
Moving from YouTube to PeerTube - djsumdog
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/moving-from-youtube-to-peertube/
======
MichaelApproved
The article touches on the importance of YouTube’s discovery a bit but doesn’t
do justice to just how strong it can be.

Multimillion dollar businesses are built based on just the discovery feature.

From the article:

> “ _If you do run a YouTube channel with any type of significant viewership,
> I highly recommend backing up your videos, in the event you may need to
> self-host your content in the future._ ”

Sure, backups are good but anyone with significant viewership should make sure
they promote their other web assets to diversify.

Getting people subscribed to your YouTube channel is #1 priority. Getting them
subscribed to your email list or to follow you on another platform should be
your #2 priority.

There are plenty of alternatives to YouTube for pure video hosting (Vimeo,
Wistia, self hosting). There are no alternatives to YouTube for discovery.

~~~
ashtonkem
YouTube owns more than discovery too: they own relationship between viewers
and producers.

Most of the YouTube channels I follow have no external means to notify me
about new videos. If I were to stop using YouTube, they were banned, or
YouTube subscriptions stopped working the same, they would have no way to
actually contact me about new content, and they’d lose me.

Effectively YouTube owns the relationship between the creators and I. This can
be changed, CGPGrey has been building a mailing list for this reason, but it
takes a lot of painstaking deliberate action to achieve. Migrating to a new
platform alone is insufficient.

~~~
imglorp
I would really like a recommendation engine that I own and control.

It would know what I read and watch. It would find new stuff for me, dedupe
it, listen to my feedback,and learn from its mistakes. It would work with all
kinds of media, not just youtube or HN.

And it would all be private. I don't mind paying for my content but I do mind
being the product.

~~~
ashtonkem
As a computer program, this is probably not feasible. While in theory you are
possibly capable of writing the algorithms for your own recommendation engine
using whatever ML tools are popular today, the issue you'd have is data.
YouTube's recommendation algorithm effectively only works because it's capable
of aggregating millions of users behavior to feed into their own system.
Getting that data personally would be very difficult both because YouTube
doesn't want to enable competitors, and because consumers would be extra
freaked out to find out about some random engineer outside of YT getting their
watch history.

As a non-program, you can always depend on the means that humans have used for
content discovery since time immemorial: word of mouth.

~~~
csande17
This is maybe a tangent, but do these ML-powered recommendation algorithms
actually, like, work well for people?

I use both YouTube and Netflix pretty extensively. These companies are both
held up as ML success stories. But, at least in my personal experience, they
suck! My front-page feeds consist of (1) content that the platform knows I
have already seen because IT IS IN MY WATCH HISTORY, (2) content that is
trivially related, like by having the the same channel/director/actors, and
(3) random junk I have no interest in watching and always regret clicking on.

It's not that the content isn't out there -- I'm able to find stuff I like
through "big spreadsheet of all the Netflix movies" websites, online
recommendations from humans, and YouTube channel crossovers/cameos. But I've
never had that magical "the algorithm knows you better than you know yourself"
experience that every ML engineer I've ever spoken to seems to be convinced
their systems achieve.

Are all ML engineers mindless drones with exactly average movie preferences,
or am I some kind of incomprehensible weirdo?

~~~
SifJar
> random junk I have no interest in watching and always regret clicking on

if you regret clicking on it, that means you _did_ click on it and the
recommendation did it's job; remember that the job of the recommendation
engine is not (directly) to suggest content you'll like, it's to suggest
content that will get you to click. Ideally those goals would be aligned, but
not necessarily. YouTube is simply incentivised (via ad revenue) to get you to
click on as many videos as possible.

