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.
Discoverability sucks balls. I still can't find an instance that's not just a list of one person's videos.
The only one I can find is TILVids, which has a few of the bigger Linux content creators but not much more than that. Content worth watching is really the one thing PeerTube is lacking, and that has to come from users, but that's really a catch-22. You need more quality content to bring in more users, but you need more users to provide that quality content.
On top of that, not many unique users are going to be drawn to a platform that can't provide avenues for monetization and which costs money to run on top of that, even with all the policies at YouTube all these creators whine about in every other video, which they only mostly whine about because it affects their monetization. So it's either live with YouTube's policies reducing your potential income or live with a negative income to set up or join a PeerTube instance: slightly reduced profit vs guaranteed loss. They'll pick the slightly reduced profit every time.
Even further, the ones who get kicked off of YouTube and need to find an alternative or care enough about "free speech" to branch out are... mostly niche creators, to put it politely, and the unique content they provide to these alternative platforms tends to discourage other creators who still have YouTube channels from syncing their channels from YouTube to PeerTube in order to not be associated with those more niche creators. Other platforms such as Rumble and Odysee have similar issues. That said, PeerTube does have an advantage over Rumble/Odysee in this regard, in that instances that want to avoid that type of content can moderate and set up their federation to limit that association, but at that point they may just find it too much effort to put into bringing in too small an audience to be worth it.
The Fediverse appears to work well enough for user generated content that doesn't take much effort or expense to provide, such as Twitter, Facebook or Reddit-type content, as the rise of Mastodon and Lemmy are showing, but when users have to put in the work and expense of publishing a video, the return on investment of PeerTube (in both money and views) compared to just staying on YouTube may just be too small to work.
But theoretically, if someone set up an instance to host their videos, they could serve banner ads right? Wouldn't that at least partly diminish the monetization problem?
Have you seen Sepia Search? https://search.joinpeertube.org/
It really needs proper federated search. I shouldn't have to go to a secondary site just to search for videos across the network.
Federated search is difficult. For now this is a temporary solution.
That's really good, thanks for sharing.