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PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform
- onetokeoverthe 4mo ago[dead]
- ekjhgkejhgk 4mo agoDoes it allow streaming?
- serendipty01 4mo agoDocs: https://docs.joinpeertube.org/use/create-upload-video#publish-a-live https://docs.joinpeertube.org/use/create-upload-video#publis... https://docs.joinpeertube.org/admin/configuration#live-streaming https://docs.joinpeertube.org/admin/configuration#live-strea...
- mxuribe 4mo agoI'm not affiliated with peertube...but yes it does enable/support streaming: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube#video-streaming-even-in-live https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube#video-streaming-even-...
- EGreg 4mo agoThis does: https://safebots.github.io/Safecloud https://safebots.github.io/Safecloud I designed it in order to stream videos and get paid without worrying about getting deplatformed Two weeks ago it was covered in a respected security publication: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/06/19/safecloud-browser-based-encrypted-storage/ https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/06/19/safecloud-browser... It's coming out soon, but if you're adventurous, you can try it on GitHub already. Edit: I posted it on HN right now as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48763565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48763565
- alashow 4mo agoYou forgot to say the magic words (shameless plug)
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- polonbike 4mo agoYes. But a click on the link will provide a more detailed answer.
- pocksuppet 4mo agoPeerTube has some interesting technology with the P2P sharing between users who watch at the same time. But with these kind of projects I think there are unfortunately social factors that impact their success as well as technical factors. It's one thing to put a <video> element on a HTML page (or implement video over webtorrent), it's quite another to make people actually watch it instead of their TikTok feed.
- manusartifex123 4mo agoyeah video social media is way ahead with algorithms and content. I still think they need to exist and keep pushing for this idea
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- an0malous 4mo agoThe P2P stuff will take off once AI slop is done destroying the current web, like a new ecosystem emerging out of the carcass of a dead whale
- jjk7 4mo agoNo, unfortunately P2P's glory days are behind us. Shame, because it was a really cool technology.
- BHSPitMonkey 4mo agoOn the contrary, I worry about the ability of these grassroots user-generated content distribution systems to withstand the barrage of generated slop uploaded by armies of autonomous agents. Fighting it off is an asymmetric battle that makes it increasingly hard to distinguish the legitimate users trying to share their work.
- duxup 4mo agoIt reminds me of the other social media type experiments, I applaud their efforts but the underlying technology just isn’t a huge selling point to viewers compared to the actual content.
- orphereus 4mo agoDoes it have good content? I explored it a bit in the past, but was a bit underwhelmed with content I could find there. Edit: in the past
- Avamander 4mo agoIf you find those few instances that have those few uploaders that interest you, the content can be good. However it does certainly suffer from the fact that all federated instances can't pull in videos from other platforms in some reproducible way (so that all instances would be able to serve the same content). I'm sure some YouTubers would allow mirrors if they didn't have to pick an instance and keep it running.
- thinkingtoilet 4mo agoMy recent experience with PeerTube was to click on the OpenMW released video and the video didn't load. Is that a regular occurrence on PeerTube?
- RobotToaster 4mo agoLast time I tried it the federation was whitelist based, that is you could only follow people on instances added by the admin of your instance. This made content discovery difficult.
- someonebaggy 4mo agoIt's not a platform, it's server-side software for creating a platform.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- raphinou 4mo agoI am currently recording tutorial videos for an open source project. It's produced fully with Foss software (on Linux, obs, kdenlive) and about an open source project, so I wanted to host it with peertube (though YouTube might be used later on for its network effect, it was easier to publish with peertube as yt required an video of me and my ID). It's going fine until now. I don't host peertube myself though, I use an existing instance, and embed the videos in the website. It was a really good experience, so I'll continue that way. If you want to check out the videos: https://www.asfaload.com/videos/ https://www.asfaload.com/videos/
- dvngnt_ 4mo agoWith adblocker enabled: error loading dynamically imported module: https://exquisite.tube/client/standalone/videos/assets/peertube-player-mvGGGjdL.js https://exquisite.tube/client/standalone/videos/assets/peert...
