6 ms·

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

by 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.
krapp 6y ago
At the moment, activists and hackers ("non-normal" people) are really the main audience for decentralized "censorship resistant" networks, since everyone else is happy with Youtube and other centralized services. Regarding the instances page, it looks like they're pulling instances randomly, which would just be confusing to new users and in cases like you mention where the instance isn't popular, counterproductive. The frontpage isn't much better - most of it is taken up explaining free software politics and things "normal" users won't care about, and it offers only three content examples - one video, one channel and one instance. Compare that to Youtube's frontpage, which is tiles and tiles of content, with a search bar right on top, basically choking you with content. I understand they probably care more about the politics and philosophy but if they want to be an alternative to Youtube they need to do what Youtube does and present themselves as content first. The layout for the instances themselves do that, but the homepage needs to pull a bit more weight in that regard, since it's standing between the user and all that stuff. In my humble and unqualified opinion.
- dewey 6y ago
  Exactly, I think the first impression should immediately show the value of the platform. In this case it would probably be well rated videos on the default / least niche / most popular instance and not an instance with conspiracy videos or other "censored" content that can't live on the other platforms. Being in a pretty similar situation I think the https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org landing page is done in a more user friendly way. They have a "Join now" link which brings you to an instance list that has the most popular ones shown right away and even gives you a way to find out which instance is the best for your language or interests.
- busymom0 6y ago
  > activists and hackers ("non-normal" people) are really the main audience Respectfully disagree with you. There's quite a lot of content which is getting throttled on Youtube if not outright censored. I follow Styx on YouTube who's a libertarian and even his channel and videos are constantly censored, throttled. Dave Rubin is another one. https://www.youtube.com/user/Styxhexenhammer666/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/Styxhexenhammer666/videos
yorwba 6y ago
I think a "normal" user isn't likely to hear about PeerTube and immediately think "how can I join this?" Rather, someone might send them a link to a cool video like https://video.blender.org/videos/watch/8533ea43-4271-4a57-9694-e9d0b35e1aa1 https://video.blender.org/videos/watch/8533ea43-4271-4a57-96... and if they like it, they look at some of the other videos on the same instance. So discovering an instance you like is not that much of a problem if you're not starting from the central project website. Of course the instance that has the videos you like may not allow just anyone to create an account (e.g. video.blender.org doesn't) at which point it does get pretty confusing, because you need to move to some random other instance for no obvious reason. (Of course the reason is decentralization, but "normal" users don't care about that as an end in itself.)
- sfkdjf9j3j 6y ago
  If someone sent me that link I would be confused, since the video doesn't play and it says "0 peers" at the bottom.
  - ajayyy 6y ago
    Do you have JavaScript disabled maybe?
    - wizzwizz4 6y ago
      With JavaScript disabled, it doesn't do anything.
  - vertex-four 6y ago
    That's interesting, it definitely plays (near-instantly on clicking play) for me. Number of peers should be irrelevant, as it falls back to downloading over HTTPS. It might be worth a bug report if you can track down any reasoning.
duskwuff 6y ago
> 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. It looks to me as though that page presents every instance matching the user's search criteria in random order, presumably for fairness. This is a mistake, IMO. Especially at this early stage, the project should be able to point to a curated list of a couple of well-run public instances, not a random listing of every instance they're aware of. (Especially given that some of those instances are private, empty, or broken.)
imhoguy 6y ago
I think the killer distributed app would be some kind of peer cache of videos from yt, vimeo and so on. You watch YT and your browser stores the movie then shares it like webtorrent. G decides it doesn't like the movie, bang - deleted! Not so much, still available in distributed cache. I look thru my yt playlist some as old as yt and half of the entries are dead. And there was a lot of original user content too. So much of human art is lost. We have technology we need leadership!
- chii 6y ago
  other than the threat of copyright strikes, why should anyone allow their bandwidth to be used for this cache? And if you want to view a deleted video, how would you go about finding it on this distributed cache? If you can search people's caches, this is the same as announcing that you have seen such and such video - which may be an invasion of privacy too.' If the original author of the video wanted it to be unremovable, they need to put this up on their own infrastructure they control imho.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  Take a moment to consider how this architecture would (or would fail to) handle truly abhorrent content -- child abuse, terrorist recruiting material, etc. Not all videos are "human art" which ought to be preserved.

