would restrict people to publish only on Peertube and nowhere else to fit the criteria. Because this makes the audience of published videos closed to zero in the current situation. I would much rather encourage a policy of "publish on PeerTube first" as in, short term exclusivity, rather than complete exclusivity.
- ohyeshedid 6y ago
  Forced/contractual exclusivity is bad for consumers, but short term is definitely more approachable.
badrabbit 6y ago
Is peertube cool? I mean would the tiktok crowd like it? My opinion: it needs 90% better UX and 10% content. The content is a by product of having an app/site you like. Make it faster,leaner,simple and featureful. I know easy for me to say that, my point is that's what would make me use it and stick around. Also,these platforms like peertube and mastodon really need to get on board with ditching email. I wouldn't be a HNer it HN required email (please I beg you don't change that). Same goes for reddit. Pretend your audience is the simplest non technical person. Things like "instance" and "federated" should not be mentioned in customer facing UI at all.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  > need to get on board with ditching email. ditching email and replacing it by what? Email is federated and ubiquitous.
  - badrabbit 6y ago
    Nothing. Make recovery email/code/phone optional. You can't use email for 2FA recovery anyways.
sergiotapia 6y ago
Can someone familiar with Peertube explain what the difference is between PeerTube and Lbry.tv? https://lbry.tv/@artiintel:e/Jamaica-driving-sunset:f https://lbry.tv/@artiintel:e/Jamaica-driving-sunset:f It seems Peertube distributes videos using torrents or something, and lbry hosts the videos, where exactly?
- rapnie 6y ago
  See DeadSuperHero elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23200467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23200467
Rotten194 6y ago
I think this is an interesting and definitely laudable project, but I think the PeerTube-exclusivity clause is a large mistep. I understand the motivations, but I think it's flawed for two reasons: 1, it increases the risk for creators. While an equipment grant is extremely useful, the biggest investment (having made a couple educational videos myself) is time. Having to then limit yourself to a platform with very low user adoption is a huge risk, and harmful to creator morale if the videos struggle for an audience due to the platform. 2, and this ties into the first problem, it's not good for marketing. If you look at how another Youtube competitor, Nebula, is handling this, they have creators cross-post most of their content to Youtube. Creators then advertise Nebula in their sponsorship timeslot, extolling its virtues for creator sustainability etc -- which PeerTube would greatly benefit from as many people aren't aware of the benefit of a distributed system, or what that even means. Additionally, they upload some sort of exclusive -- either longer videos with content that wouldn't fit on YT (LegalEagle is a good example of a channel that does this), or special long-form projects (Wendover Productions uses this model). Either way, this lets Nebula hijack Youtube's recommendation algorithm and built in audience as essentially free advertising, as the content being uploaded to YT is being posted to Nebula anyways. Obviously many people just watch on YT and ignore Nebula as it requires a subscription, but PeerTube doesn't and Nebula is succeeding despite that -- anecdotally, me and my fiance bought a subscription because of this strategy. With that out of the way, I do love this idea and hope it gets traction regardless!
evolve2k 6y ago
Honest question: how will PeerTube deal with moderation and the whole cesspit of hate problem that inflicts most user generated content sites? It’s a hard problem that even YouTube & Facebook with all their resources struggles to manage. Or are they planning to side step the issue, with a ‘it’s open so it’s not really our problem’ approach?
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  It’s up to the administrators of each instance to decide. spacepub.space will decide one thing, FramaTube will decide another, &c. Instances can decide to federate with or block other instances depending on how they like their policies and such.
justaj 6y ago
From the condition: > You can only upload videos to PeerTube - not to YouTube or anywhere else. I'm not sure this is the best approach. As it stands now, the reality is that platforms like YouTube have vastly more users than peertube. Why not allow uploading to platforms like YouTube, but instead prefacing the video with a link to the PeerTube video? This way the content creator can get more views and PeerTube instances will get more exposure to potentially new users.

