
The PeerTube content bootstrap fund - ddevault
https://sourcehut.org/blog/2020-05-15-peertube-bootstrap-fund/
======
dewey
I understand that PeerTube is an interesting project but every time I look
into it it seems hostile to any kind of "normal" user so I'm just assuming
that's not the goal of the project to become some kind of popular alternative?

I tried to pretend I'm a normal user and looked at the website and right now
it goes like this:

Let's say you are interested in the project, maybe you heard that it's a more
open alternative to YouTube and you are intrigued. So you end up on:
[https://joinpeertube.org](https://joinpeertube.org)

There's no content visible or anything that would spark any interest in a
person looking for a video site. I realized that joinpeertube.org is the site
of the open source project and I have to look at a specific instance to get a
more "YouTube"-like experience. So I click on "Instance list" which brings me
to:

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

The first entry in the instance list is "No Censorship Tube" and you don't
really see if it's an active instance, popular or anything as it just says
"Follows 0 instances" which makes it seem like an abandoned project.

Am I using it wrong?

~~~
krapp
At the moment, activists and hackers ("non-normal" people) are really the main
audience for decentralized "censorship resistant" networks, since everyone
else is happy with Youtube and other centralized services.

Regarding the instances page, it looks like they're pulling instances
randomly, which would just be confusing to new users and in cases like you
mention where the instance isn't popular, counterproductive.

The frontpage isn't much better - most of it is taken up explaining free
software politics and things "normal" users won't care about, and it offers
only three content examples - one video, one channel and one instance. Compare
that to Youtube's frontpage, which is tiles and tiles of content, with a
search bar right on top, basically choking you with content.

I understand they probably _care_ more about the politics and philosophy but
if they want to be an alternative to Youtube they need to do what Youtube does
and present themselves as content first. The layout for the instances
themselves do that, but the homepage needs to pull a bit more weight in that
regard, since it's standing between the user and all that stuff. In my humble
and unqualified opinion.

~~~
JakeAl
" since everyone else is happy with Youtube and other centralized services."

I also respectfully disagree, because YouTube consistently: \- recommends pop-
culture content that can be found elsewhere, most specifically on cable \-
recommends content I've already watched even though I'm logged in and they
should know I've already watched it \- buries the content most relative to my
interests \- gives me no means of adding or removing tags to help me filter my
content \- has search functionality that constantly breaks when one applies
filters (so you do a search, get a million results, sort by upload data and it
returns 'no results found' W.T.F.

Hell I'd even settle for someone to just abstract the AI/tracking/algorithm
and link to content on all of these sites so I don't see content on any ONE of
them and can search across all of them. Why hasn't anyone done this? If
someone has, please promote it more.

~~~
lapinot
Check out
[https://github.com/omarroth/invidious](https://github.com/omarroth/invidious):
no js needed, audio-only mode.. It has some rough edges (channel pages and a
couple videos seem to break), but it's very decent.

------
slushhut
Drew needs to quit spending Sourcehut's money on whatever he wants.

Back in October, he also hired "Sourcehut's first developer", but he gets paid
to work on Drew's personal or favored projects (like Sway), not anything
directly related to Sourcehut: [https://sourcehut.org/blog/2019-10-15-whats-
cooking-october-...](https://sourcehut.org/blog/2019-10-15-whats-cooking-
october-2019/)

Sourcehut is in an alpha state, and is barely functional in a lot of ways.
People are paying for it anyway because they support the site's vision and
what it _could_ be, and want Drew and the site to have the resources they need
to continue working on it, so that it can eventually become something that's
actually worth paying for.

Those people are paying for Sourcehut with the expectation that the money will
be reinvested into Sourcehut and used to maintain and improve it. None of them
are doing it because they want Drew to buy random people microphones so they
can make videos for Peertube.

For someone that writes so vehemently about topics like tech and business
ethics, it's extremely hypocritical for him to keep using Sourcehut's money as
his personal slush fund. Maybe someday if Sourcehut is incredibly successful
and they can't even figure out how to spend all their money this will be a
reasonable thing to do, but right now it still needs these resources that are
inexplicably being redirected to other projects instead.

