With the mass migrations of Reddit users to Lemmy/Kbin, and Twitter now speedrunning its own mass extinction, it seems me that the eventual future of social media is de-centralized. I like how Lemmy is slowing turning out, even if it still has some work to do and growing pains to fix up. It’s still able to inform me of all of the current events I want and has a large enough community that it doesn’t feel empty.
I think a similar path will present itself for a de-centralized video media platform like PeerTube, since YouTube will eventually piss off enough of its users to cause a similar kind of exodus. Wanting to jump in on the concept at an early stage, I signed up for a channel on spectra.video and uploaded my video collection there.
But, I don’t really see the same kind of community and usefulness on PeerTube. I check out the Discover and Trending pages, and it just seems like the same set of videos, really. There’s not enough content to keep PeerTube from looking like a small indie project. I can click on Recently Added and it is usually other people just dumping their channel collections, instead of recent adds of new videos. It’s very easy to scroll down and find videos from months ago.
After poking around on various other PeerTube sites, I think I found the real problem with the platform: Federation.
For example, let’s look at how federated Lemmy’s community is:
All interconnected with hundreds and hundreds (if not thousands) of other instances. If you sign up for one Lemmy account, you have little risk in not being able to access a remote community elsewhere. It feels like a federated community, where everything is de-centralized, but communication is linked everywhere. I can even link to my own video channel from Lemmy.
Now, look at PeerTube’s instance lists, based on what I’ve seen on the Join PeerTube site:
- Spectra.video
- TILvids (basically non-existent)
- Neat.tube
- Video.blender.org
- BassPistol
- Diode.zone
- FTV
- PeerTube.io
- Review.PeerTube.biz
It’s all so bare. At most, 80-90 instances for some sites. I can’t see a lot of other instances’ videos, and they can’t see mine. Not from here or here or here or here or here or here or here or here.
It makes PeerTube a large collection of small silos, instead of a real federated community. People want to be able to sign on to an instance and find the content they want without having to jump through all of these different instances. Subscription feeds rely on having a unified list from many different instances. The technology has a lot of potential, but the PeerTube community is not nearly as organized as the rest of the Fediverse.
This sounds like a somewhat simple problem to solve, but I’m not sure what other kind of technological hurdles exist. How did the Lemmy community solve it?
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I dunno. I think trying to treat peertube the same as lemmy is going to be impossible. Video hosting and sharing is a massive data hog. It’s going to take a dedicated non-profit organization to make it viable. Without a backbone like mastodon has, I don’t see it ever being anything useful.
Not to mention monetization. A big reason Youtube is what it is is because it pays its creators.
YouTube pays its creators in peanuts. That’s why almost every YouTube video has a sponsor, or is thanking its Patreons, or both.
I have a full-paying job, so I don’t bother with monetization. I feel like monetization is a boat anchor designed to shackle creators with arcane unspoken rules and unfair copyright claims. (My Babylon 5 video is still technically marked as ineligible because I criticized TNT when talking about Crusade.) I specifically signed up for Google AdSense to turn off ads on my YouTube videos.
I think what PeerTube is doing by having a Support section is good enough. Donate to your instance or donate to your creators directly. It’s a helluva lot more money than YouTube would be paying.
YouTube pays its creators in peanuts
I mean they get 55% of ad revenue and 70% of subscriptions. Even if youtube started running as nonprofit tomorrow, they could only pay creators a tiny bit more.
I dunno dude, your average uploader might not be making a ton off AdSense, but the large creators that bring in the majority of users are making bank. The sponsers and Patreons are there to diversify income streams, as Google is notororiously prone to mashing the demonetization button. There are billions of dollars flowing through YouTube, and I don’t think that a decentralized platform running on volunteers and donations is going to be able to compete with that.
Overall I think you’re being unrealistic with the Fediverses place in social media, and overly optimistic about the future of it. I doubt the platform will ever have true mass appeal, which is fine.
I dunno dude, your average uploader might not be making a ton off AdSense, but the large creators that bring in the majority of users are making bank. The sponsers and Patreons are there to diversify income streams, as Google is notororiously prone to mashing the demonetization button.
Both YouTube and Twitch are very top-heavy organizations. Something like the Top 5000 channels make up 75% of Twitch. The rest are picking up the loose pennies on the ground. If PeerTube becomes a platform for the other hundreds of thousands of channels that don’t get paid millions of dollars, so be it.
Overall I think you’re being unrealistic with the Fediverses place in social media, and overly optimistic about the future of it. I doubt the platform will ever have true mass appeal, which is fine.
It’ll be a slow burn, that’s for sure. But, platforms like phpBB, MySpace, Fark, Digg, and Tumblr didn’t fall in a day. It was a slow descent into bad decisions and inadaptability that caused these platforms to vacate over a period of years.
True that!
Yeah, I dont think it’s a problem of lack of interest but one of resources. You literally need in the 100s of terabytes of storage space, especially for HD videos.
Even if fully decentralized. Many vps providers and isp have bandwidth limits. One video on your self hosted channel goes viral and boom. Instance is down.
