publication croisée depuis : https://lemmy.world/post/17613422
PeerTube is a decentralized and federated alternative to YouTube. The goal of PeerTube is not to replace YouTube but to offer a viable alternative using the strength of ActivityPub and P2P protocols.
Being built on ActivityPub means PeerTube is able to be part of a bigger social network, the Fediverse (the Federated Universe). On the other hand, P2P technologies help PeerTube to solve the issue of money, inbound with all streaming platform : With PeerTube, you don’t need to have a lot of bandwidth available on your server to host a PeerTube platform because all users (which didn’t disable the feature) watching a video on PeerTube will be able to share this same video to other viewers.
If you are curious about PeerTube, I can’t recommend you enough to check the official website to learn more about the project. If after that you want to try to use PeerTube as a content creator, you can try to find a platform available there to register or host yourself your own PeerTube platform on your own server.
The development of PeerTube is actually sponsored by Framasoft, a french non-for-profit popular educational organization, a group of friends convinced that an emancipating digital world is possible, convinced that it will arise through actual actions on real world and online with and for you!
Framasoft is also involved in the development of Mobilizon, a decentralized and federated alternative to Facebook Events and Meetup.
If you want to contribute to PeerTube, feel free to:
- report bugs and give your feedback on Github or on our forums
- submit your brillant ideas on our Feedback platform
- Help to translate the software, following the contributing guide
- Make a donation to help to pay bills inbound in the development of PeerTube.
I feel so bad whenever I see news about PeerTube, because it legitimately seems like a great platform on a technological level, and so far I’ve been loving Lemmy and Mastodon, but it feels like the network effect just isn’t there for PeerTube yet. Most of the content feels very hyper-specific (e.g. FOSS/privacy stuff), it feels like the frequency of videos is super sparse, and on top of that, unlike Lemmy and Mastodon, there’s just not enough federated content (let alone local) except maybe on PeerTube.TV. I pay for and watch videos on Nebula, so it’s not like I’m unfamiliar with sparse uploads, but what I do get is pretty consistently something I want to watch, and it’s all in exactly one place.
Additionally, whereas Lemmy and Mastodon make it pretty easy to find an instance to sign up with (there are a few major ones or you can go with some more minor ones and still federate just fine, and there’s not too much of a difference), the process for finding and signing up for a PeerTube instance is one of the most “what the fuck even is this” experiences I’ve ever had with a platform like this. The obvious first choice is PeerTube.TV, but you can’t register with them, so now you have to go mucking around in the hundreds of other instances (you seemingly can’t sort them in the finder) and pray that the instance is decent and has content you want. And in order to know what’s going on for each of those instances, you need to go to the
Abouttab in the hamburger menu, read through a million lines to make sure that “speaking negatively about Stalinism will result in a ban” isn’t in the code of conduct (this was a real thing I found before), read through the list of subscriptions in a separate tab (basically none of which you can actually recognize) and/or check the video feeds, and then settle on one that seems basically acceptable.It’s something I can justify doing as an enthusiast, but I know only a select few people in my life who would even be able to figure out how to do this at all, I know even fewer who would be willing to do it if I helped them out and pleaded with/bribed them to try it, and I’m not sure I know even a single one who would do so on their own unprompted.
