"A minimalist and efficient peer-to-peer live stream
The great feature of this v3 is live streaming, and we are proud to say that it works very well !
...
The main points to remember :
The lag (between video maker and audience) varies between 30 seconds and 1mn, as expected ;
Depending on the power of the server and its load (number of simultaneous live shows, transcoding, etc.), PeerTube can provide hundreds of simultaneous views (but we’re not sure that it will scale to thousands… at least not yet !) ;
Administration options are included for people hosting the instance ;
The features are minimalist by design, and we have documented our recommendations for creating a live ;
The live can be done with most video streaming tool (we recommend the free-libre software OBS), with two options :
An « short-lived » live, with a unique identifier, will offer the possibility to save the video and display a replay on the same link ;
A « permanent » live stream, which will work more like a Twitch channel, but without the replay option."
Peertube is something I’ve been trying again and again from time to time. My main issue is finding instances to follow that are properly moderated. A lot of the suggested instances are filled with stolen content, porn, or just very wtf videos.
I’m hoping that once peertube provides ways for users to sponsor/subscribe-to creators’ peertube channels that more will either jump ship from youtube or at least publish in both platforms.
After meeting Youtube's hours (or views?) threshold for monetization, months later the mass-demonetized anyone without enough subscribers. Dunno how threatening my semi-popular Macbook repair video was.
Sorry for solving people's problem instead of being entertaining like a network TV series.
Of course this sapped any desire to create a video again whenever I spend weeks finding a solution and then discover it.
I'd rather make a cent from PeerTube than $0 from YT.
Yeah, though as we can see from experience of Gab being the biggest Mastodon instance and Mastodon not having collapsed, it's possible to have an alternative without it necessarily becoming a "witch town".
It wasn't hard when all the big apps and most of the big instances blocked it between the announcement and launch. The instances that didn't block it mostly looked like Gab anyway.
A problem here is that the default configuration automatically follow back any instance that follows it, making all their content appear on its frontpage. I think that is a pretty unsafe default.
Didn't that default change recently? I installed Peertube a couple of months ago, and I'm pretty sure that option was off by default (and I never changed it).
Awesome! Most of the peertube stuff I've found out there has been FramaTube, a couple fringe-interest instances, those ones hosted by the creator which only have the owner's content (which is fine, I just need several instances like this to work), instances with super low bandwidth, instances in <not-my-language>, or some combination of the above.
With the exception of the first one that 404s, every one of these is going to get a lot of use in our house!
Do other peertube instances share the bandwidth or just share links to the original server? Would it make sense for me to setup a peertube instance purely to act as a caching proxy on my network?
You can't put the ActivityPub ecosystem back inside its bottle. While it seems like (this is a commonly heard complaint) "no one is there", this is simply untrue. The ecosystem is vibrant, healthy, and will keep growing.
in my mind there will eventually be a tipping point, but it doesn't need to happen immediately. It would be nice to see more media establish a presence there though.
edit: one of my favorite PeerTube instances is https://tilvids.com -- an edutainment video community.
> The ecosystem is vibrant, healthy, and will keep growing.
>
> in my mind there will eventually be a tipping point,
Why do so many people insist on Growth and Largest, as metrics for 'success'?
My local pub is a success. They are not worlds' largest pub. My Mom and Granny don't go there. They don't have parties with millions of people crammed in the place. Etc.
Why can't Linux be called 'a success', the very moment that it helps one person? Why don't we call Mastodon or Peertube a success the very moment a tiny group of people uses and likes it?
Why do we insist that Peertube is only successful when my mom and my Granny use it?
Why do we insist on huge market shares to call open source successful?
Your local pub might be trying to offer an alternative to local people staying on their homes watching tv instead. Linux and peertube are trying to offer an alternative to something of a much bigger scale, and most likely with more pressing ethical concerns (they often want to drive people away from the current mainstream option for ethical reasons). Not everyone might share that view, but they are definitely different situations. Not saying you don't have a point, but we can't ignore the differences in context.
> Linux and peertube are trying to offer an alternative to something of a much bigger scale, and most likely with more pressing ethical concerns
True.
But my point is that you could call both "a success" the moment that one singular person uses it as alternative. For that person it is a success!
