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From a content and branding perspective, I wouldn't touch PeerTube with a thirty-foot pole. It is fundamentally untenable unless you want people able to take sc

From a content and branding perspective, I wouldn't touch PeerTube with a thirty-foot pole. It is fundamentally untenable unless you want people able to take screenshots of your content being featured next to literal-not-figurative Nazi shit. Yes, that's the point of federation, and that the watcher is the one who has those settings to put them next to one another. No, it's not your fault. Yes, it looks awful and it's your responsibility. No, nobody cares about the explanation and if you are in a place where you must explain "well, actually, it's the viewer's fault that my thoughtful video is next to some guy hanging swastikas in his bonus room," you have already and irrevocably lost. (This can, I want to note, happen in a more diminished form on other platforms--there's nothing stopping somebody's YouTube recommendations from being a disaster area. But people know what YouTube is. They know YouTube picks the hits. PeerTube isn't that, and having to explain at all is what would sink it.) Also, even if you ignore the "we're camping next to fascists" vibe of the whole thing, PeerTube quality-of-experience management is deeply poor besides. If you're using some small DIY CDN, you have predictably bad performance, instead of suddenly bad performance, and if you're using a big CDN, you have working traffic steering.

xorcist 4y ago
That sounds a bit far fetched. If that was a problem, it would also be a problem with the dozens of Youtube frontends, that are much larger than any Peertube frontend.
tpxl 4y ago
You can self-host and un-federate PeerTube, such that the user isn't even aware they're on a PeerTube instance. If I had a website where I'd host my videos as an alternative to YouTube, I'd probably go with PeerTube and have people support me by seeding videos for me.
- eropple 4y ago
  Ehh. You totally can, but at that point you're still stuck with a pretty bad model of shipping video in the first place, namely relying on having peers and dealing with PeerTube's bad failure modes when peers leave the swarm. I am not a fan--the sibling comment about those failure modes tracks with my own experiences, and I think it's scary enough to avoid. If the choice is "mediocre to okay perf based on geography, consistently" or "mediocre to okay perf, mostly based on geography, with very bad performance for some users in ways that cannot be reliably predicted", it would be pretty bad to recommend the latter for most use cases. I tend to think that, since you're already foregoing discoverability by not federating with other PeerTube instances, you might as well also just build your bootleg CDN off of Hetzner nodes or whatever and have points of presence in places you care about. It's not that expensive and it's likely to be more consistent in perf. (You could say "well, run PeerTube and register your pops as peers", but other peers falling out of the swarm is the problem, not your own.) I just don't really see a point to doing so as a small/individual creator or as a brand/channel.

xorcist 4y ago

That sounds a bit far fetched. If that was a problem, it would also be a problem with the dozens of Youtube frontends, that are much larger than any Peertube frontend.

tpxl 4y ago

You can self-host and un-federate PeerTube, such that the user isn't even aware they're on a PeerTube instance. If I had a website where I'd host my videos as an alternative to YouTube, I'd probably go with PeerTube and have people support me by seeding videos for me.

eropple 4y ago
Ehh. You totally can, but at that point you're still stuck with a pretty bad model of shipping video in the first place, namely relying on having peers and dealing with PeerTube's bad failure modes when peers leave the swarm. I am not a fan--the sibling comment about those failure modes tracks with my own experiences, and I think it's scary enough to avoid. If the choice is "mediocre to okay perf based on geography, consistently" or "mediocre to okay perf, mostly based on geography, with very bad performance for some users in ways that cannot be reliably predicted", it would be pretty bad to recommend the latter for most use cases. I tend to think that, since you're already foregoing discoverability by not federating with other PeerTube instances, you might as well also just build your bootleg CDN off of Hetzner nodes or whatever and have points of presence in places you care about. It's not that expensive and it's likely to be more consistent in perf. (You could say "well, run PeerTube and register your pops as peers", but other peers falling out of the swarm is the problem, not your own.) I just don't really see a point to doing so as a small/individual creator or as a brand/channel.