
PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding - Roccan
https://quariety.com/2018/07/20/peertube-the-decentralized-youtube-succeeds-in-crowdfunding/
======
themagician
What the people who want decentralized services don't realize is that the
content creators want centralized services (whether they realize it or not).

In the old days we needed YouTube because you needed a Flash encoder if you
wanted to make video accessible on the web to everyone. Now anyone can host
video on anything. You can throw even throw some comments on the bottom if you
want.

But what those who create want is an audience. They want a community. There is
a cycle of drama on YouTube that everyone feeds off of. Hell, some of the most
popular videos people make are videos of people complaining about YouTube.
Make a normal video, get a few thousand views. Make a rage video about how
your normal video got demonized, get a million views.

How many attempts at decentralized social networks have failed? All of them.

~~~
willio58
Podcasts are, for the most part, decentralized and seem to be still booming in
popularity. I don’t see why a decentralized video platform couldn’t work too.

~~~
Endy
Really? I don't agree here.

I've never seen any that weren't being pushed to one of the major podcast apps
- and thusly centralized. I mean, the whole term comes from the fact that it
was originally downloadable to your iPod through iTunes. None of the podcasts
I've ever found could really be considered decentralized - they might have a
webpage somewhere, sure, but if they're not in Apple's iTunes/Podcast app, I'm
not going to find them. Honestly, I haven't found a decent alternative on
Android - I know there are several but none have as robust a catalog. I even
use iTunes on Windows for podcast searching.

It's a very centralized market around specific aggregators. Could it weather a
transition to a decentralized market structure if Apple were to disown it
tomorrow? Maybe, but it would take a lot of energy to get there.

~~~
hansjorg
Believe it or not, but people without iTunes are also listening to podcasts.

I've yet to come across a podcast I wanted to listen to without an RSS feed
available through a website. For discovery there are several good alternatives
to iTunes, for example [https://player.fm](https://player.fm)

~~~
toasterlovin
> I've yet to come across a podcast I wanted to listen to without an RSS feed
> available through a website.

That's because podcasts on iTunes just point to an RSS feed hosted elsewhere.
iTunes doesn't host the audio files; it's just a directory.

~~~
hansjorg
Yes, but the feed is always (in my experience) available as a link from a web
page (hence decentralized and not dependent on iTunes).

~~~
toasterlovin
Most people don’t know how to go to a podcast’s website, copy the link to the
RSS feed, and then paste it into their podcast app. They just search for the
podcast in their podcast app. So, if you produce a podcast, you need to be in
the major podcast directories to get traction. Thus, in effect, podcasts are
highly centralized.

~~~
danShumway
This feels like moving the goalpost to me. If PeerTube succeeded, but most of
its videos were being linked and shared on Facebook and Reddit, would you call
it centralized?

It's fairly common for me to see people share direct links to a podcast's
website if they want to share a specific episode. And even from the point of
view where iTunes is a centralized indexer, they're still very clearly
pointing at a decentralized service.

The biggest podcast aggregation service in the industry decided to rely on a
decentralized model rather than hosting files themselves. That doesn't count
for anything?

The fact that every single podcast app is using a distributed protocol (RSS),
including Apple, doesn't count for anything?

~~~
toasterlovin
Note that my original point was not that podcasts are centralized. I merely
took issue with somebody else claiming that podcasts are decentralized.
They’re decentralized for distribution. But distribution is the easy part on
the internet. It’s aggregating attention that is the hard part. And that part
of the podcast market is entirely centralized.

~~~
danShumway
> But distribution is the easy part on the internet. It’s aggregating
> attention that is the hard part.

ATM for video the content hosting, distribution, discovery, indexing,
consumption, and commenting are all centralized. Let's say PeerTube brings the
video world inline with podcasts and knocks that list down to just discovery
and content indexing. That would be a really big win. That would be _way more_
decentralized than what we have now.

If you're right, and solving all of those problems are the easy part, then
PeerTube will probably be an incredible improvement to the video ecosystem.

Podcsts may not be _perfectly_ decentralized, but they're pretty stinking
close. Services like iTunes are basically card catalogues at this point. The
podcast app I use doesn't even include iTunes ratings, reviews, or
suggestions, so they've obviously made the decision that these aren't features
their users care about.

My experience with podcasts is I get recommendations in a decentralized manner
from friends, family, social media, and online articles. Then I go to one of
several centralized card catalogues and search for the podcast by the name.
Then I add the decentralized source to any podcast app (all of which work with
every podcast regardless of who developed them) and use RSS to download a file
to my physical device, which makes it easy for me to back up or mirror the
file to other devices if the source ever goes down in the future.

If 99% of my experience is decentralized, does the centralized 1% that
basically boils down to a list of urls and a regex expression override that?
Especially keeping in mind that nearly every podcast app still provides a
mechanism for you to bypass that list whenever you want, and any good podcast
app allows you to search for a podcast across multiple preloaded sources at
the same time?