189 points by ddevault 6y ago

dmix 6y ago

I remember visiting some PeerTube sites and being turned off by the UI. But it looks like there has been some significant improves and pageload speeds are super fast. Glad to see it making progress. Peertube should partner with Patreon or a similar service for premium content. And hopefully more major Youtube content creators link to it in their video descriptions and other social media platforms. Vimeo carved out their own niche with more professional content creators. Any Youtube competitor will have to find a few niches in order to seed their initial user base.

yummypaint 6y ago
If their copyright takedown system has a less asymmetrical power balance that YT, movie reviewers and musicians might be good to target.
- ajayyy 6y ago
  There is no "they". PeerTube is a software package that allows you to host your own YouTube-like site. However, it also has ActivePub (Mastodon) federation allowing you to also follow people from other instances (if allowed by your instance). It is up to to the website's host to deal with DMCA and other complaints.

dewey 6y ago

I understand that PeerTube is an interesting project but every time I look into it it seems hostile to any kind of "normal" user so I'm just assuming that's not the goal of the project to become some kind of popular alternative? I tried to pretend I'm a normal user and looked at the website and right now it goes like this: Let's say you are interested in the project, maybe you heard that it's a more open alternative to YouTube and you are intrigued. So you end up on: https://joinpeertube.org https://joinpeertube.org There's no content visible or anything that would spark any interest in a person looking for a video site. I realized that joinpeertube.org is the site of the open source project and I have to look at a specific instance to get a more "YouTube"-like experience. So I click on "Instance list" which brings me to: https://joinpeertube.org/instances#instances-list https://joinpeertube.org/instances#instances-list The first entry in the instance list is "No Censorship Tube" and you don't really see if it's an active instance, popular or anything as it just says "Follows 0 instances" which makes it seem like an abandoned project. Am I using it wrong?

ddevault 6y ago
In my opinion, the main problem here is that PeerTube is more expensive to host than, for example, Mastodon or Pleroma. The model is not going to be well-suited to drive-by creators hoping to sign up and start uploading in 5 minutes, because the cost of hosting that user is pretty high for the instance administrator. With this initiative, I hope to start bootstrapping instances which are comparible to cooperatives. When money and content start flowing into the ecosystem, I hope it'll push for more development towards improving the user experience for non-creators, and provide a bunch of good content to incentivize federation. I hope to see more instances (and better upstream support for instances) which are not focused on uploading/creating - but on consuming - then make this the path that most users follow to participate in the network.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  It would be really useful that some instance managers out there give us a cost breakdown on how much it takes to run a "regular" instance with specific volume/traffic numbers and videos served. Transparency can help people to start in case the cost is lower than what they expected.
  - toohotatopic 6y ago
    As a rough estimate: 1 TB cost about $1.20 HD is 5MB per second, UHD is 25MB per second. [1] If you stream a 3min video in HD, that's about 200seconds which lead to 1GB traffic. So you can stream 1000 videos for $1.20, or one video for 0.12 cents. [1]https://www.epiphan.com/blog/bandwidth-for-streaming/ https://www.epiphan.com/blog/bandwidth-for-streaming/
    - chrismorgan 6y ago
      That’s megabits per second, not megabytes, so your numbers are off by a factor of 8. Where has that $1.20 per terabyte figure come from? It doesn’t match the sorts of rates that I’ve seen talked about. As an example of commercial retail (not wholesale) rates: Backblaze B2 cloud storage is one of the better options available, at $5/TB/month for storage and $10/TB for bandwidth per https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html. (AWS, Azure and Google Cloud are all at least five times the cost for traffic. Seriously.) Meanwhile, your standard $5/month VPS (Digital Ocean, Vultr, &c.) tends to include 1TB of traffic per month (and scale up at that rate for a bit, though not far), but charge overages at $10/TB. I have no idea what’s going on with that lot, because Digital Ocean does bandwidth pooling across all your droplets, so it’ll be cheaper to add a new e.g. $20/month droplet and get 4TB of bandwidth, rather than paying $40 for that 4TB of bandwidth. But remember with PeerTube that the idea is that some of your bandwidth is covered by peering. I have no idea at all what the expected fractions are, but it’s going to depend heavily on your workload: videos just released that everyone’s watching right now will get better peering than videos from some time ago with scattered viewing (where I would expect you would get just minimal peering effects, but my opinion is hunch only and lacks any actual knowledge). 5Mbps is on the high side for HD (1920×1080 @ 30fps) video streaming. I’d think 3.5Mbps was a more typical figure that people would speak of, and for many sorts of content even 2.5Mbps can be more than you need. 3.5Mbps for three minutes is less than 80MB, rather than your 5MBps’s 1GB. At B2 rates (which are drastically higher than what you quoted), each of your three minute videos costs 0.08 cents to view, and each hour of video costs about one and a half of your pennies of the United States of America.