~~~
csande17
At least in my case, it's not that I'm constantly clicking on things that it
turns out I dislike. Rather, it's that the few times I _have_ clicked on a
recommendation (because hey, maybe they know something I don't, maybe Sonic
the Hedgehog actually _is_ a good suggestion for people who liked Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), I've regretted it.

~~~
SifJar
Right, but my point is that from YouTube's perspective it doesn't "matter" if
you like or dislike the video, if they can get you to click. And clearly this
strategy works on _some_ people, or they wouldn't be doing it.

So while it may not be overly successful on you (i.e. you only click
occasionally), if it works on a significant portion of people it could still
be a successful strategy overall.

------
sbussard
I remember the internet before google - when you would search for anything
there would be like a 25% chance that a given search result would be a porn
site targeted for random keywords. Google has done a great job figuring out
content curation at scale. A competitor for any of their services would need a
suite of hard-to-implement features to be viable, including discoverability
and content filtration. Are there any good open source solutions to solve
these problems? Bonus points if they’ve been proven at scale

~~~
jrnichols
I'm amazed that peer tube isn't full of porn by now too.

~~~
vanderZwan
Just checked out the main site - on top of trending is a seven-second clip of
a headless woman showing off her cleaveage. Remember when YouTube had to fix
_that_ problem?

~~~
jrnichols
I didn't see that one, but on another instance, I was not at all surprised to
see the trailer for the completely debunked film "Plandemic."

------
kmeisthax
>An embedded PeerTube video comes with a warning, because when you watch one
of these videos using the web player, you may also be serving that video to
other audience members watching it at the same time.

This is something the distributed video people don't seem to entirely
understand. Look at how many copyright disputes happen on YouTube - not actual
piracy, just disputes. Now imagine every dispute was resolved by sending DMCA
takedown notices or subpoenas to individual users who happened to have the
misfortune of watching a particular PeerTube video someone didn't like.

Centralized and non-distributed video platforms have one critical advantage
over distributed: it's harder to sue users. That's because you'd have to first
sue the host to get logs, which requires at least some legal adjudication of
the merits of any underlying copyright claim. Distributed systems shift that
legal liability directly to viewers. So you need some sort of mechanism to
ensure people who provide you the video don't have an IP address to trace,
which immediately puts you in all sorts of hard UX problems that the wave of
encrypted P2P software from a decade and a half ago never really figured out.

~~~
DINKDINK
Is your position that centralized services can out survive distributed ones?
Because user IP's are less observable? The past 25 years of cyber/cypherpunk
software and legal battles say otherwise. Decentralized solutions outlive
centralized ones not because there is "no one to shut down" it's because
there's too many people to shut down. Enforcement processes don't scale,
especially when it comes to speech.

>Centralized and non-distributed video platforms have one critical advantage
over distributed

A more compelling argument:

>>You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography. > >
>Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory
of freedom for several years. > >Governments are good at cutting off the heads
of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like
Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.

[https://www.mail-
archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09...](https://www.mail-
archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09971.html)

~~~
bagacrap
these days people get music from spotify ($$) and similar services, not from
torrents ($free). I'd say centralized won.

When I did torrent, I would frequently get warnings from content owners by way
of my ISP, so at least identification of offenders seems to have scaled. They
didn't take me to court personally, but some other end users were compelled to
settle, and even the threat of punitive measures should be enough to
discourage many others. So overall I don't agree with your characterizations.

~~~
unionpivo
Spotify still isn't accessible where I live, so music piracy is live and well.

On the other hand steam is so game piracy is almost nonexistent.

It's mostly about convenience, since centralized app if designed with users in
mind can be more convinient.

More and more people are pirating tv shows aswll, since pirates have the only
solution that has all the content in one place.

------
natex
As it relies on P2P, watching a PeerTube video exposes your IP to anyone who
wants it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17387289](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17387289)

~~~
abdullahkhalids
Can you explain why exposing your IP is a problem or security issue? What is
the attack I am exposed to because someone knows my IP address?

~~~
bserge
Probably because it's quite a personal thing, which can be used for port
scanning, ddos, geolocation and other stuff. Also anyone can monitor p2p
activity:
[https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/](https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/)

Not that big of a problem if it's dynamic.