- CM30 4mo agoIt's a promising system, and I'd probably use it over a non-federated video hosting system if I wanted to run a video hosting site of some kind. Yet it's currently hard to find a real usecase for it, since neither the content you want nor audience is there on PeerTube at the moment. If you're interested in open source software or data privacy you might find something here or there, but topics like gaming, music, sports or movies are very much underserved on the platform at the moment, and get almost no attention from viewers. For example, I recently did a test search and found a let's play for the Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. The videos had something like 3-5 views on PeerTube, and about 10-15 times that on the creator's YouTube channel. It's the same issue as on Mastodon and Lemmy to be honest, except exaggerated. If the majority of topics aren't well represented on these platforms, then the general public won't use them. And if the general public won't use them, then the creators that would bring the general public over won't use them either. They need to figure out a way to encourage people outside of the 'hardcore tech nerd raised on Usenet' audience to use these platforms.
- karmakurtisaani 4mo agoLemmy is pretty ok actually. The lack of big user base is more of a feature than a bug.
- organsnyder 4mo agoI've found the same with Mastadon. It has a pre-eternal-September feel to it.
- al_borland 4mo agoHas it normalized? When I first tried Lemmy it was mostly communists talking about communism. Then after some Reddit drama it seemed to be a bunch of people complaining about Reddit. I generally like smaller sites, but those topics weren’t exactly engaging for me.
- ramgine 4mo agoI’ve been a regular lemmy user for a few years now and it’s gotten better. The communists (and fascist) platforms have been de-federated from the major platforms. It’s still full of Reddit complaining from ex redditors. I don’t think that will change. My login server is lemmy.world, so if you sign up with something else ymmv.
- zuzululu 4mo agois it bulletproof ? I don't think peertube has fixed that massive legal liability to the "seeders" same situation that bitorrent found itself in
- blooalien 4mo agoIf you only seed videos you have full legal rights to (creative commons [as long as you follow the license terms properly], public domain, or videos you personally created yourself, therefore own all rights to outright), then where's the worry? If you choose to seed copyrighted videos, well then that's all on you to handle the legality of (or lack thereof) I'd suppose... :shrug:
- Raed667 4mo agoIt is unfortunate that in french « peer » reads as « pire » which translates to « worse-tube »
- gausswho 4mo agoSnarky lemma: In French, is the trend of things going worse to worse?
- dewey 4mo agoIt's developed by a french company, so that confusion can't be that critical.
- astrobe_ 4mo agoLet's go for "PearTube" then.
- mywittyname 4mo agoPèreTube. Just videos about golf, lawn care, cars, and Fox News clips. PearTube (PoireTube) would just have the Fox News clips.
- bigfishrunning 4mo agoPierre-tube
- jesse_dot_id 4mo agoI like the idea of all of these federated services but why does the UX always feel like an afterthought when it is the most important factor for adoption?
- cosmic_cheese 4mo agoSame reason why the Linux desktop often suffers on the UX/UX front: people naturally drawn to these projects tend to lean heavily technical, and highly technical circles have a bad habit of driving out less technical contributors through devaluation of their work and lack of agency within the project among other issues. That sort of work also tends to be less well-compensated than that of SWEs which makes it more important to be paid for work (which most FOSS project cannot do).
- StableAlkyne 4mo agoUX work is often also a lot heavier and more subjective than the plumbing. I might open a pull request to support some new video code, and that might only require a few dozen lines over a few files. That's easy to review, and it either works or it doesn't. Worst case they say "our convention is to register codecs as a subclass of X class, but you subclassed Y class" or something equally straightforward. Let's say instead I wanted to change the workflow to register an account. Now I'm changing a bunch of JavaScript, CSS, templates, I'm adding pages, and I also need to update the backend. Even if someone is that into frontend work, it might take forever to even get reviewed by the maintainers because it's a massive PR. Plus, now we've moved into subjectivity land: "I'm used to the old workflow," (because they designed it) "The last one was really easy" (for an engineer), "I think we should focus on the backend before we work on the UI," "I don't like this font because the license isn't free as in freedom" etc. Even if you just mockup something on Figma or whatever, unless you're a maintainer it's probably going to just get ignored as a feature request. Because there's also the psychological aspect of basically being told that the UI you wrote is implicitly bad, if you're the maintainer reviewing the mockup.
- jollymonATX 4mo agoMaybe some devs in OSS are married to their horrid idea of how things should work?
