Peertube is another one of those projects I've been using more and more over the last months. It's mostly a matter of being finding interesting content over time.
Like many of the other open-source/libre alternatives to big platforms, there are few lock-in (aka network) effects, and so platform usage increase tends to be sloooow (aka organic). Extremely unsexy for 10x unicorn VC investment I guess. But for a user who wants to see interesting stuff it's great!
Before anyone interjects: yes, I'm aware that peertube won't work for all creators. NotJustBikes has been very clear that it would simply not be an option for them. Nebula (creator coop) seems to be the best compromise for them for now.
Anyhow, nice list of new features, much appreciated! <3
Interesting read. Although the "Update" section at the top finishes thus:
> Ultimately the worst thing Nebula has done is provide some misleading marketing spin. They’re still an infinitely better deal for creators than YouTube.
I'm more interested in the financials and funding of the service - it's "easy" to provide a better service if you're losing money burning VC cash, but we know that'll never be sustainable.
If they are better for the creators while also being at least cashflow-neutral, that's a much bigger deal IMHO than specifics on /who/ owns it.
>Like many of the other open-source/libre alternatives to big platforms, there are few lock-in (aka network) effects, and so platform usage increase tends to be sloooow (aka organic). Extremely unsexy for 10x unicorn VC investment I guess. But for a user who wants to see interesting stuff it's great!
I think you are missing the point: there is pretty much no money to be made with peertube. It's just people using their own bandwidth and time to host and make videos they want to see.
>NotJustBikes has been very clear that it would simply not be an option for them. Nebula (creator coop) seems to be the best compromise for them for now.
Because there is no monetization angle to peertube aside from donations. But whatever, youtube was great before monetization so I figure there is no need for these kinds of filmmakers in the long run.
There are only a few creators so much better known that I will follow them. Most of the time I don't care who shows me that interesting content, so long as it is interesting good enough.
My biggest gripe with videos shared on Mastodon is that with so many nodes hosted on personal infrastructure on the wrong side of the consumer / producer gap in the way the modern web is laid out (i.e. hosted over a consumer cable connection with asymmetric upload / download bandwidth), trying to play a video often feels like I've been zapped back into the late-'90s and am waiting for an animated GIF to download off of USENET. I'm wondering if people generally find videos on PeerTube come through faster.
It's generally bad unless you have a peer or two. The only instance i've used that's fast is videos.lukesmith.xyz but thats probably because his fans self-host and mirror his videos in webtorrent
I already have a Fediverse account on my own domain (via masto.host, an excellent service). There's no way for me to reuse that ActivityPub actor with PeerTube. The fact that making this possible isn't a huge priority for the community gives me serious reservations about building on AvtivityPub.
You can follow peertube accounts, comment on their posts, etc, from a mastodon account. The only thing you can't do is post videos to their instance, but that's how all activity pub apps work.
Are there any known legal actions taken for people sharing copyrighted material? I know that in some countries e.g. Germany it is dangerous to share via P2P as it's quite probable that some law firm will sue you.
If you are worried about legal action, you can buy a seedbox anonymously in some 3rd world country to host your stuff. People use those a lot for private trackers in the bittorrent world, so I figure same applies to webtorrent.
Of course, you can just go without p2p and just do client-server. That's a bit slower though, but you could do that over tor or something.
In the long run, maybe you could figure out webtorrent over i2p, I've heard p2p has had some success over i2p with applications like i2psnark but IDK as i've never used it and IDK how it would interact with WebRTC data streams (might need some sort of proxy?)
Peertube has been a fantastic way to mirror videos from Youtube and have embedded versions that are ad- and cookie-free. It's got support for mirroring channels from the other video providers which makes it a breeze to run. I've deployed it for various communities:
The fediverse integration is a minor plus, but the permanent nature of the video hosting. My only wish is that there was a way to bidirectionally mirror view counts, so that the Peertube mirrors don't look like a ghost town.
22 comments
[ 4602 ms ] story [ 521 ms ] thread* Separate audio and video streams for more flexibility
* Browse subtitles in the transcription widget
* Set up Youtube-dl for smoother imports
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/pull/2213
I made this not so much to listen to music but to listen to recorded lectures while on the move - and thus on 3/4G - so as to avoid wasting data.
Like many of the other open-source/libre alternatives to big platforms, there are few lock-in (aka network) effects, and so platform usage increase tends to be sloooow (aka organic). Extremely unsexy for 10x unicorn VC investment I guess. But for a user who wants to see interesting stuff it's great!
Before anyone interjects: yes, I'm aware that peertube won't work for all creators. NotJustBikes has been very clear that it would simply not be an option for them. Nebula (creator coop) seems to be the best compromise for them for now.
Anyhow, nice list of new features, much appreciated! <3
https://medium.com/@cameron-paul/who-actually-owns-nebula-95...
> Ultimately the worst thing Nebula has done is provide some misleading marketing spin. They’re still an infinitely better deal for creators than YouTube.
If they are better for the creators while also being at least cashflow-neutral, that's a much bigger deal IMHO than specifics on /who/ owns it.
https://social.notjustbikes.com/@notjustbikes/11277626354576...
But from that little, I'd interpret (!!!) that
a) It's much less of a hassle to use nebula, and
b) economically and power-wise, they see nebula like a creators' union.
It makes sense to me, I don't have grief with this. :)
I feel like the biggest problem is that this solves problems that are different then the ones most people have with youtube.
Like from what i understand from the creator side, the creators want a bigger piece of the ad revenue pie. Peertube isnt going to help with that.
I think you are missing the point: there is pretty much no money to be made with peertube. It's just people using their own bandwidth and time to host and make videos they want to see.
>NotJustBikes has been very clear that it would simply not be an option for them. Nebula (creator coop) seems to be the best compromise for them for now.
Because there is no monetization angle to peertube aside from donations. But whatever, youtube was great before monetization so I figure there is no need for these kinds of filmmakers in the long run.
And I understand full well why it's not an option for NJB. For starters because they were very clear about it when they wrote about it on mastodon. :D
My biggest gripe with videos shared on Mastodon is that with so many nodes hosted on personal infrastructure on the wrong side of the consumer / producer gap in the way the modern web is laid out (i.e. hosted over a consumer cable connection with asymmetric upload / download bandwidth), trying to play a video often feels like I've been zapped back into the late-'90s and am waiting for an animated GIF to download off of USENET. I'm wondering if people generally find videos on PeerTube come through faster.
Of course, you can just go without p2p and just do client-server. That's a bit slower though, but you could do that over tor or something.
In the long run, maybe you could figure out webtorrent over i2p, I've heard p2p has had some success over i2p with applications like i2psnark but IDK as i've never used it and IDK how it would interact with WebRTC data streams (might need some sort of proxy?)
- https://watch.ocaml.org (for all the OCaml language talks over the past 20 years)
- https://watch.eeg.cl.cam.ac.uk (for our research group on environmental science)
- https://crank.recoil.org (for my personal talks and videos)
The fediverse integration is a minor plus, but the permanent nature of the video hosting. My only wish is that there was a way to bidirectionally mirror view counts, so that the Peertube mirrors don't look like a ghost town.