~~~
izolate
Does this apply to WebTorrent (WebRTC)? I'm not sure

~~~
0xdeadb00f
It applies to torrenting in general, so I'd assume it also applies to
WebTorrent

------
jhallenworld
Well here is another direction I recently learned about: Amazon Prime Video
Direct:

[https://videodirect.amazon.com/home/help?topicId=G201978440](https://videodirect.amazon.com/home/help?topicId=G201978440)

I found one YouTube creator who moved his videos to Vimeo on Demand and then
to Prime Video Direct. I think you can choose to require viewers pay for your
video, or have them included for free for Prime members, where the pay is $.06
/ hour of viewing (it used to be $.15 / hour).

Anyway, it's an interesting alternative for content creators, as long as their
videos are high quality. The pay is certainly much better than YouTube, so I
have a lot of sympathy for this route. Plus it's like YouTube Premium in that
there are no ads.

I'm not sure if Amazon will actively promote these videos, so I suspect
YouTube remains king for discovery.

Here are the videos:

[https://www.youtube.com/user/CountryHouseGent](https://www.youtube.com/user/CountryHouseGent)

[https://www.amazon.com/Travels-by-
Narrowboat/dp/B07S6CK8MW](https://www.amazon.com/Travels-by-
Narrowboat/dp/B07S6CK8MW)

~~~
donmcronald
What kind of money is that for the space? Assuming a 10 minute video where you
want to make $100 you need 100k views. $100 / $.006 per hour = 16667 hours.
16667 hours * 6 10 minute views per hour = 100000.

Incidentally, Cloudflare Stream charges the same rates for serving video ($1
per 1000 minutes).

Any idea what kind of money a YouTuber would make off 100k views? Does
something like Cloudflare's offering make a suitable backup where they could
eat the cost of serving video temporarily if YouTube kicks them off?

I think it's a really hard problem because serving video is so expensive.
YouTube must be a huge money pit.

~~~
jhallenworld
Wait, it's .06 not .006 per hour, so 10K views of a 10 minute for $100.

Wow, serving video is expensive. I had no idea it was $.06 / hour. I presume
Amazon and YouTube have their own CDN or something.

~~~
ryan29
Oh yeah. My bad. I got my degree in math from Verizon. Getting paid $1000 per
100k views sounds ok.

On the paying side I'd hate to end up on the hook for a video that goes viral
and gets a million views.

Keep in mind that Cloudflare is making a profit on that and Amazon, Google
probably have lower costs than Cloudflare. Still, it has to be a huge money
pit to host that stuff.

------
PopeDotNinja
I like the idea of PeerTube, but every time I try to play a video, it buffers
to the point of being unwatchable.

~~~
simias
Streaming video is hard and expensive, I think that's why there's very little
serious competition to Youtube.

You not only have the network effects of social media ("everybody is on
Youtube") but you also have to host and stream petabytes of data and still
manage to turn a profit.

Now if on top of all of that you want to do it with decentralized technologies
it become even harder to reach the same level of quality. Anybody who's
attempted to download some niche torrent from a few years ago knows that the
success rate tends to be very low. Meanwhile you can still watch the holiday
video of some Polish family in Italy in 2011 on Youtube, even if it only has
like 20 views.

I want a decentralized, peer-to-peer internet but when you face the technical
and financial realities you realize that it really doesn't add up, IMO. You
need huge economies of scale to make it work.

Or alternatively you need to convince people that things like web search,
video streaming and email hosting are actually worth paying for. Good luck.

~~~
abdullahkhalids
Interestingly, part of the problem is that people have switched to smaller and
portable devices like laptop, tablets and phones, and away from desktop
computers. Desktop computers are not constrained as much by energy consumption
problems, can usually have more storage at the same price point, and can
persistently connect to reliable internet.