~~~
toasterlovin
Maybe this is a better approach: what happens to the podcast market if Apple
stops shipping a podcast app?

The priors that come to mind when trying to answer this hypothetical is what
happened to independent blogs when Google shuttered Google Reader and what
happened to news companies when Facebook tweaked their algorithm to show less
3rd party content. In both cases, distribution was decentralized (blogs host
their own RSS feeds and news sites host their own content), but attention was
centralized (people accessed blogs through Google Reader and news through
Facebook). In both cases, the decentralized distribution failed prevent a
massive decrease in traffic to blogs and news sites. And that’s because
competition for attention is fierce, so aggregating attention is hard.

~~~
danShumway
I guess?

Neither of those things are dead though (news is struggling with the
adblocking apocalypse, but that's a different category of problem). I kind of
get what you're saying, and I agree that Facebook and Google are powerful, and
that we should look for ways to distribute that power more evenly.

But at the same time, to me those scenarios kind of look like distributed
architectures doing the jobs they're supposed to. I mean, Google Reader's
shutdown hurt bloggers less than Live Journal's did, right?

Another way of looking at it: think about what happened when Microsoft bought
Github. A bunch of people panicked, but for the most part, it was fine -
because Git repos are decentralized. And a bunch of people came out with hot
takes that said, "Git's not really decentralized, because Github is the part
that matters."

But... no, for the most part it's decentralized, and we saw the benefits of
that architecture.

If you have a decentralized core you might interface with or feed off of a few
centralized services, but you will be more resilient and better equipped to
deal with their failures. You don't have to be perfect to reap most of those
benefits.

If iTunes stopped distributing podcasts, that market would suffer. But I'd
still be able to directly share episodes on Twitter and Reddit, and there are
at least 2 other preloaded sources on my listening app that could be serving
the same purpose within a day with zero change to the way I find new podcasts
or download them. The big change for people like me would be that when
searching, I would click the second button on a list of sources instead of the
first one. It would definitely hurt the health of the network (mostly just for
iPhone users), and you can make an argument that it would disproportionately
hurt the health of the network, but it probably wouldn't _kill it._

But suppose Apple or Google stopped distributing an app store. That market
would instantly die, for basically everyone, and no one would be able to do
anything to save it.

------
amitkgupta84
As a content creator, once you've recorded and edited your content, you have
to solve for a few kinds of things:

1) hosting, content delivery, authentication and access control, styling and
UI, etc. 2) discoverability, which requires things like a search engine,
recommendation engine, a community/social network, links, etc. 3) some degree
of independence, and the freedom to decide what content to show, what content
to monetize, etc. free from whatever agenda/motives a company like
YouTube/Alphabet might have.

One way to look at it is that PeerTube starts to make (1) a lot more
accessible without something like YouTube. (2) is where YouTube shines, but is
possible via existing structures in the Internet if you're just using PeerTube
(plus PeerTube has some sort of federation, though I haven't looked into it
much). (3) is where PeerTube shines.

There doesn't have to be one answer for the entire market. YouTube is probably
better for smaller creators looking to build their audience and be discovered,
but once you reach a sufficient size, and don't need to rely on the YouTube
recommendation engine for people to find you, something that offers greater
independence and self-determination would seem desirable. Of course, I'm only
talking about tendencies, a very small content creator may have a strong
desire for independence, and a a very large content creator may be perfectly
fine coloring inside whatever lines YouTube draws.

