this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Technology

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[–] [email protected] 76 points 2 years ago (7 children)

oh look, another web service who wants to strangle its users for money and ad views :D when's a peertube instance going to get some big creators on it supported by viewers? that'll do it, i bet

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Seems unlikely that a creator would jump ship from a platform that pays them to a platform that doesn’t. That being said, lots of creators also constantly complain about demonetization, so maybe they’ll start to get fed up and move to purely in-video sponsorship things. Seems most likely from a creator that’s already on a platform like nebula

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Most big youtubers have in-video ads now anyways. I'm not sure what the ratio of their revenue comes from youtube ads vs in-video ads, but youtube seems pretty trigger happy about demonetizing videos. Sometimes entire channels. If someone gets the majority of their revenue from other sources than youtube ads, I could see them migrating to something like peertube.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Even with in-video ads, those must be paid based on historical (or actual?) view counts right? No matter how big you are, there's no way you're going to maintain view counts when switching away from YouTube.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

That is quite true.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

you're definitely right on most points. but, to your point, if a creator was on a federated instance of peertube then they don't have to worry about the wishy-washy, everchanging rules of youtube :3

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I could see someone making some fork of peertube that helps creators get paid. May not be free but could get creators willing to join

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Unfortunately most people post to YouTube. They might not know about Peertube. So Peertube just doesn't have the content.

[–] talentedkiwi 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Here's to hoping as lemmy, mastodon, etc. get name recognition peertube gets their time of day too.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (2 children)

How does peertube work exactly? Because if it hosts the video on just the one "instance" or server or whatever a viral video will almost certainly have it's legs cut from under it very quickly. Don't get me wrong I want YouTube to have viable competition but videos are huge.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You basically get how it works. The tech isn’t there yet to replace YouTube.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I figured, video is a whole different beast than text.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

From the documentation:

A PeerTube instance can mirror other PeerTube videos to improve bandwidth use.

The instance administrator can choose between multiple redundancy strategies (cache trending videos or recently uploaded videos etc.), set their maximum size and the minimum duplication lifetime. Then, they choose the instances they want to cache in Manage follows -> Following admin table.

Videos are kept in the cache for at least min_lifetime, and then evicted when the cache is full.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Hopefully once the issue of the ridiculous amount of resources needed for such a service is resolved. This is why we don't have any viable youtube alternative yet, especially one that isn't a corporate pile of junk. Once you get to a certain size if you don't rake in the cash you shut down. So hopefully peer to peer saves the day.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

yup, even youtube isn't profitable. Video remains one of the largest sinks of resources. A 4K movie is stored on a disc of about 66GB, so about 30GB per hour of 4k video. Even with peertube it'd take the best hobbyists to run even a modest server for a few streamers. We're talking people with PB level of storage capacities now with fiber lines to their house to truly host peertube alternatives, and if we're talking cloud we're talking thousands per month.

It's not impossible, I don't want to get people down, but that's the major hurdle

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Every video maker should host his own peertube instance with only 1 user.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

yeah but then we get a youtube esque site of nerds who love hoarding hard drives and setting up selfhosted services. Which is great, I did that, but the vast majority of youtubers don't have the knowledge/don't want to set that up

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Which makes me wonder - was the push for 60fps across the platform a move to make competition harder?

I'm not aware of anyone that was using it as a leg up on them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

hopefully 💙 video codecs have gotten pretty good, and maybe they'll get even better to where, like you're saying, we don't have to shovel so many resources into hosting something like a peertube. crossing fingers 🤞

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I subscribe to nebula for this reason, directly support creators and it's very reasonably priced.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

never heard of nebula, thank you for bringing it up :D

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Did they ever get around to implementing playlists and autoplay of some sort? I really wanted to get into that service, but the absence of those two things just killed it for me

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Not to my knowledge, no.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I've found Nebula to be great for a few creators I follow, but the amount of content isn't high enough to wean me off of YouTube completely.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

How is peertube in terms of hosting costs? I would assume much higher than lemmy or mastodon considering it's all video content.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

hosting cost for peertube would probably be astronomical since you're likely hosting the videos yourself :/ unless there is some sort of federation that kind of works like bittorrent. that would be awesome

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Peertube is federated. It seems to work similarly to Lemmy. I went on a random instance and clicked "discover" and noticed that I see videos from other instances. So at least the hosting cost is distributed across instances.

The other issue then is the bandwidth. Peertube uses p2p among viewers, so if there are many viewers at the same time they can take a significant load off from the server. Instances can also cache each other's videos to split the bandwidth cost between them.

I think these design decisions means that it is possibly viable, though it is definitely way more expensive than non-video federated communities.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

I've had good experiences with Odysee. Not as much content yet, and it's missing DIY videos, but I don't see problems yet.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Odysee lacks of moderation. It's full of conspiration bullshit, racist videos and horrible stuff.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

this is very interesting, ty 💙

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Peertube will unfortunately never be an answer because of the lack of way for creators to get paid for watchtime

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I disagree with this, I fully believe a donation-funded content economy can work.