~~~
imglorp
First of all, bravo to Drew for trying to nudge the world in a positive
direction.

I was just wondering if he was running a fund that did exactly this, to pay
for a few open content creators and OSS developers. (Is there already a fund
like he's sort of doing here?)

If he (or someone) did peel off these altruistic activities, they could (a)
get donations from others of like mind, (b) continue to let Drew use his good
sense to decide how to spread those funds out to the creators, and (c) keep
Source Hut funds separate so its users got a more fair deal.

Even if he does keep them commingled, wouldn't mind paying for SH and having
some of it go towards helping the community.

~~~
ddevault
I think this would be a good idea in the long term, and I'd like to set
something like this up. Ambitions like making sure driver maintainers have
access to the hardware they need, paying for security audits, and so on, would
be great. The biggest resource that _is_ scarce is time, though - so for the
time being this is the easier approach.

------
Naac
This is great, and looks similar to of Drew DeVault's ( creator of Sourcehut )
other offer of paying you to write a blog:

[https://drewdevault.com/make-a-blog](https://drewdevault.com/make-a-blog)

I think wanting and encouraging usage of Free and Open Source software is
important, and I commend Drew for putting his money where his mouth is.

~~~
ekianjo
If that's any indication, the previous initiative to motivate people to write
a blog is a failure since most of the blogs listed there as recipients never
made it past a few blog posts.

~~~
ddevault
Actually, 10+ of them are still going strong. I have been meaning to sort the
list by activity rather than award date. I feel like I got my money's worth
with that initiative.

~~~
ekianjo
Can you separate them from the list?

~~~
ddevault
Check back on Monday, I'll try to find time to sort it then.

~~~
ekianjo
Thanks, will do.

------
Rotten194
I think this is an interesting and definitely laudable project, but I think
the PeerTube-exclusivity clause is a large mistep. I understand the
motivations, but I think it's flawed for two reasons:

1, it increases the risk for creators. While an equipment grant is extremely
useful, the biggest investment (having made a couple educational videos
myself) is time. Having to then limit yourself to a platform with very low
user adoption is a huge risk, and harmful to creator morale if the videos
struggle for an audience due to the platform.

2, and this ties into the first problem, it's not good for marketing. If you
look at how another Youtube competitor, Nebula, is handling this, they have
creators cross-post most of their content to Youtube. Creators then advertise
Nebula in their sponsorship timeslot, extolling its virtues for creator
sustainability etc -- which PeerTube would greatly benefit from as many people
aren't aware of the benefit of a distributed system, or what that even means.
Additionally, they upload some sort of exclusive -- either longer videos with
content that wouldn't fit on YT (LegalEagle is a good example of a channel
that does this), or special long-form projects (Wendover Productions uses this
model). Either way, this lets Nebula hijack Youtube's recommendation algorithm
and built in audience as essentially free advertising, as the content being
uploaded to YT is being posted to Nebula anyways. Obviously many people just
watch on YT and ignore Nebula as it requires a subscription, but PeerTube
doesn't and Nebula is succeeding despite that -- anecdotally, me and my fiance
bought a subscription because of this strategy.

With that out of the way, I do love this idea and hope it gets traction
regardless!

------
dmix
I remember visiting some PeerTube sites and being turned off by the UI. But it
looks like there has been some significant improves and pageload speeds are
super fast. Glad to see it making progress.

Peertube should partner with Patreon or a similar service for premium content.
And hopefully more major Youtube content creators link to it in their video
descriptions and other social media platforms.

Vimeo carved out their own niche with more professional content creators. Any
Youtube competitor will have to find a few niches in order to seed their
initial user base.

~~~
yummypaint
If their copyright takedown system has a less asymmetrical power balance that
YT, movie reviewers and musicians might be good to target.

~~~
ajayyy
There is no "they". PeerTube is a software package that allows you to host
your own YouTube-like site. However, it also has ActivePub (Mastodon)
federation allowing you to also follow people from other instances (if allowed
by your instance).

It is up to to the website's host to deal with DMCA and other complaints.

------
ekianjo
It's a little strange that they would restrict people to publish only on
Peertube and nowhere else to fit the criteria. Because this makes the audience
of published videos closed to zero in the current situation.