Thet’s where “Peer” in “PeerTube” comes in, while watching a video you automatically donate your own bandwidth to other people so that they can download it from your computer instead of from the server.
How does that work for people using things like cell phones and or streaming devices or those behind cgnat such as many cell carriers use?
A lot of folks that use services like YouTube are not doing so on devices equipped to donate bandwidth.
I don’t see how cellphones or CGNAT play into this. If you can send real-time voice data in a web call P2P in your browser (webrtc), you can send semi-real-time video data P2P aswell.
Cellphones and streaming devices often have extremely limited space allowed for caching content and aren’t designed for serving content but are heavily used for consuming content. Most younger users aren’t watching YouTube from a browser, it’s mostly coming from phones and streaming devices. Android may be less stringent but Apple is very aggresive in how the caching can be used and managed.
. Additionally because cell phone usage is often 99.99% used to download and bandwidth on a cell services is generally treated as aggregate they will often only Qos tcp acks and heavily deprioritize literally everything else to make room for download bandwidth.
Should be something like the system that torrents use: each instance provides the video at the same time to the same user. Some instance give 100kb/s and another 900 kb/s. In the end, the user streams the video with 1000kb/s
There is that issue as well! I forgot about bandwidth.
I mean just some basic calculations. 10 minute video at 1080p running 8 Mbps compression.
That’s 600 MB per video in bandwidth.
Times that by….30,000 streams and boom. 18 TB of data. And that’s probably not even “viral.”
It’s worth noting that PeerTube has a peer2peer function that allows other people watching a video to upload directly to other viewers, reducing the bandwidth needed on the server directly.
It’s like everybody forgot about the first half of the name PeerTube
Exactly. The questions section on their homepage says this: “Peer-to-peer broadcasting - It reduces server bandwidth overload if a video becomes viral;”.
Compared to other fediverse platforms like mastodon and lemmy, peertube will obviously have more storage requirements though. And as usual, having many small instances is always better than a small number of large instances.
I think there needs to be an option to link to a PeerTube instance without having to always host the material. Have some sites where you host videos, but other peers where you don’t because you can’t afford to host all of it. That would at least solve the federation problem. Hopefully, they can have enough “tier 1” peers (seeders) to serve the content from multiple sources.
Also, why can’t videos use torrent technology to serve the data by other viewers?
Also, why can’t videos use torrent technology to serve the data by other viewers?
from what i read, they do.
i think the problem is the kind of distributed systems it was designed to be vs the kind we are talking about.
PT won’t be, at the current state of propagation of content, redundancy and accessibility of content, a replacement for YT or similar.
it could be, but today it cannot.
there is another post mentioning how if certain Lemmy instances keep growing they’ll need economic support.
it smells PT, the way it’s organised today, needs support right now.
there are various ways to optimise data propagation and replication for scalability of content.
I think the discussion needs to be open towards this question
Yeah, I think this might be the best for PeerTube. Instead of federating to the point of copying the actual videos to each server, just copy the metadata/thumbnails. That way all of the videos on all federated servers on the network show in each instance’s list of videos, but when you actually click on a video it requests an embedded player from the original server that the video was hosted on rather than on your local instance.
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But, all of these instances are already hosting the videos. Why not serve the links to the content on the Discover and Trending pages?
one reason which come to mind is Stream-ability.
if you download the video and play it, it might be fine. but users normally want to stream it.
to stream it, the endpoint from where you stream it needs to be near you.
if you are in the US and will stream something from a European server, you’ll have problems. and even if you don’t, that cannot be considered the norm.
that’s why people use CDNs, and they are a huge business.
so there’s an advantage to have a close to you instance, which has as much locally present content as possible
[Lemmy] servers can be run for only a few hundred dollars per month.
The median seems to be much lower, like 10, 20 or 30 per month. Many admins reported they ran a server for other purposes anyways, and just had to pay for the domain to add a Lemmy instance.
It’s only after a few thousand users that the bill goes 3 digits.
At least that’s the impression I got from reading a few posts about this.
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I think you’re missing the forest for the trees here.
PeerTube accounts are for video makers, not video watchers. If I want to watch a PT video, I can do so without an account. If I want to leave a like or comment, I’ll do so from my mastodon or misskey account. The reason Peertube servers don’t tend to federate with each other is because they don’t need to: they federate with mastodon/misskey/pleroma servers for the people who want to watch. (also, the https://spectra.video/about/follows page OP linked seems to ignore non-peertube follows?)
As for finding new videos on PeerTube, I recommend using sepiasearch.org
I think you’re totally right. The big difference is that while for a lemmy instance to show you other instances content under ‘All’ only one other user from your instance needs to subscribe to it and you will be exposed to it. On PeerTube if another user subscribes you will never know about that instance because the server admin needs to manually federate with that instance.