With Peertube you need some network-effect, because one single person uploading and then watching those videos, can't be called "a success". But if a tiny niche, say a small group of specialist beekeepers, uses it to share instructional videos and no-one else in the entire world uses it, it can still be called "a success". Because for them it offers a solution.
I used to think differently, but I am starting to agree. Part of the issues with current generation of software is that it is effectively intended for masses, who barely understand what is happening under the hood or what is possible resulting in software that looks pretty, has severely limited options and constantly calls home for 'diagnostic' purposes.
That said, commercially, it is hard to argue with adoption as a metric. Problem is, focusing on that metric results in the same bs as in the real world: consumer ( crap tier ) and business ( good tier that tends to have good options if you are willing to spend money ).
Cost of physical distance enables niches that can be served by your local pub. If we could teleport (well, and cohabit the exact same space and tune out conversations of others at will so crowdiness is not an issue) they would have a much much harder time selling something unique. Scale aids in bringing people in, because it becomes the default choice.
I don’t those two thing are contradictory, it’s just that you are assuming you don’t get uniqueness inside a monopolistic platform, which is only partially true. The platform is fixed, but you get uniqueness inside the platform, with the content and contacts you follow. Facebook, reddit, etc. are not the same experience for all users. Comparing a network, where each vantage point is unique with Starbucks, which has maybe 50 products, is not an apt analogy.
Aren't local pubs in the UK and certain other countries now mainly owned by corporate chains, not independent? In that case, there is definitely a concern with growth, though it might not be readily visible to patrons.
> The ecosystem is vibrant, healthy, and will keep growing.
I'm in favour of it, and hope it does well. But at the same time, constant growth itself doesn't mean that much.
There's a big difference between slow constant growth and explosive constant growth. Something can constantly grow yet still remain something most people have never heard of. I think Linux on the desktop is a reasonable example of this.
The alternatives will likely be constantly growing as well.
> in my mind there will eventually be a tipping point
it's going to be difficult to compete against YouTube... there has to be some reason why people use it instead of YouTube.
> there has to be some reason why people use it instead of YouTube.
I had non-technical people in my family asking me Youtube alternatives because they were afraid of censorship. I think the reasons are already there[0] but there are no "peertube marketing department" taking care of conversion.
That has me concerned that nutjob right wing conspiracy theorists are going to flock to PeerTube just as they did voat and parler. So long as they maintain their own stuff which is what I understand as to how this all works, thats fine. I just wouldn't want their stuff to pop up in other instances so that they're filtered out by default.
You know, Linux in general is probably the best example of this. Its success doesn't need to be defined by the desktop.
When people bring up desktop Linux, I always bring up that Linux impacts 100% of internet users because of its presence running web applications, and it impacts however many people who use Android or other Linux devices (embedded/IoT). Automotive is even a huge sector these days.
RT_PREEMPT is very much capable of real-time applications. Outside of control loops faster than a couple kHz, it's even suitable for hard real-time applications.
But those issues aren't fixed with Linux, but rather with CPUs design for hard real-time usage.
If Linux with PREEMPT_RT is unsuitable, all the modern x86 CPUs with system management mode interrupts are even worse. Because those are the worst and primary cause for that Linux being insufficient for control loops in the 10's of kHz.
It doesn’t need to. But obviously there are people who want it to be at least fairly well used.
The value of such a thing has a lot to do with how many people use it and how much content there is. You need users to give incentive for people to upload content. And you need content to incentivize new users.
I disagree. Value here is a matter of quality, not quantity, and impact on humanity's welfare. Most "network-effect successful" networks have a low and decreasing signal-noise ratio, they merely produce unqualified "content" for the most part.
Tech diversity in itself is a value, even if the niche players never leave the niche for the most part. Diversity allows for adaptability in a changing environment/crisis.
I believe the mass social network epoche is about to end, as the advertisement/influence ecosystem is eating up its island's last trees. The dream of the global internet failed, for reasons we can't fix. ActivityPub is much better fitting a fragmented network.
Yup, same with whats going on in defi with stable coins… as the existing system crowds people out and benefits fewer and fewer people more, more people will be incentivized to seek out alternatives
I made PeerTube and Mastadon accounts today out of curiosity and was generally impressed. Mastodon especially is quite usable (though obviously many fewer users than Twitter), the interface is as good as Twitter (better if you count not spamming you to login). I posted about my open source project and other random stuff and got several thought out, kind, non-spam replies with a new account. I imagine this is because of the barrier to entry and that I made my account on a open source focused instance. If Mastodon/federated social networking became popular I imagine there could be "Eternal September" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September) dynamics though.
