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What 2023 will bring for PeerTube

260 points| booteille | 3 years ago |joinpeertube.org | reply

87 comments

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[+] robertlagrant|3 years ago|reply
As a Brit I love the idea of a video service just for the titled and ennobled.

May I ask - do the non-peers get any access at all? Even perhaps as a degraded, low resolution service? If so, I'd like to know where to register my disapproval.

[+] phillc73|3 years ago|reply
If you do not wish to watch videos of fox hunting, Mayfair house parties and Etonian high jinks, then commons-tube is for you.
[+] seanhunter|3 years ago|reply
Spectacular. Also, if you are a Lord, the resolution is 1080p, from there it gets scaled up so Viscount, Earl etc up to you have to be a Duke or minor royal to get 4k.

Audio could be auto dubbed into received pronunciation and any food onscreen automatically replaced by deepfaked cucumber sandwiches.

[+] EGreg|3 years ago|reply
When Simon Cowell on Britain’s Got Talent used to ask “peers, what do you think?” I thought he was asking his fellow judges. But no! He was asking Piers Morgan!
[+] mjfl|3 years ago|reply
No peasants allowed, for sure.
[+] fredsmith219|3 years ago|reply
Fox hunts are paywalled, though.
[+] raybb|3 years ago|reply
Finally, I love that they've created https://peer.tube/ to showcase good content on PeerTube. Discoverability has been quite a challenge.

Also, remote transcoding of videos seems like a huge win! Makes it so you won't need as beefy as a system to run PeerTube.

I wonder why FOSDEM doesn't use PeerTube to host their videos.

[+] nodja|3 years ago|reply
> Also, remote transcoding of videos seems like a huge win! Makes it so you won't need as beefy as a system to run PeerTube.

You can technically do it if you're willing to hack around. Since it uses the ffmpeg binary you could technically replace it with rffmpeg[1], the setup isn't pretty but it's doable. I haven't done it myself but have seen reddit posts on the jellyfin community that it works pretty well once setup.

[1] https://github.com/joshuaboniface/rffmpeg

[+] codetrotter|3 years ago|reply
> I wonder why FOSDEM doesn't use PeerTube to host their videos.

I didn’t watch any of their videos yet this year, but perhaps the thing they are using to host their videos is something they have built on their own, before PeerTube even existed? And so if what they have works then that’s a good reason to stick to using that.

[+] AstixAndBelix|3 years ago|reply
This guy has implemented a mind-boggling amount of features in these years basically all alone and funded with a modest tech salary.

Just goes to show how much potential small teams or even individuals have that gets wasted in big corpos.

[+] rglullis|3 years ago|reply
It also shows how the web (and technology in general) would be a lot better for us if we decided to support these people just a little bit, instead of letting ourselves be exploited by Big Tech in exchange of "free" stuff.
[+] college_physics|3 years ago|reply
Yes. This almost makes you giggle with excitement about what sort of potential has accumulated around web technologies when used creatively and with purpose.

Self-hosting is still not quite as easy as it could have been, though.

[+] BlueTemplar|3 years ago|reply
While extremely impressive, we shouldn't forget the support that Framasoft provides him, and that he's building upon WebTorrent software and Fediverse protocols.
[+] Nifty3929|3 years ago|reply
I feel like this relates right back to the recent wave of layoffs.
[+] college_physics|3 years ago|reply
As always the French locale means there is a bit of language barrier for the English speaking world, but framasoft supports a whole host of interesting "fediverse" projects. I would maybe single out mobilizon [0] as most intriguing. It is "simply" about communities organizing events in a decentralized way.

[0] https://mobilizon.fr/

[+] _ache_|3 years ago|reply
Humm, I can't see a thing that is not translated to at least english. Not sure about the language barrier.
[+] aeharding|3 years ago|reply
Nice seeing this on the top of HN, lucky timing, I was just browsing code/blogposts etc last night and ended up donating €30. I've been toying with the software and I've been pretty impressed.

I'd like to see an invite-based signup option like Mastodon, but other than that, it's a nice roadmap!

Edit: Created an idea post: https://ideas.joinpeertube.org/posts/139/invite-links-to-cre...

[+] abcc8|3 years ago|reply
I'm wondering how they plan to get decent content. I just searched two of my interests, climbing and canoeing, and only a handful of uninteresting videos popped up. Are there specific topics that have engaging communities on the site?
[+] kevincox|3 years ago|reply
Just like YouTube most content is crap. Maybe the bigger problem is that searching on any one instance will only search a small subset of the content available.

But it is mostly a discovery problem. Once you have found a channel that you like it is easy to follow via RSS or ActivityPub. I would love to see discovery services built on top of PeerTube, it seems natural to separate the viewing infrastructure from the recommendation service.

[+] rsynnott|3 years ago|reply
Based on the Mastodon experience (very quiet outside of small niches until mid last year) you'll probably have to wait til Youtube self-destructs.
[+] AstixAndBelix|3 years ago|reply
That's like asking how Signal plans on getting nice people to talk to. Peertube is just a self-hosted platform that allows for bandwidth-efficient video sharing, it's up to the single instance owners to care about publicizing their stuff.
[+] jrmg|3 years ago|reply
What is that screenshot of ‘Morning Affairs’ to ‘Embark’ meant to show?