But because there is no good differentiation between ‘All’ and ‘Local’ many admins - including me - just don’t federate with other instances automatically. What made it worse - I’m not sure if it got better over time - was that if you automatically federated then there would be naked people without NSFW at the top of every discovery, there would be antivax, nazis, all the fringe groups which weren’t allowed on YouTube anymore. That would make it impossible to find the local videos and your instance would look like it’s run by nazis and would offer bad quality porn.
I’m not sure I understand the difference between those problems on PeerTube vs. Lemmy. Lemmy NSFW instances exist, especially since the Reddit NSFW community established a foothold, and they are all properly separated into their own groups and instances. Lemmy admins maintain their own block lists (see the bottom of the instance lists linked) to get rid of the antivax/nazi nonsense, which usually isn’t that large, compared to the thousand or so instances they connect to.
Heck, even Lemmy.film and others have links to the porn/NSFW instances, so somehow they are maintaining a relationship to keep things clean on the non-NSFW side.
This is just my observation, but I think it’s because the communities on PeerTube decided to just give up on controlling moderation of instances (perhaps because the instances were popping up like whack a mole?)
So they opted instead to just give up on the idea of any federation on the PeerTube branch of fedi, and now we have the isolated issue of today…
My opinions are the same as yours, in my little experience. There’s not a lot of content on there, you can’t see content from other instances, and the content that is on there is not high quality.
One thought that crossed my mind was having a PeerTube instance backing each of the major Lemmy instances for video upload. Anything to reduce our dependence on corporate frequently used sites like YouTube and imgr.
Ok so here’s where it starts falling apart in my head. First, as another poster mentioned, the costs would be through the roof compared to a link aggregating site like Lemmy. From what I understand PeerTube does some Bit torrenty stuff to reduce bandwidth usage. And IPFS could help as well. But at the end of the day you need a server hosting this as a source of truth, with the monumental cost that accounts for.
The other huge problem is moderation. We need strong moderation because jackasses are going to upload CSAM. As single files. Spliced into the middle of legitimate videos. And the fediverse is way too important to have it be associated with that crap. So like I said, extremely strong moderation, for free.
I want to see Peertube take off and overcome these hurdles. If there’s anything I can help develop I’d be happy to take on a ticket.
I’ve been so frustrated by Peertube because I feel like it needs leadership that the developers just aren’t willing to do. It feels like someone made a product and then never actually used it.
I was just thinking the other day if the dev is even running an instance and I almost certain that they don’t.
@jeena well, they do, but it’s not open to registrations: https://framatube.org/
@sabreW4K3
I still don’t understand the content that you can find on there. Can I find commentary videos from my favorite YouTubers on there? Music videos? Music theory videos? Meme videos? Is it all only educational stuff or technojargon coding nonsense?
I observed the same segmentized silos problem a little while ago. Initial reach is SOOOO much harder when federation doesn’t work.
Reach is there only when some popular tech vblogger appears, like The Linux Experiment on TILvids - and that’s it. Most people are there for that channel and that channel only (Nick’s done a good job at promoting it, as we see), which must mean the impression other parts leave on a viewer is considerably worse.
TILvids has the worst possible solution by subscribing to nobody in the PeerTube landscape.
It would be a good solution if peertube was growing at a decent pace. But it’s not so it ends up just dragging it down
TILvids is like your average overprotective uncle…
Most instances do not enable global index to prevent having to do much federation between PeerTube instances.
Hi, so I run Spectra, and would like to weigh in.
I wrote this piece a few years back about the content situation on PeerTube.
TL;DR, PeerTube has a significant problem with spam. I’m not just talking about spammy comments, although it has those, too. No, I’m talking about the videos. For example: there’s an option within PeerTube that, when enabled, basically just automatically subscribes to every server that subscribes to yours. I let that setting run for a while, and connected to maybe a hundred random instances over time.
It was all garbage. Either you get far-right propaganda videos, actual nazi videos, or super random weird stuff of little value. Want a video in Hindi for a restaurant with a two-second video featuring a French TV commercial transcribed from VHS? How about that, mixed with thousands of random snippets of media that you will never care about or relate to?
A lot of PeerTube admins kind of informally got together and said: you know what, this is crap, no one is ever going to enjoy this. So, we connected our communities together. We have to do our research on which servers are good, and which ones just serve up bullshit. Good community stewardship, in this case, requires us to do our homework on which servers are worth following. Instead of following as many servers as possible, we’re more inclined to check and see if the place is putting out original stuff, has decent guidelines, and isn’t spouting hateful crap everywhere. To build community organically, we have to do so with intention.
The reason that you’re not seeing your videos in any of the places you’ve listed is because their servers don’t follow ours. This doesn’t mean that your videos cannot be seen through federation - it’s just that, in any of those places, no one is subscribed to you, and that server isn’t subscribed to our server. So, your channel and videos aren’t likely to show up there, unless somebody actively chooses to subscribe to you.
I agree that PeerTube is seriously lacking in some kind of Community Discovery feature, and would be greatly enhanced by it.
In my mind, having a peertube account is only for the video makers, as a consumer of video you are better off interacting with it from another app (lemmy is so-so about this, but mastodon/misskey/firefish seems to work better) or following the RSS feed