~~~
notatoad
2 and 3 are inherently linked. If you want somebody else to recommend your
videos, you're automatically under their control. Expecting a third party to
promote your content without caring what content you produce is not realistic.

You could definitely build a recommendation system on top of PeerTube, but
content creators will be just as beholden to the peertube discovery algorithm,
and the assumptions and preferences it is built on, as YouTube's content
creators are to the preferences and assumptions of the YouTube algorithm.

~~~
lapinot
Even if your reasoning is strictly speaking right, the issue is very different
in peertube and in youtube (or at least could be, i don't think they have a
good recommendation system yet): peertube is a federation and not a monopole.
Distributed systems allow to have a clean separation between the an
exploration algorithm, its actual policy and the instance hosts. The policy
can be very much user-specific, easily with a federated-instance granularity
and could be run on an instance which has no link with the content it's
searching.

------
ryrobes
People want viable services not "tech".

Red flag: both their concept as well as name have YT's brand name in it. The
equivalent of calling your company "Uber for X". I'm all for decentralization
where it makes sense - but this seems like they might be shooting themselves
in the foot everywhere EXCEPT the tech (which, ultimately won't matter if they
fail).

From the article: "Online since March 2018 in a beta version, the project
should definitely take off by October, based on the money raised."

Beta + $60k + 6 more months time = Success? Against a practical content
monopoly.

As a guy currently doing the start-up dance - this kind of optimistic naivety
almost offends me.

~~~
noitsnot
$60k is mind-blowingly low. I wouldn't expect much, if anything from this
site.

~~~
KaoruAoiShiho
It got to the top of HN. That speaks to a tremendous demand. Most startups
fail not because of money raised but because they don't have product market
fit. People want this product to exist, but... the question is, will they
actually use it. lol.

~~~
parent5446
The audience of HackerNews is vastly smaller than the audience of YouTube.

~~~
r00fus
PeerTube is not trying to replace YouTube. So the target markets don't have to
overlap or even look similar.

If PeerTube is successful YouTube will most likely still exist and be
dominant.

------
Endy
I like the idea of PeerTube, but there are many hurdles.

Anyone whose ISP/firewall/etc blocks all Torrent traffic is going to have a
major challenge - which means that while part of what PeerTube has been so far
is educational videos, they're not accessible in most school environments.
That's a big challenge to overcome.

The other is pretty simple, and a reason I have not used PeerTube to watch a
single video. If you're using my machine and my bandwidth to host or transfer
your video to another person, you're going to pay me for it - upfront and at a
rate I agree to. You're slowing down my connection and your website is causing
me send data to someone I do not know. You're going to be liable for anything
malicious that gets sent back; and if you're MitM'ing it to scan it properly,
why are you wasting my bandwidth and storage?

~~~
onli
> _If you 're using my machine and my bandwidth to host or transfer your video
> to another person, you're going to pay me for it_

That's a bit ridiculous. No one is ever gonna pay you for that. You get
something for free, the video you want to watch, and the deal here is that
your unused upload bandwidth gets used to help transfer it to others. It's a
social contract thing, and thinking you might get a better deal magically by
refusing it won't make that deal appear.

> _You 're slowing down my connection_

In which way? It is using your upload while you download a video. That does
not harm you.

> _causing me send data to someone I do not know_

You never seeded a torrent? You never connected to an internet site you did
not know the owner of? It's pretty much the same thing.

> _You 're going to be liable for anything malicious that gets sent back_

Who is the you here? A Peertube instance won't be liable for malicious data,
how would that even work anyway. Even if it were possible: The websites
spreading malware with their ads were not liable either. This won't happen.