Related, that’s probably not the best picture to show if they’re going for mainstream acceptance. I suspect it’s probably a pretty sedate video actually, so the author of the post just didn’t think about how it looked, but just choosing something with less apparent nakedness would probably give a better first impression if PeerTube is going for a widespread audience.

[+] peppermint_gum|3 years ago|reply
I have one problem with PeerTube: its P2P architecture makes the users legally liable for the content they're watching, because they aren't just watching, they are also automatically sharing it.

Of course, Torrent has the same problem but I think in that case people are more aware of it.

[+] e63f67dd-065b|3 years ago|reply
The fundamental benefit of Youtube is that it is perhaps the only social media platform, along with Instagram and Onlyfans, that has figured out how to create an ecosystem where creators are sufficiently compensated in a way that sustains careers.

The problem here was only ever partly technological, and the rest is a business problem. On one end, you have the ability of Youtube to store huge amounts of video, transcode it, and then serve it to basically every corner of the globe, eating up significant portions of global bandwidth doing so, all with incredibly low tail latency (load up random 0-view videos and they still load quickly).

On the other, you have creators actually getting paid. Yes, they're not paid very much, and yes there are endless issues with advertisers getting unhappy or creators complaining about content policy, but by and large it's sustained an incredibly diverse ecosystem of people making videos because enough people watch them to make it a living. That's not to add the embedded advertising that usually pays much more than YT's own ads.

Any platform that wants to compete must solve all these problems simultaneously: can you serve video at global scale, not go bankrupt doing it, and split enough of your money video creators that they actually want to host their videos with you.

The problem is as much with the business model as it is technological, and anybody that tries to build a better youtube just by throwing code at the problem is doomed to fail.

And then after you have all of that you still end up with the network effect: YT has all the users and all the video, and it's a self-reinforcing system where one begets the other.

[+] jrm4|3 years ago|reply
In a very odd way, I almost want Youtube to screw up something big to shine some light here, a la Twitter/Mastodon. Get these things rolling!
[+] wongarsu|3 years ago|reply
Youtube semi-regularly screws up in ways that makes the creators fear for their channel and audience, and makes them evaluate alternatives. The "problem" is that youtube never really screws up on the content consumer side, so viewers have little reason to ever go to any of these altnernatives (unless it's paid bonus content on patreon).

Though I guess I could see some channels that are too heavily restricted on youtube using peertube as a repository of all videos, and youtube for the videos that youtube currently deems acceptable enough.

[+] BlueTemplar|3 years ago|reply
Just like with Mastodon created because of the 2013 Twitter APIpocalypse, YouTube have been screwing things up big for at least 14 years now, and PeerTube as it exists now is at least partially the result of those actions :

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/01/youtubes-january-fair-...

(To be fair there also was that Viacom et al. lawsuit for $1 billion in damages...)

[+] nicce|3 years ago|reply
I doesn't matter much since there is no money involved in alternatives. Google pays for content creators. A lot. Decentralisation is likely removing all compensations and people stop pushing content for money.
[+] TheCaptain4815|3 years ago|reply
General question, why haven't nefarious actors used PeerTubes technology to launch their own non-censorable channels/videos? I'm talking ISIS tier.
[+] ehutch79|3 years ago|reply
I'm getting certificate errors. This is a giant red flag to me.
[+] LinuxBender|3 years ago|reply
For which domain? joinpeertube.org or one of the video hosting nodes?

Use Qualys [1] to test the domain in question to link here or use the testssl.sh [2] code only depends on openssl and bash to test from your machine. If one of the many self hosted nodes, see if you can find a way to reach out to them and kindly suggest they set up certbot or a cron job to renew their certs.

Joinpeertube.org looks good to me [3] so I assume you find a self-hosted node that needs some attention.

If someone here knows of a way to query a list of all the self-hosted domains joined into peertube perhaps we could run testssl.sh against all of them to generate reports. I am not opposed to doing this if someone knows how I can get a list of all the domains using curl.

[1] - https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

[2] - https://github.com/drwetter/testssl.sh

[3] - https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=joinpeertube....

[+] _ache_|3 years ago|reply
I don't. It a basic Let's Encrypt certificate. It comes from you side.
[+] frostiness|3 years ago|reply
Are you sure you're not on a network that may be blocking the site? I had the same issue but it went away once I connected to a VPN.
[+] aendruk|3 years ago|reply
What errors?
[+] somecompanyguy|3 years ago|reply
my guess is a massive propaganda campaign demonizing peertube
[+] CharlesW|3 years ago|reply
Given some of the content I've seen on PeerTube, PeerTube becoming popular would be the end of PeerTube.
[+] neonsunset|3 years ago|reply
It's nice to see PeerTube keeping going, it's quite an important project in the long run, always providing the opportunity to spin up your own instance for videohosting, and "peer" too. Here federation is actually a more useful model when compared to deeply flawed fediverse in its use case.
[+] doublepg23|3 years ago|reply
PeerTube uses ActivityPub, it is _part_ of the fediverse. You can comment on a video using a Mastodon account.