In other words, and ironically, the physical deanchoring of compute devices
has made it harder for virtually decentralized video sharing to take off.

~~~
simias
True, and also IPv4 and mass-NATing everything by default was an other factor
IMO. If you've been coding some network application over the past 3 decades
you basically have to assume that most of your users are going to run it
behind a NAT. That creates a world of issues for anything p2p.

I wonder if the situation would've been different had something like IPv6 been
adopted much earlier. Then even end users might have integrated the idea that
their devices would remain accessible remotely once connected to the internet.
That would have made it harder for ISPs to sell these connections where
basically nothing but HTTP(S) makes it through.

------
zelly
> It’s 2020 and YouTube, as well as the rest of big tech, is continuing to
> remove content they don’t agree with from their platforms.

Bold of these folks to assume their little self-hosted hard disk will outlive
YouTube. When an individual is in charge of keeping some resource online, it's
a matter of _when_ it disappears not if. I don't care how controversial your
content is, it's more likely to be accessible by me in 10 years if you put it
on YouTube versus your torrent or personal website.

~~~
wolco
Piratebay did a good job of self-replicating itself and outlives many others.

~~~
zelly
Yes, the website and its database are resilient. Torrents are less likely to
be struck down by a singular authority like YouTube but on the other hand it
suffers from the same problem as personal websites. Almost every torrent
posted to tpb over the years, if you tried to download now, would have zero
seeders. It's the same thing with IPFS. None of these P2P solutions will ever
be like S3.

~~~
LockAndLol
I have a feeling that once IPFS and torrents become more popular on anonymous
networks like I2P, the copyright mafia will have a real problem trying to shut
that down.

Right now the speeds are pretty bad (20 KB/s average 100KB/s for "fast"
torrents), but with more users, that can drastically change. If 400KB/s
becomes the average, watching 720p on a peertube instance on I2P will be
possible without lag. At 800KB/s 1080p becomes possible without lag.
[https://stream.twitch.tv/encoding/](https://stream.twitch.tv/encoding/)

------
als0
"However, self-hosting might also be the only alternative, if Google decides
to ban you from their platform"

I'm not familiar with the YouTuber industry but this scenario sounds like a
death knell. Are there popular video bloggers that aren't on YouTube?

~~~
metiscus
ChemPlayer basically had so many videos taken down that he moved off platform.

~~~
swiley
I thought they deleted his account last summer.

Personally that seems so weird. The amateur chem videos where what got me to
start subscribing to YouTube channels.

~~~
metiscus
But the children might learn to make naughty chemicals, can't let that happen.

In all seriousness, nearly every major chemistry youtuber that I have seen has
had several videos struck for seemingly pointless issues. There are many many
videos showing poor technique and potentially extremely dangerous synthesis -
those remain up. I don't understand the criteria behind it in this domain.

------
ferros
YouTube’s unassailable feature is discovery.

Would be great to see competition in video hosting though.

~~~
MayeulC
There is an ongoing crowdfunding campaign, to finance peertube's ongoing
development. One of their goals for this year is discovery, with global
search.

[https://joinpeertube.org/roadmap](https://joinpeertube.org/roadmap)

~~~
Deukhoofd
And they added it in 2.3, last month.

[https://joinpeertube.org/news#release-2-3-0](https://joinpeertube.org/news#release-2-3-0)

~~~
MayeulC
Ah, thank you, I had missed it. It is quite unfortunate that they don't have
an RSS feed on that website. I just tried setting up [https://kill-the-
newsletter.com/](https://kill-the-newsletter.com/), we'll see how that goes...

Unfortunately, I cannot share the generated feed here, as it's too similar to
the inbox address.

------
tempsy
anecdotally youtube seems to have aggressively increased the number of ads
just in the last few weeks or so

i see ads on almost all videos i watch now, there are two ads before the video
(the first one i can’t skip at all, the second i can sometimes skip after a
few seconds), and then some videos have more ads at different points in the
actual video that show up out of nowhere.

and then there’s the search ads that take up the entire mobile interface plus
ads beneath the video

given i’ve mostly been using youtube for recipes lately and skip around the
video a lot the experience is like being forced watching 30 seconds of ads for
every 5 minutes of content.

it’s completely completely unbearable

~~~
localhost
YouTube Premium is by far the best $10/month that I spend. Zero ads on YouTube
and creators get a share of that, which is typically more $ than they would
get from ads.