I would much rather encourage a policy of "publish on PeerTube first" as in,
short term exclusivity, rather than complete exclusivity.

~~~
ohyeshedid
Forced/contractual exclusivity is bad for consumers, but short term is
definitely more approachable.

------
justaj
From the condition:

> You can only upload videos to PeerTube - not to YouTube or anywhere else.

I'm not sure this is the best approach. As it stands now, the reality is that
platforms like YouTube have vastly more users than peertube. Why not allow
uploading to platforms like YouTube, but instead prefacing the video with a
link to the PeerTube video? This way the content creator can get more views
and PeerTube instances will get more exposure to potentially new users.

------
sergiotapia
Can someone familiar with Peertube explain what the difference is between
PeerTube and Lbry.tv?

[https://lbry.tv/@artiintel:e/Jamaica-driving-
sunset:f](https://lbry.tv/@artiintel:e/Jamaica-driving-sunset:f)

It seems Peertube distributes videos using torrents or something, and lbry
hosts the videos, where exactly?

~~~
rapnie
See DeadSuperHero elsewhere in the thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23200467](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23200467)

------
evolve2k
Honest question: how will PeerTube deal with moderation and the whole cesspit
of hate problem that inflicts most user generated content sites?

It’s a hard problem that even YouTube & Facebook with all their resources
struggles to manage.

Or are they planning to side step the issue, with a ‘it’s open so it’s not
really our problem’ approach?

~~~
chrismorgan
It’s up to the administrators of each instance to decide. spacepub.space will
decide one thing, FramaTube will decide another, _& c._ Instances can decide
to federate with or block other instances depending on how they like their
policies and such.

------
badrabbit
Is peertube cool? I mean would the tiktok crowd like it?

My opinion: it needs 90% better UX and 10% content.

The content is a by product of having an app/site you like. Make it
faster,leaner,simple and featureful. I know easy for me to say that, my point
is that's what would make me use it and stick around.

Also,these platforms like peertube and mastodon really need to get on board
with ditching email. I wouldn't be a HNer it HN required email (please I beg
you don't change that). Same goes for reddit.

Pretend your audience is the simplest non technical person. Things like
"instance" and "federated" should not be mentioned in customer facing UI at
all.

~~~
ekianjo
> need to get on board with ditching email.

ditching email and replacing it by what? Email is federated and ubiquitous.

~~~
badrabbit
Nothing. Make recovery email/code/phone optional. You can't use email for 2FA
recovery anyways.

------
TACIXAT
I would be happy to. I looked at peertube but didn't pull the trigger and
instead went to YouTube. I think the upload limits held me back. I went
through a lot of sites and some would not have video descriptions, some would
have no monetization methods, others no audience. I'll definitely be dropping
and email, I think the 5k would be best spent adding monetization and
discovery features for creators though.

~~~
seanyesmunt
Did you check out LBRY? If so what did you not like about it?

I work on [https://lbry.tv](https://lbry.tv) and the desktop app and am just
curious.

~~~
DeadSuperHero
Another key point is that LBRY and PeerTube have different philosophies on how
to approach decentralization. I believe LBRY uses a Blockchain for media
storage, but PeerTube is more built around the concept of data federation -
people set up separate sites that can then seamlessly integrate with one
another by passing messages around, rather than each site having to maintain a
separate copy of the same ledger.

Additionally, PeerTube is also compatible with the wider fediverse through the
usage of the ActivityPub protocol, meaning that channels can be followed via a
dozen or so other platforms that all speak the same federation language.
Theoretically, it would be possible to write an entirely new project from
scratch (in a completely different language even) that's capable of federating
videos with existing PeerTube installations.

This is not to say that there's anything specifically "wrong" with LBRY, just
that one approach already integrates with a broader set of platforms due to
what community it was developed out of.

~~~
seanyesmunt
It uses the blockchain to store pointers to find the data in a p2p network.

Anyone can build an app that interacts with the LBRY network through the lbry-
sdk ([https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-sdk](https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-
sdk)). To be fair though, our company is the only one working on apps atm. But
you could build one in any language you want.

