One of the only things I find myself missing about reddit is the videos. I’m aware that it’s not really feasible for videos to be hosted on a lemmy instance at the moment, but I’m curious if that might change

  • fubo@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Does PeerTube distribute load across instances, like BitTorrent? Or does it assume that the hosting instance has enough bandwidth to support all concurrent users?

    • atocci@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      PeerTube uses the WebTorrent protocol for its videos, so it does distribute load with everyone currently watching a video helping distribute it to everyone else. Each instance is its own torrent tracker. I’m not sure how I feel about it, because your IP address is visible to anyone else watching the video also.

    • kadu@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m going to be honest with you, I have absolutely no idea how it works. And as far as I can see, there are very few instances at the moment.

      Though someone smarter than me could probably answer you by checking the source code, or maybe they even have some documentation written already.

    • eh@nerdbin.social
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      1 year ago

      It uses WebTorrent for distribution between viewers watching at the same time which can temporarily help with the load on popular videos, but there still needs to be at least one source instance that’s sharing the video “regularly” (for unpopular or old stuff), which ends up having the same bandwidth issues you’d get with any other video platform.