- matt_lo 4mo agoRandom idea… 1. Chunk one inside a YT video 2. Chunk two inside a TikTok video 3. Chunk three on an X thread And then just post the manifest somewhere that can be read by a client, that then pulls the data in (video, doc, anything) Obv, not meant for speed or good UX, but if we’re going down the route of decentralization, we can probably leverage social platforms to host chunks of data.
- hungryhobbit 4mo agoStupid question: when people inevitably use this for pirate content, and the feds try to shut the service down ... what's the plan?
- dewey 4mo agoSomeone is still hosting the content and paying for resources just like with every other service distributed or not so it doesn't really add anything new to the equation.
- rpgbr 4mo agoThe feds will go after the instance admin that is sharing pirate content.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- Gigachad 4mo agoIsn't the design of peertube that you can view videos originally uploaded by other instances? So unless you decide to not federate, you are responsible for every video on every instance.
- rpgbr 4mo agoYes, but you can federate selectively, as in choosing which other instances you want to. And, yes, federating turns you responsible for the content of the other instance (IMHO; not legal advice or even fact checked).
- paxys 4mo agoThey can't shut down the service because there is no single service. They can go after individual servers, and that is fine. The admin is responsible for what happens on their server.
- dymk 4mo ago
- GodelNumbering 4mo agoYoutube has been incredibly frustrating for many many reasons and is evidently evil in many axes now. We really need competition in video hosting.
- WarmWash 4mo agoThen start loading ads. Youtube's biggest threat ever died in the cradle because they foolishly thought users would volunteer money to them. No one with capital and capability looks at youtube, looks at youtube's audience, and says "Yeah, 30-40% ad-blocking and 4.5% paying for premium, these are the people I want to build services for!".
- mywittyname 4mo agoThose ad-blocked viewers are important, which is why YT doesn't actually crack down on them. Those are the people who will happily go to an alternative product. And while that product might start as a pirate YouTube, the one that nabs 30% of YT's traffic can certainly make a pivot to legit. If you're a content creator whose audience is mostly in that group, you're likely to start posting content directly on the competitor's site. I'm guessing OP had their account banned for using a tool like yt-dl too aggressively. Then again, doing that does give a warning.
- mvdtnz 4mo agoYoutube does crack down on them, all the time. Why do you think they are "important"? What are they contributing, and to whom? How does Google benefit?
- mywittyname 4mo agoThey half-ass crack down on them. Not even that, it's dime-assed crackdown at best. You get that little "experiencing issues?" note that the bottom of the screen (which goes away after a few seconds), and an occasional 3-5s delay before video starts. I explained exactly why I think they are important in that entire paragraph. And the evidence I'm right is the fact that YouTube could trivially prevent ad-blockers tomorrow, but they don't. They've tried it and quickly rolled back the changes. Presumably they lost a lot more audience than expected.
- djaro 4mo agoAs a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization. I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch. This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram. Even a decent 20-minute video can easily take 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor. I have a pretty small channel (~100K subscribers) with no employees and relatively low upkeep costs (a few hundred dollars a month), and even I could not make this work if I didn't get at least $500-$1,000 per video on average, since it just takes so much time and money. Most channels with more than a million subscribers are likely founders working 60-80 hour weeks with multiple full-time employees supporting them. You cannot do that in the hopes of viewers donating $5 here and there. And yes, there are people who make content for free - most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video. And the difference between a million views and a hundred is 10,000x. You cannot create a platform without big users. I think any real competitor to YouTube nowadays would have to be backed by a big corporation that can pay big creators million-dollar deals to make the switch. Otherwise it's just dead in the water.
- ktallett 4mo agoYour issue is assuming that this is trying to replace YouTube for those who wish to try and make money from this. I suspect this is much more closer to a Google videos or YouTube back in the day which was pretty much just random videos, plus lots of conferences on there (which don't get enough views to monetize). This can easily replace that and is something I would support. YouTube hasn't always been monetising and it is good if we have a competitor against it.
- djaro 4mo agoIt's not about people "trying to make money", it's about viewers wanting to see high quality videos. High quality videos just cost a lot of money and labor to produce. There is simply no way around this. Any platform which doesn't let creators monetize effectively will be stuck with what people produce in their free time. Which will essentially always be worse, because the competitors will have creators with actual budgets and time to work.