by dewey 6y ago

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.

krapp 6y ago

At the moment, activists and hackers ("non-normal" people) are really the main audience for decentralized "censorship resistant" networks, since everyone else is happy with Youtube and other centralized services. Regarding the instances page, it looks like they're pulling instances randomly, which would just be confusing to new users and in cases like you mention where the instance isn't popular, counterproductive. The frontpage isn't much better - most of it is taken up explaining free software politics and things "normal" users won't care about, and it offers only three content examples - one video, one channel and one instance. Compare that to Youtube's frontpage, which is tiles and tiles of content, with a search bar right on top, basically choking you with content. I understand they probably care more about the politics and philosophy but if they want to be an alternative to Youtube they need to do what Youtube does and present themselves as content first. The layout for the instances themselves do that, but the homepage needs to pull a bit more weight in that regard, since it's standing between the user and all that stuff. In my humble and unqualified opinion.

dewey 6y ago
Exactly, I think the first impression should immediately show the value of the platform. In this case it would probably be well rated videos on the default / least niche / most popular instance and not an instance with conspiracy videos or other "censored" content that can't live on the other platforms. Being in a pretty similar situation I think the https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org landing page is done in a more user friendly way. They have a "Join now" link which brings you to an instance list that has the most popular ones shown right away and even gives you a way to find out which instance is the best for your language or interests.
busymom0 6y ago
> activists and hackers ("non-normal" people) are really the main audience Respectfully disagree with you. There's quite a lot of content which is getting throttled on Youtube if not outright censored. I follow Styx on YouTube who's a libertarian and even his channel and videos are constantly censored, throttled. Dave Rubin is another one. https://www.youtube.com/user/Styxhexenhammer666/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/Styxhexenhammer666/videos

yorwba 6y ago

I think a "normal" user isn't likely to hear about PeerTube and immediately think "how can I join this?" Rather, someone might send them a link to a cool video like https://video.blender.org/videos/watch/8533ea43-4271-4a57-9694-e9d0b35e1aa1 https://video.blender.org/videos/watch/8533ea43-4271-4a57-96... and if they like it, they look at some of the other videos on the same instance. So discovering an instance you like is not that much of a problem if you're not starting from the central project website. Of course the instance that has the videos you like may not allow just anyone to create an account (e.g. video.blender.org doesn't) at which point it does get pretty confusing, because you need to move to some random other instance for no obvious reason. (Of course the reason is decentralization, but "normal" users don't care about that as an end in itself.)

sfkdjf9j3j 6y ago
If someone sent me that link I would be confused, since the video doesn't play and it says "0 peers" at the bottom.
- ajayyy 6y ago
  Do you have JavaScript disabled maybe?
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    With JavaScript disabled, it doesn't do anything.
- vertex-four 6y ago
  That's interesting, it definitely plays (near-instantly on clicking play) for me. Number of peers should be irrelevant, as it falls back to downloading over HTTPS. It might be worth a bug report if you can track down any reasoning.

duskwuff 6y ago

> 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. It looks to me as though that page presents every instance matching the user's search criteria in random order, presumably for fairness. This is a mistake, IMO. Especially at this early stage, the project should be able to point to a curated list of a couple of well-run public instances, not a random listing of every instance they're aware of. (Especially given that some of those instances are private, empty, or broken.)

imhoguy 6y ago

I think the killer distributed app would be some kind of peer cache of videos from yt, vimeo and so on. You watch YT and your browser stores the movie then shares it like webtorrent. G decides it doesn't like the movie, bang - deleted! Not so much, still available in distributed cache. I look thru my yt playlist some as old as yt and half of the entries are dead. And there was a lot of original user content too. So much of human art is lost. We have technology we need leadership!

chii 6y ago
other than the threat of copyright strikes, why should anyone allow their bandwidth to be used for this cache? And if you want to view a deleted video, how would you go about finding it on this distributed cache? If you can search people's caches, this is the same as announcing that you have seen such and such video - which may be an invasion of privacy too.' If the original author of the video wanted it to be unremovable, they need to put this up on their own infrastructure they control imho.
duskwuff 6y ago
Take a moment to consider how this architecture would (or would fail to) handle truly abhorrent content -- child abuse, terrorist recruiting material, etc. Not all videos are "human art" which ought to be preserved.