PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization.

I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch. This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram. Even a decent 20-minute video can easily take 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor.

I have a pretty small channel (~100K subscribers) with no employees and relatively low upkeep costs (a few hundred dollars a month), and even I could not make this work if I didn't get at least $500-$1,000 per video on average, since it just takes so much time and money.

Most channels with more than a million subscribers are likely founders working 60-80 hour weeks with multiple full-time employees supporting them. You cannot do that in the hopes of viewers donating $5 here and there.

And yes, there are people who make content for free - most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video. And the difference between a million views and a hundred is 10,000x. You cannot create a platform without big users.

I think any real competitor to YouTube nowadays would have to be backed by a big corporation that can pay big creators million-dollar deals to make the switch. Otherwise it's just dead in the water.

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.

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/

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.

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

Stupid question: when people inevitably use this for pirate content, and the feds try to shut the service down ... what's the plan?

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

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?

Random idea…

1. Chunk one inside a YT video 2. Chunk two inside a TikTok video 3. Chunk three on an X thread

And then just post the manifest somewhere that can be read by a client, that then pulls the data in (video, doc, anything)

Obv, not meant for speed or good UX, but if we’re going down the route of decentralization, we can probably leverage social platforms to host chunks of data.

Last time I tried it the federation was whitelist based, that is you could only follow people on instances added by the admin of your instance. This made content discovery difficult.

It is unfortunate that in french « peer » reads as « pire » which translates to « worse-tube »

is it bulletproof ? I don't think peertube has fixed that massive legal liability to the "seeders"

same situation that bitorrent found itself in

My recent experience with PeerTube was to click on the OpenMW released video and the video didn't load. Is that a regular occurrence on PeerTube?

Does it allow streaming?

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