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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
>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 is something I always thought to be extremely funny. Producing videos is a hobby. If you made it your job, go figure out how to monetize your material yourself. Nobody prevents you from taking sponsorships.
It would still be a great alternative for the original YouTube. The one with video replies and all that, that was basically just people video blogging at each other or into the ether.
> And yes, there are people who make content for free - most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video.
Where is the "fail" though? Some of those videos take exactly as long to make is it does to watch them. If they don't get monetized (maybe for speaking normal English instead of saying "unalive" and "to grape"), then someone else doesn't make a lot of money from even the little effort it took them by showing ads [0] to people. If all you want to do is talk at a camera and maybe with some people, then all that is a plus.
[0] Speaking of ads, some of the stuff on youtube is wild. Like, honestly gross and disturbing to me.
If you are looking to make money of it, sure, starting with peertube only would be nonsense. If you just wanna make videos, do it! Upload the best ones to youtube and mention peertube, so you maybe get some audience. Then if you really get into it, and make better stuff, spend more effort than just "start record, say things, upload as is", you can upload everything to youtube, too. After having livestreamed the whole thing on Twitch, just to use every part of the buffalo.
>As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization.
That's the main benefit. Monetised content, and the people who make it, is despicable.
>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.
Have you considered getting a real job?
>Most channels with more than a million subscribers are likely founders working 60-80 hour weeks with multiple full-time employees supporting them.
Putting them out of business would be a fantastic turn of events.
>And yes, there are people who make content for free - most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video.
Cool and good.
>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.
That would be like paying a malware company to move from windows to apple.
That's the thing; not everything has to be or should be monetized. The thing I miss the most are the funny dumb amateur videos.
There are several YouTube channels I love; Folding Ideas, hbomberguy, Kurtis Conner, Contrapoints, etc... but I see those essentially as semi professional / professional variations on television. Once I got into their content via YouTube, YouTube of course drove me away with horrid vile ads, and I moved on to supporting those creators on Patreon.
And that's all good - the digital medium needs places like YouTube. But that doesn't mean there isn't a huge amount of value in the amateur unmonitized video landscape. Pairing those with some niche phpbb style forums was, for me, the last time I truly enjoyed the experience of actually being on the internet.
>You cannot do that in the hopes of viewers donating $5 here and there.
But you can do that in hopes of youtube sharing a percentage of fluctuating ad revenue? Certain things can get you de-monetized, you can get strike-bombed, falsely accused of copyright infringement via automated systems, etc, and unless you are a very big channel owner, you will receive a minimal droplet of support likely involving no humans in the loop.
There are sustainable creators getting much more revenue by collecting direct subscription money from their patrons while providing exclusive or first-hand content to them which is then re-uploaded to youtube for reaching a wider audience. They can run their own integrated ad-campaings without google deciding what they are advertising or which content they can or cannot produce.
I mean, when you spin your own instance, because frankly, that's what the best option if you're a content creator, you can put whatever ads and monetization strategies you want. So basically the full income that gets generated gets to you, instead of splitting it with some third party that invests minimal effort. Yes, you'll have to pay someone to maintain and upkeep the server, but assumedly the people that can make the change will take that cost into account.
> a big corporation that can pay big creators million-dollar deals to make the switch.
I'm surprised by this. Isn't controlling your full production/distribution/revenue a good enough payback?
Thr one solution I see to that is sponsorships, the number I've heard is they typically pay 10x the ad revenue of a video, and this wouldn't be affected by the platform, just the viewership numbers.
As a professional watcher, I consider the lack of monetization a feature. I'd much rather see genuine videos from amateurs than commercialized crap with sponsored segments and undisclosed sponsorships and product placement and filler to keep up release schedules and please like and subscribe and whatever other dark patterns commercially motivated video producers come up with on "free" platforms. And of course also without the ads the video platform adds on top of all that. Not everything needs to be a viable job.
> This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram
Low key shitting on other content creators? Some of IG content creator easily match professionalism you are describing. I know you are probably partially venting your frustration, but that doesn't paint you in a nice light.
By charging it for content. Since HN doesn't like any form of Ads. /s
Sorry I have to write this out. But I am somewhat glad in the past 2 years HN has returned back to discussing monetization, money, business in a sane way.
Seems advertising could be a third-party service on top of the video streaming service. Just like there are ad platforms that plugin to web pages. If that grows, you get your monetization.
But isn't know most of the money they make from direct sponsors instead of adsense? I have seen a few creators putting their income sources and most of the money comes from direct sponsors instead of adsense.
So if these sponsors would continue to sponsor them in other platforms, it can take YouTube monopoly away. The problem now is that those others video platform don't have the eyeballs as YouTube
Personally, I find the lack of videos to watch on PeerTube a huge plus. I tremendously reduced my weekly video watching time and I don't feel like missing out on something important. My favorite instance is makertube.net, but I visit few others too.
Would be pretty incredible to see decentralized federated media individual accounts and aggregators implement the x402 payment protocol (https://x402.org) as a way for creators to get paid, and thus continue to create.
Im envisioning a spotify replacement. You could pay for your streams directly to artists or platform the artist hosts on. Allowing for a more free market of creators and consumers.
The 'Explore' part, would basically just be like Mastadon or Bluesky
I'm giving this an honest try to post some music I made, cause Google randomly banned me yesterday for "bot activity" and wants an appeal. I'm not mad or anything, just thinking they won't let me use YouTube anymore.
I used it a few months ago but there was lag and things not working.
I keep on saying we need to eliminate Google for real. I mean it too.
But the services NEED TO BE FLAWLESS if you want to have a chance against
Google. I don't understand why people don't seem to understand it. Software
can often be better. PeerTube's software was disappointing and really poorly
implemented compared to Google. There is no way to win here that way against
Google. That's not realistic.