TACIXAT 6y ago

I would be happy to. I looked at peertube but didn't pull the trigger and instead went to YouTube. I think the upload limits held me back. I went through a lot of sites and some would not have video descriptions, some would have no monetization methods, others no audience. I'll definitely be dropping and email, I think the 5k would be best spent adding monetization and discovery features for creators though.

seanyesmunt 6y ago
Did you check out LBRY? If so what did you not like about it? I work on https://lbry.tv https://lbry.tv and the desktop app and am just curious.
- mkl 6y ago
  Not OP, but multiple American political conspiracy theories/theorists featured on the front page doesn't seem like a good look, or something most people would want to be associated with.
- unraveller 6y ago
  the moving thumbnails all at once everywhere is just atrocious.
  - seanyesmunt 6y ago
    That one is filed! https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-desktop/issues/3134 https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-desktop/issues/3134 Just haven't gotten to it yet. We're a pretty small team right now.
- DeadSuperHero 6y ago
  Another key point is that LBRY and PeerTube have different philosophies on how to approach decentralization. I believe LBRY uses a Blockchain for media storage, but PeerTube is more built around the concept of data federation - people set up separate sites that can then seamlessly integrate with one another by passing messages around, rather than each site having to maintain a separate copy of the same ledger. Additionally, PeerTube is also compatible with the wider fediverse through the usage of the ActivityPub protocol, meaning that channels can be followed via a dozen or so other platforms that all speak the same federation language. Theoretically, it would be possible to write an entirely new project from scratch (in a completely different language even) that's capable of federating videos with existing PeerTube installations. This is not to say that there's anything specifically "wrong" with LBRY, just that one approach already integrates with a broader set of platforms due to what community it was developed out of.

slushhut 6y ago

Drew needs to quit spending Sourcehut's money on whatever he wants. Back in October, he also hired "Sourcehut's first developer", but he gets paid to work on Drew's personal or favored projects (like Sway), not anything directly related to Sourcehut: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2019-10-15-whats-cooking-october-2019/ https://sourcehut.org/blog/2019-10-15-whats-cooking-october-... Sourcehut is in an alpha state, and is barely functional in a lot of ways. People are paying for it anyway because they support the site's vision and what it could be, and want Drew and the site to have the resources they need to continue working on it, so that it can eventually become something that's actually worth paying for. Those people are paying for Sourcehut with the expectation that the money will be reinvested into Sourcehut and used to maintain and improve it. None of them are doing it because they want Drew to buy random people microphones so they can make videos for Peertube. For someone that writes so vehemently about topics like tech and business ethics, it's extremely hypocritical for him to keep using Sourcehut's money as his personal slush fund. Maybe someday if Sourcehut is incredibly successful and they can't even figure out how to spend all their money this will be a reasonable thing to do, but right now it still needs these resources that are inexplicably being redirected to other projects instead.

ddevault 6y ago
The mission has always been "to improve the free and open source ecosystem", not just "to make a cool code forge". On many occasions (e.g. [0][1]) I have made it clear that the goal is to invest our profits back into the broader open source ecosystem. [0]: https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3C20190426160729.GC1351%40homura.localdomain%3E https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3C2019042616072... [1]: https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CBVRVZEWYB30Q.3HGIC803LDBH7%40homura%3E https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CBVRVZEWYB30Q.... I would rather not be the kind of company which pockets millions for its founders and investors with money built on the backs of the FOSS community. An explicit, stated goal is to spread the wealth and raise up the ecosystem as a whole. If you don't believe in that, then don't pay for it, it's your money. SourceHut-the-software-forge is not going to be any worse off because we spend $5K giving PeerTube a leg up. We spend more on that for a single build host for builds.sr.ht.