> _if you 're MitM'ing it to scan it properly, why are you wasting my
> bandwidth and storage?_

Right, that would be a bad idea.

~~~
drexlspivey
> That's a bit ridiculous. No one is ever gonna pay you for that.

There is a p2p network that does exactly that using cryptocurrency tokens.
[https://substratum.net/](https://substratum.net/)

~~~
sleepyams
Also FileCoin:

[https://filecoin.io/](https://filecoin.io/)

------
usaphp
So I have a friend who has a pretty popular YouTube channel and one of the
things he complains about is that some users are stealing and them uploading
his videos in bulk and moneytise them. The benefit of having a central
authority is that you can at least complain about your stolen copyright, with
a decentralized network it will seem like a very difficult task since there is
no regulation, unless I am missing something

~~~
dwild
> uploading his videos in bulk and moneytise them

As far as I know, there's no plan to monetize videos over PeerTube, that
pretty much remove that possibility then.

> that you can at least complain about your stolen copyright

Torrent exist, PeerTube won't create much more possibility to stole content.
Considering it's free content too, there's not much incentive to get it
anywhere else than it's original source.

~~~
natural219
Visit a Peertube site in Brave and donate via BAT. Easy.

Complete copyright control is something content creators (and humanity) will
just have to get over. Donation/patronage-based models are simply the future
of intellectual property compensation.

~~~
philipodonnell
> Complete copyright control is something content creators (and humanity) will
> just have to get over. Donation/patronage-based models are simply the future
> of intellectual property compensation.

I fear this may be true. The war was lost the moment it became effortless and
free for anyone to make a copy of content by digitizing it. We're that last
unit wandering in the wilderness still fighting because we haven't figured out
its over.

------
meesterdude
Good, we need decentralized services, especially as content creators. Youtube
will flag seeming anything as violating some copyright, no matter how fair
it's use may be. It's getting to be excessive now.

Fanmade music Video's i watched two weeks ago are taken down and gone from the
internet. There's a real cultural loss with that, the culmination of human
creativity snuffed over servitude to corporations who blanket flag content
because they can.

The web is decentralized, and I think something so critical to our records as
a species should not be under the control of any one corporate entity.

~~~
izzydata
What would process of taking down an obviously illegal video be on PeerTube?

~~~
albertgoeswoof
Contact the peertube host. If they choose to leave it up, you can contact law
enforcement / a court who can make a genuine judgement as to the legality of
the content and take up approrpriate enforcement.

~~~
dmoy
How do peertube hosts pick what to host? Do they manually curate everything?

~~~
dragontamer
Probably the same as email curation. If a spammer is caught, you ban them from
your server. If other servers notice that spam is coming from a particular
server, those servers disconnect from that server.

But Politics and Porn? These taboo subjects will be hard to deal with in a
federated environment.

~~~
albertgoeswoof
With Federated networks you can block an entire domain, so if you don’t like
seeing it you don’t have to- but if you do want to talk about taboo subjects
you can in your own space.

~~~
dragontamer
That kills the userbase however.

If your server builds a reputation as being a nanny state, your users will
often exodus and go to another site.

As such, the status-quo eventually creates the loosest set of rules. See
4chan, Reddit, and other social networks. The fewer the rules, the bigger the
userbase. Any effort to tamp down based on moral concerns leads to huge
controversies (ie: /r/Jailbait, /r/TheFappening, and other controversial
reddits)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communities)

It takes an extraordinary amount of effort to clamp down on a taboo subject.
The "free speech" advocates are incredibly strong. Even "obviously wrong"
subreddits like /r/CreepShots took an absurd amount of Drama before things got
resolved.

------
anderspitman
If PeerTube accomplishes nothing but making it easy for a person to host their
own videos in a way that can be streamed scalably, in my opinion it will be a
very valuable piece of software. I wonder how many seed boxes you'd need in
order to guarantee video availability. I'm assuming after you get enough
people watching at one time that webtorrents become self-sustaining, correct?

------
lxe
Remember Peerflix? It was a great interface to a time-tested platform enabling
modern streaming, searching, and overall great user experience.

Unfortunately decentralized tech always ends up harboring illegal or immoral
content and then becomes a pariah if a sort.

~~~
themodelplumber
> decentralized tech

It seems to me that the problem you rightly pointed out could be approached
and possibly solved by zooming in a bit and breaking the term "decentralized"
into component parts. For example, at least two parts: 1) Those components of
decentralization which do not lead to this problem and 2) those components
which may lead to this problem.