It's not possible for FOSS to compete with Google in Google's niche — try it and you'll see why. It's possible to find a different niche and expand there.
PeerTube only performs the fourth, and maybe the third. It's not a flooding distribution system like BitTorrent. It's just a way for a large number of people to play the same video without overloading a modest hosting server. Playout load is distributed amongst the watchers browsers.
I put videos in PeerTube, tech demos of various rendering tests. Works fine.
No ad insertion, which is why I use PeerTube.
Peak view count is 2.3K.[1] Nobody is expected to discover them there. They're linked from various forums. Some are for a very tiny audience, such as "Second Life sim server EstablishAgentCommunication message bug", with 10 views, mostly from the devs who needed to see this.
Technically it works fine, but it's not going to displace YouTube. Unless, say, Taylor Swift decided to stream her wedding on it to avoid ad insertion.
55 comments
[ 91.6 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadIt'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.
Edit: in the past
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/
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.
same situation that bitorrent found itself in
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.
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.
This is something I always thought to be extremely funny. Producing videos is a hobby. If you made it your job, go figure out how to monetize your material yourself. Nobody prevents you from taking sponsorships.
> And yes, there are people who make content for free - most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video.
Where is the "fail" though? Some of those videos take exactly as long to make is it does to watch them. If they don't get monetized (maybe for speaking normal English instead of saying "unalive" and "to grape"), then someone else doesn't make a lot of money from even the little effort it took them by showing ads [0] to people. If all you want to do is talk at a camera and maybe with some people, then all that is a plus.
[0] Speaking of ads, some of the stuff on youtube is wild. Like, honestly gross and disturbing to me.
If you are looking to make money of it, sure, starting with peertube only would be nonsense. If you just wanna make videos, do it! Upload the best ones to youtube and mention peertube, so you maybe get some audience. Then if you really get into it, and make better stuff, spend more effort than just "start record, say things, upload as is", you can upload everything to youtube, too. After having livestreamed the whole thing on Twitch, just to use every part of the buffalo.
That's the main benefit. Monetised content, and the people who make it, is despicable.
>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.
Have you considered getting a real job?
>Most channels with more than a million subscribers are likely founders working 60-80 hour weeks with multiple full-time employees supporting them.
Putting them out of business would be a fantastic turn of events.
>And yes, there are people who make content for free - most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video.
Cool and good.
>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.
That would be like paying a malware company to move from windows to apple.
There are several YouTube channels I love; Folding Ideas, hbomberguy, Kurtis Conner, Contrapoints, etc... but I see those essentially as semi professional / professional variations on television. Once I got into their content via YouTube, YouTube of course drove me away with horrid vile ads, and I moved on to supporting those creators on Patreon.
And that's all good - the digital medium needs places like YouTube. But that doesn't mean there isn't a huge amount of value in the amateur unmonitized video landscape. Pairing those with some niche phpbb style forums was, for me, the last time I truly enjoyed the experience of actually being on the internet.
But you can do that in hopes of youtube sharing a percentage of fluctuating ad revenue? Certain things can get you de-monetized, you can get strike-bombed, falsely accused of copyright infringement via automated systems, etc, and unless you are a very big channel owner, you will receive a minimal droplet of support likely involving no humans in the loop.
There are sustainable creators getting much more revenue by collecting direct subscription money from their patrons while providing exclusive or first-hand content to them which is then re-uploaded to youtube for reaching a wider audience. They can run their own integrated ad-campaings without google deciding what they are advertising or which content they can or cannot produce.
I mean, when you spin your own instance, because frankly, that's what the best option if you're a content creator, you can put whatever ads and monetization strategies you want. So basically the full income that gets generated gets to you, instead of splitting it with some third party that invests minimal effort. Yes, you'll have to pay someone to maintain and upkeep the server, but assumedly the people that can make the change will take that cost into account.
> a big corporation that can pay big creators million-dollar deals to make the switch.
I'm surprised by this. Isn't controlling your full production/distribution/revenue a good enough payback?
Low key shitting on other content creators? Some of IG content creator easily match professionalism you are describing. I know you are probably partially venting your frustration, but that doesn't paint you in a nice light.
By charging it for content. Since HN doesn't like any form of Ads. /s
Sorry I have to write this out. But I am somewhat glad in the past 2 years HN has returned back to discussing monetization, money, business in a sane way.
Im envisioning a spotify replacement. You could pay for your streams directly to artists or platform the artist hosts on. Allowing for a more free market of creators and consumers.
The 'Explore' part, would basically just be like Mastadon or Bluesky
I keep on saying we need to eliminate Google for real. I mean it too. But the services NEED TO BE FLAWLESS if you want to have a chance against Google. I don't understand why people don't seem to understand it. Software can often be better. PeerTube's software was disappointing and really poorly implemented compared to Google. There is no way to win here that way against Google. That's not realistic.
- Discovery (as in search)
- Monetization (as in ads)
- Hosting (as in storage)
- Playout (as in data distribution)
PeerTube only performs the fourth, and maybe the third. It's not a flooding distribution system like BitTorrent. It's just a way for a large number of people to play the same video without overloading a modest hosting server. Playout load is distributed amongst the watchers browsers.
I put videos in PeerTube, tech demos of various rendering tests. Works fine. No ad insertion, which is why I use PeerTube.
Peak view count is 2.3K.[1] Nobody is expected to discover them there. They're linked from various forums. Some are for a very tiny audience, such as "Second Life sim server EstablishAgentCommunication message bug", with 10 views, mostly from the devs who needed to see this.
Technically it works fine, but it's not going to displace YouTube. Unless, say, Taylor Swift decided to stream her wedding on it to avoid ad insertion.
[1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/7usCE3v2RrWK6nuoSr4NHJ