PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

Join the discussion

• Hacker News
• Stupid question: when people inevitably use this for pirate content, and the feds try to shut the service down ... what's the plan?
  by hungryhobbit
• I am gonna guess it's similar to torrenting and seeding?
  by busymom0
• The plan is the same as it always has been. It's no different than running an open FTP server.
  by treyd
• Someone 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.
  by dewey
• The feds will go after the instance admin that is sharing pirate content.
  by rpgbr
• They 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.
  by paxys
• Been running my instance for more than 5 years now, feel free to ask questions.
  by utopiah
• How much does it cost you? what is your business model to substain it?
  by MiDu16
• The first thing I noticed is that clicking on "browse" does not allow browsing but requires search: https://joinpeertube.org/browse-content
  by pajtai
• Would be pretty incredible to see decentralized federated media individual accounts and aggregators implement the x402 payment protocol (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

  by rbbydotdev
• Does 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

  by orphereus
• If 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.

  by Avamander
• I 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?
  by jesse_dot_id
• Yeah, form is the most important factor. Function isn't necessary./s
  by timbit42
• It'd help if you explain the problems you see in the UX.

  I picked a random instance and played a video - did not see any problems.

  And Youtube: I've hated their UX since they launched. It shouldn't be hard to make something with better UX than Youtube.

  by BeetleB
• Do you have precise suggestion of what to improve? I'm genuinely interested.
  by flaburgan
• Same 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).

  by cosmic_cheese
• Youtube has been incredibly frustrating for many many reasons and is evidently evil in many axes now. We really need competition in video hosting.
  by GodelNumbering

•   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_video_platforms

  by numpad0
• I am still a bit upset that I got banned without even a warning. I tried to adhere to policies and figured if anything was wrong, I'd get a warning at least, and then I'd know better what the limits are. Unfortunately there is little recourse and even less feedback.

  Even more annoying is that it terminates your YouTube account entirely, so now I can't even login to use it. And I was a premium subscriber, too!

  The best thing about YouTube is their agreements with rights holders to allow music and revenue sharing easily, which makes it very simple for creators and remixers etc to not get their stuff removed via DMCA.

  by xfeeefeee
• Then 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!".

  by WarmWash
• The problem is that YouTube isn't just a video hosting platform. We have many of those. The problem is that YouTube is a business platform that lets you makes money from your business, as long as your business is mainly comprised of publishing videos. No amount of open-source software quality can replicate thousands of dollars of ad money flowing into your pocket. It's like making a 3D-printable plan of an Indian restaurant, it can't ever become an actual Indian restaurant.

  Small or hobby creators, who aren't making money anyway, could use small platforms - but then they forfeit their chance to ever become big and get that money - at best they could become big and not get that money.

  by pocksuppet
• PeerTube 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.

  by pocksuppet
• The 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
  by an0malous
• It 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.
  by duxup
• yeah video social media is way ahead with algorithms and content. I still think they need to exist and keep pushing for this idea
  by manusartifex123
• There 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

  by Animats
• I 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/

  by raphinou
• With adblocker enabled: error loading dynamically imported module: https://exquisite.tube/client/standalone/videos/assets/peert...
  by dvngnt_
• It'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.

  by CM30