Naac 6y ago

This is great, and looks similar to of Drew DeVault's ( creator of Sourcehut ) other offer of paying you to write a blog: https://drewdevault.com/make-a-blog https://drewdevault.com/make-a-blog I think wanting and encouraging usage of Free and Open Source software is important, and I commend Drew for putting his money where his mouth is.

ekianjo 6y ago
If that's any indication, the previous initiative to motivate people to write a blog is a failure since most of the blogs listed there as recipients never made it past a few blog posts.
- ddevault 6y ago
  Actually, 10+ of them are still going strong. I have been meaning to sort the list by activity rather than award date. I feel like I got my money's worth with that initiative.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    Can you separate them from the list?
    - ddevault 6y ago
      Check back on Monday, I'll try to find time to sort it then.
      - ekianjo 6y ago
        Thanks, will do.

ekianjo 6y ago

It's a little strange that they would restrict people to publish only on Peertube and nowhere else to fit the criteria. Because this makes the audience of published videos closed to zero in the current situation. I would much rather encourage a policy of "publish on PeerTube first" as in, short term exclusivity, rather than complete exclusivity.

ohyeshedid 6y ago
Forced/contractual exclusivity is bad for consumers, but short term is definitely more approachable.

badrabbit 6y ago

Is peertube cool? I mean would the tiktok crowd like it? My opinion: it needs 90% better UX and 10% content. The content is a by product of having an app/site you like. Make it faster,leaner,simple and featureful. I know easy for me to say that, my point is that's what would make me use it and stick around. Also,these platforms like peertube and mastodon really need to get on board with ditching email. I wouldn't be a HNer it HN required email (please I beg you don't change that). Same goes for reddit. Pretend your audience is the simplest non technical person. Things like "instance" and "federated" should not be mentioned in customer facing UI at all.

ekianjo 6y ago
> need to get on board with ditching email. ditching email and replacing it by what? Email is federated and ubiquitous.
- badrabbit 6y ago
  Nothing. Make recovery email/code/phone optional. You can't use email for 2FA recovery anyways.

sergiotapia 6y ago

Can someone familiar with Peertube explain what the difference is between PeerTube and Lbry.tv? https://lbry.tv/@artiintel:e/Jamaica-driving-sunset:f https://lbry.tv/@artiintel:e/Jamaica-driving-sunset:f It seems Peertube distributes videos using torrents or something, and lbry hosts the videos, where exactly?

rapnie 6y ago
See DeadSuperHero elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23200467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23200467

Rotten194 6y ago

I think this is an interesting and definitely laudable project, but I think the PeerTube-exclusivity clause is a large mistep. I understand the motivations, but I think it's flawed for two reasons: 1, it increases the risk for creators. While an equipment grant is extremely useful, the biggest investment (having made a couple educational videos myself) is time. Having to then limit yourself to a platform with very low user adoption is a huge risk, and harmful to creator morale if the videos struggle for an audience due to the platform. 2, and this ties into the first problem, it's not good for marketing. If you look at how another Youtube competitor, Nebula, is handling this, they have creators cross-post most of their content to Youtube. Creators then advertise Nebula in their sponsorship timeslot, extolling its virtues for creator sustainability etc -- which PeerTube would greatly benefit from as many people aren't aware of the benefit of a distributed system, or what that even means. Additionally, they upload some sort of exclusive -- either longer videos with content that wouldn't fit on YT (LegalEagle is a good example of a channel that does this), or special long-form projects (Wendover Productions uses this model). Either way, this lets Nebula hijack Youtube's recommendation algorithm and built in audience as essentially free advertising, as the content being uploaded to YT is being posted to Nebula anyways. Obviously many people just watch on YT and ignore Nebula as it requires a subscription, but PeerTube doesn't and Nebula is succeeding despite that -- anecdotally, me and my fiance bought a subscription because of this strategy. With that out of the way, I do love this idea and hope it gets traction regardless!

evolve2k 6y ago

Honest question: how will PeerTube deal with moderation and the whole cesspit of hate problem that inflicts most user generated content sites? It’s a hard problem that even YouTube & Facebook with all their resources struggles to manage. Or are they planning to side step the issue, with a ‘it’s open so it’s not really our problem’ approach?

chrismorgan 6y ago
It’s up to the administrators of each instance to decide. spacepub.space will decide one thing, FramaTube will decide another, &c. Instances can decide to federate with or block other instances depending on how they like their policies and such.

justaj 6y ago

From the condition: > You can only upload videos to PeerTube - not to YouTube or anywhere else. I'm not sure this is the best approach. As it stands now, the reality is that platforms like YouTube have vastly more users than peertube. Why not allow uploading to platforms like YouTube, but instead prefacing the video with a link to the PeerTube video? This way the content creator can get more views and PeerTube instances will get more exposure to potentially new users.