- pajtai 4mo agoThe first thing I noticed is that clicking on "browse" does not allow browsing but requires search: https://joinpeertube.org/browse-content https://joinpeertube.org/browse-content
- butz 4mo agoPersonally, I find the lack of videos to watch on PeerTube a huge plus. I tremendously reduced my weekly video watching time and I don't feel like missing out on something important. My favorite instance is makertube.net, but I visit few others too.
- aembleton 4mo agoThank you, I'd not come across makertube.net. Is there some website that collects all of these instances together? I thought peertube.tv would do that, but there are loads more content on makertube.net so clearly not.
- butz 4mo agoI think https://peerseek.video https://peerseek.video is sort of aggregator website, not sure how much instances it covers, though.
- jdw64 4mo ago[dead]
- gargola_ 4mo agoIs there any moderation? how long until it's filled to the top with nsfw stuff?
- aembleton 4mo agoI guess each instance does its own moderation. Peertube has been around for years and still no one watches it.
- rbbydotdev 4mo agoWould be pretty incredible to see decentralized federated media individual accounts and aggregators implement the x402 payment protocol (https://x402.org https://x402.org) as a way for creators to get paid, and thus continue to create. Im envisioning a spotify replacement. You could pay for your streams directly to artists or platform the artist hosts on. Allowing for a more free market of creators and consumers. The 'Explore' part, would basically just be like Mastadon or Bluesky
- frollogaston 4mo agoI'm giving this an honest try to post some music I made, cause Google randomly banned me yesterday for "bot activity" and wants an appeal. I'm not mad or anything, just thinking they won't let me use YouTube anymore.
- utopiah 4mo agoBeen running my instance for more than 5 years now, feel free to ask questions.
- MiDu16 4mo agoHow much does it cost you? what is your business model to substain it?
- utopiah 4mo agoI didn't estimate the cost but server-wise it's less than 30 EUR/month. What's demanding is transcoding but with the new architecture https://docs.joinpeertube.org/contribute/architecture#remote-vod-live-transcoding https://docs.joinpeertube.org/contribute/architecture#remote... there are ways to optimize, e.g. do nightly batch transcoding on a cheaper spot instances. My business model is showcase and archival of my prototyping work. I'm the only account on my instance so there is no surprise with suddenly someone abusing the instance.
- shevy-java 4mo agoI used it a few months ago but there was lag and things not working. I keep on saying we need to eliminate Google for real. I mean it too. But the services NEED TO BE FLAWLESS if you want to have a chance against Google. I don't understand why people don't seem to understand it. Software can often be better. PeerTube's software was disappointing and really poorly implemented compared to Google. There is no way to win here that way against Google. That's not realistic.
- someonebaggy 4mo agoIt's not possible for FOSS to compete with Google in Google's niche — try it and you'll see why. It's possible to find a different niche and expand there.
- Animats 4mo agoThere are four functions here: - Discovery (as in search) - Monetization (as in ads) - Hosting (as in storage) - Playout (as in data distribution) PeerTube only performs the fourth, and maybe the third. It's not a flooding distribution system like BitTorrent. It's just a way for a large number of people to play the same video without overloading a modest hosting server. Playout load is distributed amongst the watchers browsers. I put videos in PeerTube, tech demos of various rendering tests. Works fine. No ad insertion, which is why I use PeerTube. Peak view count is 2.3K.[1] Nobody is expected to discover them there. They're linked from various forums. Some are for a very tiny audience, such as "Second Life sim server EstablishAgentCommunication message bug", with 10 views, mostly from the devs who needed to see this. Technically it works fine, but it's not going to displace YouTube. Unless, say, Taylor Swift decided to stream her wedding on it to avoid ad insertion. [1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/7usCE3v2RrWK6nuoSr4NHJ https://video.hardlimit.com/w/7usCE3v2RrWK6nuoSr4NHJ
- fortran77 4mo agoI've tried a few of these alternative sites, and it's just not a fun place to go find videos from interesting people working on projects, etc. A lot of unpleasant extremist videos, a lot of slop, with no good ability to filter out just what I want to see. Sure, YouTube has these too but I can manage to keep it at bay.