This simple typology could then, with a bit of nudging, probably yield some
new leverage points.

A question like, "what is the _most decentralized_ platform which does _not
seem to have this problem_ and what are its characteristics" could also
probably help.

We are just getting started with decentralization in many ways, so there may
also be analogs in e.g. economics or even games/sports that could be overlaid
to improve our optics.

(It'd be neat if we could be really persistent with our decentralization aims
as a community and make visible, helpful progress against previous conceptions
of the pitfalls)

------
deadalus
Bitchute, DTube, Minds and now PeerTube. Great products but how long can they
survive?

------
amitkgupta84
I started working on a Helm [1] chart for PeerTube if someone wants to try out
running PeerTube on a Kubernetes [2] cluster (I've only tried this on GKE
[3]).

[1] [https://www.helm.sh/](https://www.helm.sh/) [2]
[https://kubernetes.io/](https://kubernetes.io/) [3]
[https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-
engine/](https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/)

------
wetpaws
I am concerned that federated service is being presented as distributed. Email
is federated and it is precisely the reason why nobody is hosting their mail
server and using Gmail instead.

~~~
albertgoeswoof
Nobody except literally every sizeable corporation, the hundreds of gmail
competitors and the millions that host their own server.

~~~
wetpaws
Just for the sake of curiousity, where do you store your mail?

~~~
gulperxcx
lol, I think you got em!

------
NedIsakoff
What happened to the Decentralized Facebook that everyone was so excited about
a few years ago?

~~~
dragontamer
"What happened" to it? You're LOOKING at it, right now!

PeerTube builds on top of the Mastodon / ActivityPub network, which is
Decentralized Facebook.

In effect, this is showing the network effect of the new open-source /
federated protocol. It can be extended to host videos over Bittorrent over
WebRTC through the Web Browser (all port 80, no configuration, Javascript
clients only), while publishing over the Mastodon / ActivityPub federation.

\----------

I think there are some legitimate privacy issues with regards to Bittorrent
over WebRTC (public publishing of IP Addresses and such), but as long as its a
configurable flag that individual servers can turn off, then the federation
can grow.

~~~
synchronise
Mastodon is a decentralised Twitter, Hubzilla would be the decentralised
Facebook.

------
empath75
So how does this not end up being all porn and nazis?

~~~
deckar01
There is a "Self-managed moderation" section at the end of this article.

If you host your own instance, you can serve that kind of content. Since
instance discovery is also decentralized, you can only subject your content to
users who you convince to visit your instance in the first place.

If you are trying to expose the masses to perverse/extremist content and you
don't have your own popular instance, you are limited by the moderation of the
instance you are trying to publish to.

------
sergiotapia
I hope this explode in popularity. I remember torrent streaming was in it's
infancy at one point and nobody really used it. Now popular content is so
heavily trafficked you can easily watch in full 1080p with no loading times.

I think once peertube hits it's mass effect it'll blow up. No stopping it, by
design.

This is really awesome!

------
pschon
I wonder how this is different than usenet. I can recall our sysadmin
complaining about having to manage usenet.

~~~
dragontamer
Socially, its not too different. A good netizen will have to manage the
servers, just as usenet required good administrators to thrive in the 90s and
early 2000s.

Technologically, PeerTube / ActivityPub is built on top of modern protocols
which are more fashionable right now. WebRTC, ActivityPub, etc. etc. are all
web browser technologies that can be implemented in PHP and Javascript alone.

------
FrozenVoid
You all miss one important advantage small sites have over the media giants:
Attention economy for giant sites allocates zero to nothing share for new
content creators, smaller content creators occupy proportionally more space
because the userbase is smaller. Its much easier to get to top 1000 or top 10k
when there much less users, regardless of quality or talent. This means more
representation in search results, categories, related videos,etc.

------
hughes
How does a creator monetize a video with PeerTube?

~~~
deckar01
> a simple “support” button allows videographers to direct their viewers to
> Tipee, Patreon, Paypal and other donation tools.