~~~
ekianjo
You can get the exact same thing with ad blockers.

~~~
ElijahLynn
I would much rather pay the content creators with YouTube Premium than by
using an ad blocker.

~~~
keb_
If your concern is for supporting content creators, and if you have any
reservations about the intrusiveness of adtrackers -- and also maybe you'd
like to conserve your system resources when you browse the web -- wouldn't it
make _much more_ sense to support the content creators you enjoy directly
through Patreon and use an adblocker instead?

~~~
coldpie
You're positing that YouTube itself provides no value, but I strongly disagree
with that. I find YouTube to be very pleasant to use, I have found a lot of
great stuff through their discovery algorithm, and obviously the bandwidth and
storage itself isn't free. I think it's worth paying for. Separately from
that, I also support several creators on Patreon directly.

And yes, I use an ad blocker. You'd be crazy not to.

~~~
keb_
No, I was not positing that YouTube itself provides no value -- I was
responding to a comment that asserted their reason for subscribing to YouTube
Premium was to support content creators. I suggested an alternative.

Personally, I do not disagree that YouTube is worth paying for. But I have
reservations because I believe their parent company (Google) already profits
tremendously in morally objectionable ways. Thus, I try to avoid giving them
my business as much as possible.

Unfortunately, the reality is Google (and YouTube) are practically
_impossible_ to compete with in all things data.

To play devil's advocate: you say you use adblocker (I assume you use it on
sites other than YouTube) -- but why? Because the modern web is practically
unbearable without it? But is there not an implicit contract when you visit a
website and consume their bandwidth, that you view the ads? Are you not, in
effect, _stealing_? Sure, advertisers don't have the right to your attention,
but don't the content creators have the right to your financial support?

~~~
coldpie
I feel we are talking past each other. I apologize for missing your original
point.

------
jmartrican
Is the premise here that the author wants to move away from YouTube because
YouTube removes racist or violent promoting, or fake news posts? If PeerTube
doesnt block these videos, then I rather stick with YouTube.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
PeerTube effectively doesn't block anything... It's just a piece of software.
PeerTubes can connect to other instances of PeerTube or other fediverse
servers like Mastodon... and those other servers will likely block a server
posting harmful content. But they can't take down a PeerTube posting harmful
content, that'd be up to the hosting provider.

------
293984j29384
Does anyone else thing this is a terrible name? Reading the topic, I
immediately went to peertube.org/.com/.net to check it out. Turns out it's
really just software for self hosting your own videos.

~~~
guerrilla
> Turns out it's really just software for self hosting your own videos.

Not exactly, since you can join a node and upload there and it's also like
Mastadon in that it's federated.

~~~
anticensor
See:

[https://joinpeertube.org](https://joinpeertube.org)

[https://peertube.fr](https://peertube.fr)

~~~
guerrilla
Yes?

[https://joinpeertube.org/instances#instances](https://joinpeertube.org/instances#instances)

Some of those are federated with eachother and you can upload to them and your
videos are stored on the instance. You do not need to run your own instance
but obviously it can be helpful.

------
ekianjo
Related:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23124214](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23124214)

------
mdale
Would have been nice if the article could have embedded a video towards making
a statement of ease of use of peer tube :)

------
prvc
>PeerTube does this using technologies such as WebTorrent and WebRTC. In
theory, this can help PeerTube scale without expensive centralized servers.

I wonder if this is actually that useful for reducing server bandwidth for the
long-tail type of content that self-hosters are apt to produce.

~~~
coopsmgoops
Spotify used P2P in the early days for this reason I belive. Worked out for
them.

------
jaimex2
I can only ever see a large company like Amazon or Facebook try to take on
Youtube sucesfully.

They have the server capacity/capability and have more than enough capital to
try and incentivise creators across if they think the venture is worth it,
which it probably isn't.

~~~
tracker1
Facebook tried, and was incredibly deceptive about the numbers.