- EatBroccoli 4mo agoIt does have some ability to filter. I am subscribed to a few channels on the Makertube instance and regularly watch some videos there. You can mute channels or entire federated instances so they don't appear in feeds or search results. It does get tiresome to always have to do this when you see unwanted video's, but they do stay gone, unlike Youtube's system of "Not Interested"/"Don't recomend this channel". All in all i've been watching less Youtube lately and starting to watch some Peertube videos and finding the grassroots nature of it very refreshing.
- rq1 4mo agoThe main advantage of PeerTube and alike is that they keep the “professional content creators” and their crappy content away. Because of their unique monetisation feature.
- globalnode 4mo agoI wonder if peertube could be used as backend infra for a security camera system, the tech seems promising. Also with all these instances hosting their own content, what do they do to combat cgnat? do individuals need to upload to an instance that has a public ip at a bare minimum. And what about directory listings for content, users would expect to be able to browse available videos and then burrow down to instances that host them no?
- nirui 4mo agoHasn't cared about PeerTube for a long time, but this software is getting really impressive. Maybe it's time to move towards the next step: getting publishers on board. I could totally see myself hooked if I can watch news on it. Can someone from a proper news agency, such as BBC, DW, Reuters, NYT etc test the software and maybe make a pitch? If these agencies are hosting their own PeerTube instances, that would be a major win.
- Gigachad 4mo agoPublishers won't get on board until you can work out how to sort out advertising, paid subscriptions, and blocking ad blockers.
- nirui 4mo agoNo, I mean just let them host the instance themselves, and they can decide to do whatever. Many of these publishers already got a podcast/video publishing routine anyways and they just put ads directly in the podcast/video. I guess maybe it's not that hard for them to add another publishing channel. Getting one of the proper news agencies on board is very beneficial for the PeerTube network, because currently there's not much good quality content on it. News videos maybe a good baseline to keep user engaged (as long as they're not too political). If PeerTube is my software, I'll probably pay my own money to get the agencies on board. I'll even host their site myself if it needs to (at least for the first few years, to demonstrate the value of the software).
- ButlerianJihad 4mo agoI've been deeply invested in YT and YT Music for about 20 years now. This month I was forced to cancel my subscription. They recently jacked up the price and really ruined the apps. I can't even understand how to operate the apps anymore; nobody will document it; nobody will support them. So I'm unable to monetarily support an unsupported app ecosystem. Sadly I cannot leave the platform. The network effect is far too strong. PeerTube, and Vimeo, and Spotify are all well and good, like any other, but the network effect means that YouTube is where the channels are. The official channels that I follow and watch every day, for news, for updates, for the most important things in my hobby and my daily life. I cannot simply stop watching those things. Call me an addict or something; I don't know. I have no TV, no family; I need some kind of time-chewing entertainment that is mostly passive. I wish I could curl up with books and knitting or crafts or something, but my eyes are still glued to these screens. Help?
- rapidaneurism 4mo agoUser generated content: check, comment section: check. How do people running an instance not fall foul of all the protect the children UK legislation? Will peers also be done by the UK regulator, or only hosts?
- sirnicolaz 4mo agoI spent 10 minutes figuring out how I could just follow a few instances without having to run a docker container on my machine or keeping N tabs open all the time. Not a chance to figure that out (I am no mastodon user, so hard for me to guess). These platforms are promising, but they need to remember that the average user will turn away immediately if there is no clear guidance on how to do the basic things.
- buggylearning 4mo agoThe biggest problem I see is that you need to search for videos. If this is going to work you need a YouTube like home page with videos on it and a different webpage talking about the tech. Using a search page to find videos instead of being presented with one is a non starter.
- m4rtink 4mo agoFor an example of a quite vibrant local PeerTube instance, there is https://vhsky.cz/ https://vhsky.cz/ running in the Czech Republic. (And no, it is not spelled "VH SKY" - it's a pun on the VHS video format - in Czech to say "multiple VHS casettes - you would say "vhsky", hence the name. :) )
- archon810 4mo agoBrowsing the main page, none of the videos crack even 100 views. Many under 10 views. I don't know if one could call this vibrant.
- tomjow 4mo ago[flagged]
- tom1ow 4mo ago[flagged]
- tom9ow 4mo ago[flagged]
- zftnb666 4mo agoPeerTube: we don't recommend cat videos. Also PeerTube: 10 cat videos on the front page