------
godzillabrennus
They raised 53,100 Euro.

The article says: “Online since March 2018 in a beta version, the project
should definitely take off by October, based on the money raised.”

Quite the confidence being exhibited with such little funding.

------
tCfD
'decentralisation' should not be a design goal, or at least should not be
advertised as one, because it is fundamentally unsustainable.

It is best understood as a transitional phase between centralized regimes, not
an end in and of itself.

~~~
not_that_noob
I don’t know man - the Internet is distributed and last I checked it was doing
great.

~~~
tCfD
Distributed and decentralized mean different things. distributed implies a
distributor, which is itself a centralized function and in fact the internet
has several of these centers of decentralisation that make sure that the grand
partitions of high value 'land' assets such as IP address blocks and domain
names are apportioned in an explicitly centralized manner.

'Decentralized' as it is commonly understood is about eliminating such central
control points and devolving those powers to the edge of the network graph -
to individual nodes, or more exactly to individual people.. This never works
long-term, and always collapses right back into a centralized hierarchical
system.

Information wants to be free, but value wants to be centralized.

~~~
gowld
The Internet is largely decentralized. Individual nets form peering agreements
with each other.

~~~
tCfD
The internet is so much more than a bunch of peering agreements. You can make
a peering agreement with a network that you can't get transit to all you want,
but if the underlying physical layer operator says no, you are out of luck.
Maybe they'll let you in if you bribe them, maybe not. And this is Geography
rules above all else here, which means concentration of access occurs where
advantageous locations permit, and central points of control eventually
monopolize these. Fiber backbones and undersea cables and major internaps etc.
cost a lot to build and maintain. The reason net neutrality is an issue at all
is because the tradition of apolitical cooperative peering is under sustained
attack from the natural forces of network centralization.

And you didn't address the issues I pointed out about the explicitly
centralized 'land title' systems which distribute critical location identities
to users. This is to say nothing of the ongoing tendency of higher layer de
facto centralization of value location assets such as search and messaging.

Decentralisation isn't non-existent, it is just a temporary transition phase
from one centralized hierarchy to another.

------
stevefan1999
Is there any regulations in PeerTube?

------
smolsky
So a cross between bittorrent and porntube?

~~~
dragontamer
Its closer to a cross between Twitter, Email, and Bittorrent. People create
accounts like Email, on the servers they like. You can publish new videos to
your followers, like Twitter, using ActivityPub. Followers on other servers
are notified via ActivityPub that a new video was made.

When followers click on the video, its shared with Bittorrent over WebRTC over
everyone's Web Browser (with the PeerTube server as the permanent seed).

Personally, I don't like the idea of the Bittorrent bit, due to the publishing
of IP addresses. But I really like the idea of federated video sharing through
ActivityPub.

\---------

I guess ActivityPub might be the new RSS, if RSS lists were hosted on servers
and had concepts about users. And PeerTube is mostly about notifying
ActivityPub members that new videos are available.

------
twerpy_d
what about dtube?

~~~
yontherubicon
Doesn't d.tube only run on one main server, but transmit over ipfs?

------
alttab
No mention of TRX in the thread? Shocker...

------
nkkollaw
Without taking away any of the merit of succeeding in crowdfunding anything:

people go to YouTube because there are awesome content creators that produce
content you want to watch.

Content creators make money via Patron, but mostly via ads. If PeerTube became
successful enough to get a lot of content creators, they would eventually want
to monetize their videos.

PeerTube would now have to introduce things like "censorship" to make sure
advertisers stayed on the platform, etc. etc. and eventually you would have
YouTube again.

Personally, I really enjoy YouTube. I have an ad blocker and never see any ad
whatsoever (although I did support a few content creators via Patreon in the
past), the interface is great, none of the channels I subscribe to have ever
experienced censorship or bad interference from Google--although they do play
by the rules.

I really welcome alternatives, but the community on YouTube is absolutely
great, and I really enjoy the platform. It won't be easy to make a lot of
people change their mind, unless you offer something different (for instance,
Vimeo with really good quality videos mostly, and short professional movies).