I'm not sure I'd like Amazon any better... they really need to improve the
UI/UX of the video services they already offer.

~~~
jaimex2
Yeah, I recall College Humor attributing the deceptive FB stats as something
that hurt their focus on what was important to stay alive come to think of it.

------
freeopinion
This is a complete aside, but what are some examples of other acquisitions
that have lived on as well as Youtube after they were bought? I mean, there is
of course that time when Apple was taken over by Next. What are some other
standout acquisition survivals?

------
BadassFractal
Is there a way to become a node for PeerTube, and help the cause with your CPU
and bandwidth?

~~~
jrnichols
This is kind of close .. become a redundant peer

[https://docs.joinpeertube.org/#/contribute-
architecture?id=r...](https://docs.joinpeertube.org/#/contribute-
architecture?id=redundancy-between-instances)

------
ireflect
I have been looking for a good video aggregator website. Something like digg,
but for videos. Most of the videos would naturally link to youtube, which is
fine, but they could just as easily link to peertube, vimeo, self-hosted, etc.
This would solve a number of problems:

1\. Better (or at least a different) way of discovering. I'm a pretty heavy
YouTube watcher, but my recommendations are bland and full of reruns. It knows
what I've been interested in the past but I find them tiresome. It does a
terrible job of recommending new things that I might find interesting. It
needs to take more chances.

2\. As many have already said, there are plenty of ways to host a video but
none of them have good discoverability. If there was a good video aggregator
site, it would help to begin diversifying this aspect. Even better, it could
be successful even without convincing content creators to use it directly,
because much of the content could still just link to YouTube.

Does such a site exist? One that I've found is browsing lobste.rs' [video]
tag, or HN for the youtube.com domain, but that's not really the same.

------
skinnyasianboi
If you like PeerTube please check out LBRY, too. It goes a step further and is
even more decentralized and doesn't rely on server instances like the one you
have setup.

------
LockAndLol
Once peertube starts using distributed storage and goes onto I2P or other
anonymous networks, I think paid services can kiss their asses bye bye. Good
on battlepenguin to join the movement.

------
ElijahLynn
The article can be improved by embedding an example video.

------
FirstLvR
i've tried using peerTube a couple times, but the discovery system is totally
broken

even if you setup the main language to english a bunch of other languages keep
poping up on top on every search

the only reason youtube is so good now is because is tied with google, thus
making the search/discovery process fully efficient and am sorry my friends,
thats exactly what am looking for

------
puskavi
LBRY has done the same pretty well.

------
de_watcher
Every time youtube breaks the old UI current workaround I start looking for
alternatives.

------
rch
Google should spin off YouTube.

~~~
anticensor
YouTube runs at a loss.

------
suyash
What's a cheap, reliable way to have cloud backups for videos?

------
jhatemyjob
I don't understand why (other than Stallman religious reasons) you would go
through the effort of hosting a PeerTube instance when you could just serve a
static video file and call it a day

------
2Gkashmiri
You are missing an important link here, peertube does P2P ON DEMAND. You "CAN"
disable it and you are out of the p2p scene. Dont know why people here seem to
equate peertube=p2p=insecure.

~~~
simias
I don't equate p2p with insecure but what's the point of turning it off? If
you do that aren't you better off just hosting some basic HTML/CSS/JS to serve
your videos directly from your self-hosted website without bothering with
PeerTube?

Maybe I'm missing the point but I though the advantage of PeerTube was using
P2P file sharing to cut down on the huge amount of bandwidth necessary for
video streaming.

~~~
antepodius
You can disable it client-side if you, the viewer, don't want your ip visible
to the peers.

As it's opt-out, most people won't do it, so the host can still reap the
benefit of the p2p system.

Aside from that, another goal of peertube is the ability to federate instances
together so that a search on one site can return results from all federated
ones. The hope is to build a decentralised, federated youtube competitor.

------
ns5049520
+1 for decentralization.

------
_hao
Viemo = Vimeo. I was thrown off at the start until I realized that's the
platform the author meant.

~~~
jychang
The proofreading for this article is atrocious.

~~~
netsharc
At least the misspelling is consistent, except for the mention of "Vimeo Pro".

Maybe the author thinks the video service "Viemo" sells the pro account with
that name..

