I know this is a silly question, especially as I’m currently focused on local-only feeds, but there’s just one part of the Fediverse I wish would get more love: PeerTube. While there aren’t a lot of people actively looking for alternative video hosts outside the big guys (Twitch, YouTube, Dailymotion, etc.), it would be nice to see wider adoption of PeerTube. I think better integration with other softwares would be helpful in that regard, if for no other reason than just that it brings attention to the services available.
Even if it doesn’t federate, I’d still like to see wide adoption of peertube for linking rather than youtube. A popular decentralized video host would be an incredible boon to the internet; offering a path that could potentially (eventually) lead away from YT.
I think the main way that could be achieved is if Kbin and Lemmy had a convenient “upload video” option that actually uploaded the video to peertube. Convenience is king. Back before Reddit offered image and video hosting (and you’d usually upload to a site like imgur instead), there’d constantly be people commenting that they didn’t know how to upload their content.
That said, I’m personally cautious of PeerTube. Hosting small images is one thing, but video is something else. I don’t really understand how PeerTube will keep running if it gets too much usage. Presumably, like most of these sites, it will depend on donations. I don’t know if that will cut it for hosting video. My fear is that it’ll be fine with low usage but as soon as it gets too high usage, we might see it going down (and taking a ton of content with it).
Peertube is inherently very scalable with relatively little cost due to an artifact of all social media platforms: Most of the traffic is driven by a tiny amount of videos/magazines/etc…
For services like youtube, you can use this as a way to quickly cache data close to the place it’s going to be streamed: e.g. Netflix works with ISPs to install small servers at their locations to lessen the burden on their (and the ISPs) systems.
But with centralised systems you can only push this so far since ultimately everything is still concentrated at one central location.Hypothetically, if you could stop this super-linear scaling for each user (you need to pay per user plus overhead generated from managing them at scale), you could easily compete against the likes of youtube simply because, at sufficient scale, all the other effects get ammortized away.
Peertube does exactly this by serving the videos as webtorrents: essentially this means that for every “chunk” of a video you downloaded, you also host that chunk for other people to download. That means that peertube itself theoretically only has to host every unique video once (or less than once since the chunks are in the network for a while), meaning you rid yourself of the curse of linear user scaling against users and only scale sub-linearly with the number of unique videos (how sub-linear depends on the lifetime for your individual torrents; i.e. how long a single video chunk stays available for others).
The costs that remain for every peertube instance is essentially the file hosting costs (and encoding the video, but that also only scales in the number of videos and could be pushed onto the uploader using WASM video encoders).
Storage itself isn’t cheap, but also not ungodly expensive (especially since you can ammortize the costs over a long time as you platform grows with storage prices in a continual massive decline).Platforms like Netflix and youtube cannot do this because
- Netflix is a paid-service and people don’t want to do the hosting job for netflix after having already paid for the service
- Youtube has to serve adds which is incompatible with the “users host the content” method
In general torrenting is a highly reliable and well tested method that scales fantastically well to large data needs (it quite literally becomes more efficient the more people use it)
@CoderKat It works on torrents, so the more people use it the faster it gets (in theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebTorrent
I expect it will be - it seems to almost work already. For example, take this peertube channel - https://tube.arthack.nz/c/intertwingled/videos?s=1.
I tried a few different things in the kbin search and
@intertwingled@tube.arthack.nzgot a result that I could subscribe to. If that channel posts another video, it might show up in kbin. Will it be a microblog? A thread? A magazine? Who knows! kbin seems very confused about all of this.@boilingsteam (https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]) was created a month ago. BoilingSteam put a video on the channel 2 weeks ago (after it should’ve already been federated) and it didn’t come down the pipe. So I think PeerTube is currently broken.
PeerTube channels use ActivityPub groups, so they should appear as a magazine in kbin. They already show up as communities in Lemmy, though I’m not sure if subscriptions work right there or not.
PeerTube videos available directly on /kbin will add 50 thousands more users to PeerTube! A great boost of popularity for this platform!
@NotTheOnlyGamer If we can get Peertube and Pixelfed integrated that would cover all of the bases for me.
PixelFed already federates. It just doesn’t use ActivityPub groups, though, so posts just show up in the Microblog feed.
I think that the moment YT starts actually blocking people who use ad blockers, we need ot start pushing for the adoption of PeerTube the way we did for Lemmy, kbin and Mastodon.
It is already possible. You just have to use the search to trigger the federation with a channel. For example this channel: https://tilvids.com/c/thelinuxexperiment_channel/can be subscribed to via searching: [email protected]
We can already view PeerTube channels in the “Microblogging” tab, as that’s the way PeerTube federates to other services.
At least in theory that should be the case
What will you do when people start mirroring content from Youtube to kbin? Youtube will enforce the new politics of blocking the adblockers, so there will be an incentive for the viewers to host those videos here. What will Ernest do when the lawyers of big labels start suing kbin?
Who is mirroring? If it is the video authors that is good that they mirror to peertube. If it is someone else that gets into copyright law and needs to be squashed (unless permission is obtained)
It will be someone else. Like someone who wants to host his favorite playlist somewhere else than youtube where the ablockblockers are coming.
It will be more than a full time job to delete the copyrighted content. Specially when you know that youtube and the creators will have a business reason to do so. If you are too slow, boom, if you miss a video, boom.Video content is dangerous to host.
See it or fold, like anybody else.
I thought it already federated since both are using activity pub
I think the protocol is only part of success, but also possibility to read data, parse it and show on interface. I think the second part doesn’t work.
Services implement ActivityPub in slightly different ways, so things don’t always work right out of the box.
