Peertube is one of the oldest federated software projects. It's a lot less sustainable than ActivityPub platforms because storing HD video is much much more expensive than what Lemmy instances currently do. Lemmy as a platform with a few federated home servers could feasibly replace Reddit, Mastodon could feasibly replace Twitter, but if PeerTube ever got mainstream enough to handle even 0.01% of YouTube's traffic/hosting footprint it'd be impossible to deal with the associated costs.
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Not as much as you might think. Depending upon the type of video The actual encoded files can be rather small comparatively. The big thing in heavy lifting the platforms like YouTube etc do is the multi-rencoding for different resolutions. And then hopping between them on the fly to try to keep the stream as real time as possible.
If peer tube has lag and doesn't support high definition / multiple resolutions per video, it'll never get enough popularity that storage / bandwidth become issues.
Using WebRTC it won't lag. At least not for popular streams. For obscure content that no one watches. It might. But that isn't some deal breaker. It supports high resolution just fine. But honestly we don't need a ton of different resolutions for every video. It's a luxury and a convenience. Realistically with modern codex today the difference in bandwidth while not insignificant. Again is not a deal breaker. The distribution isn't all through a single entity. It is highly distributed.
Personally I had not messed with any peer tube instances for a year and a half or so. So the other night I installed it on an Android device and the experience has come leaps and bounds. If the content were there. And loading up as all the content that I did watch did. I could absolutely see myself using it. The issue will be content. And perhaps monetizing it. Though there is a lot of content that for one reason or another can't be monetized. Which would be perfectly happy on a service like this.
The issue is the content, of course, but also the problems will come with the content. Peertube works great for what it currently does, but when it comes time to scale up, it gets a lot harder to distribute videos among so many hosts. Right now it flies under most radars, what happens if it becomes even 1/10000 as popular as youtube is and people start uploading full TV show episodes? Porn? Monetization is an issue too, because we unfortunately live in capitalism and making actually good video content takes time and effort that people can't do in their free time - if Peertubers got 1/10000th the views that a YouTuber gets and they're not getting kickbacks "from PeerTube" because the whole point is not doing that, and the kind of sponsors you skip with Sponsorblock would obviously rather pay to have their ad shown to 10,000 times the audience by sponsoring a youtuber instead.
About the monetization, I think that a paywall can work
Honestly. Not as much as you might think. A lot of YouTubers are trying to get away from the algorithm and the rat race that is YouTube monetization. That is the more established ones for sure. The smaller ones still definitely rely on it at this point. But it isn't sustainable either. And a lot of people are looking for a way out. Many of them now rely more on patreon than anything. And with services like Patreon as long as they can get the content out to satisfy people they will still get paid no matter how they get it out there. Though there are still gaps that could be monetized perhaps.
As far as copyright content, has that ever stopped them from uploading it to YouTube? It's going to happen. There are still Napster like services out there for music piracy as well. If you know where to look. I would think instances that do that sort of thing will probably be pretty isolated. But they will exist. Likely in nations with lax copyright laws and enforcement. But the copyright wars as they currently exist are not sustainable long-term. They need to find ways to get the content to the people that want to see it for a reasonable compensation. Yes there will be people who will always want something for free. But they would also be plenty of people willing to watch commercials etc like the old days to see the content as well. Peer tube honestly could be a next step towards arriving to something like that. But only time will tell.
It's not only a storage problem, but bandwidth cost too.
It uses WebRTC. It's not going to be that big of a bandwidth issue.
It's still bandwidth. If every single video viewed uses (for example) 2Mbps, 10.000 video viewed simultaneously would need 20Gbps.
From who? It's federated and distributed. Everyone watching it also re-streams it. You don't need a massive data center in the cloud. The more people who are watching it. The more bandwidth there is for more people to watch it.
Everyone watching is also restraining? Is that really how Peertube works? I didn't know! Does it works using chunks form different people or video is fully uploaded by a single user?
Yes WebRTC is highly similar to BitTorrent. You have your initial uploader who seeds. Every person that then downloads a chunk to watch it is also then capable of sending that chunk back out. Thereby the more people that watch the more people that can watch. Even back in 2012 with the Kodi piracy plugins. You could click on watching a show. And within a minute or two you would be watching the show in decent quality. Though at the time they were actually using straight up bit torrent just tuned to send the first chunks first so you could watch it as it streamed. So as far as bandwidth on storage requirements are concerned is pretty minimal. Unless of course you're trying to run a large public instance. Then you are still on the hook for some basic storage.
Are you sure that's the WebRTC protocol? I'm no expert, bit it doesn't seem to me that WebRTC does that. I think that the "shared" view can work with live streaming, but with stored video, it's fairly uncommon that multiple people will watch the same video in the same moment, don't you think?
Yeah open-source alternative youtube would look bleak without some sort of reliable (and heavy) funding. I suppose if they could get the eu to fund them, then maybe but yeah it looks a bit bleak if i am being honest
If funding enters the picture, capitalism means that it'll eventually shift towards profit (or in some cases "not operating at a severe loss"). Something based on BitTorrent might be one of the only capitalism-proof solutions for handling video, but that of course has its own problems (most people that create video content like to be able to delete it, for example)
That's what peer tube basically operates on. Not exactly. But it's a very similar concept.
Peertube is nice, it works well
You're looking for Peertube
PeerTube might be the answer but don’t expect as many content.
I actually forgot peertube was federated, i wonder if peertube could even sustain a youtube exodus
A single PeerTube instance couldn't, but that's why it's federated.
It isn't federated but LBRY is a project that is kind of similar to federation (but not really). The code is open source, videos are shared p2p (mostly? I think there are still servers involved, honestly not 100% up to speed with the technology) and you can have different apps which can offer different curated experiences (which is kind of more like federation in that sense I guess) with Odysee being the main one. You can see some of the stuff built on top of it here.
The content on the competitors has been lacking/conspiratorial/right-leaning also fyi just in case those aren't your cup of tea
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