I wonder if paradoxically federated communication would let you improve the quality of discourse by more proactively banning people. Mastadon works on a federated system where anyone can run they're own "instance" which can then interact with other instances pretty seamlessly. Since people really can leave if they don't like the rules you could be pretty heavy handed with moderation within individual instances to ban obnoxious people or have an invite only system.
PeerTube was a little rougher around the edges, but still very impressive for being pretty new and doing p2p video streaming. There was more lag than YouTube but with decent internet it's fine. The choices for instances aren't great and storage size and bandwith are limited. Storage/bandwith cost money though and that may just be making what's an invisible cost on YouTube visible.
If you want to connect your Twitter and Mastodon accounts and enable crossposting, have a look at this[0]. I also wrote a blog post[1] were I talk a bit about my migration experience.
I'm interested as well. How did you choose your PeerTube instance? What happens to the videos and followers if whoever runs peervideo.club stops what I assume is a side project of them?
This was the biggest problem with PeerTube. For Mastodon I clicked the big "join" button on the website and filtered by technology > foss and fosstodon.org was the largest option and seems to have a great community. For PeerTube trying to do the same thing I found some small technology instance with a few hundred videos. I chose peervideo.club because it's the 4th largest (so I'd be in good company if it's taken down) and seemed to be the largest English focused instance. From their about, "Peer Video Club is a chill PeerTube instance most likely just for testing. How long we plan to maintain this instance: ¯\(ツ)/¯. How we will pay for this instance: Owners's own funds". Doesn't seem like a pillar of stability.
My understanding is I could backup (no plans), and restore to another instance. To take my followers with me I would have to leave peervideo.club in a more planned way and set my account to redirect to another. No idea how long the redirect would have to stay up for most of my subscribers' instances to get the message. Even with federated you need some degree of trust that you won't be kicked off or have you instance shut down with no warning.
I don't know whether this also applies to ActivityPub, but with Matrix it's similar to e-mail. If you use an identifier supplied by your instance, you run into the issue of having to tell people your new address. If you use your own domain as an identifier, you can simply redirect it to another instance if you switch.
An Eternal September can easily be avoided by joining a small server with a community you like. I and others would recommend over a couple hundred but under a couple thousand.
As for improving discourse, I think you are exactly right. Unlike big tech Masto mods don't have the weight of the world on their shoulders and can moderate however. Nazi pits will still exist, but they'll be isolated.
Afaik, Gab doesn't use Mastodon anymore. They did start as a Mastodon instance, but after being blocked from most instances and even at the software level by most Mastodon apps, they stopped using Mastodon and I believe wrote their own new backend that does not federate.
Here's the commit that removes the Public/All timeline (the above image mentions that removal): https://code.gab.com/gab/social/gab-social/-/commit/7ad7fe06...
Couldn't find when exactly Federation capability was removed, since that's less obvious from the commit messages (as someone who doesn't know Mastodon internals).
It's still based on the Mastodon fork, but they seem to have been changing the code constantly even before this (based on information under #gab on Mastodon), so it's not clear how much it resembles the Mastodon source by now.
PS: Somehow looking at the source repo and commit messages makes this more "real" for me, more than any screenshots or the user-facing site itself. It's a weird feeling.
I like PeerTube, but the really important part of the puzzle is the advertiser network. What makes YouTube special is that Google takes care of the advertising side of things and makes it easy for people to monetise.
If Silicon Valley continues to drift into ideological activism, at some point a hugely profitable opportunity to set up a new advertising network develops.
>If Silicon Valley continues to drift into ideological activism, at some point a hugely profitable opportunity to set up a new advertising network develops.
YouTube started moderating it's content more because advertisers asked for it. No large advertiser wants to be shown next to a neo-nazi video.
you have your eyes closed if you think they're only censoring the worst kinds of content, like nazis. videos have been taken down for e.g. criticizing lockdowns. it has moved well into policing acceptable thought.
On the other hand I don’t let my kids watch YouTube (even using YT kids and with my account to bypass ads) because they don’t do enough moderation of extremist videos. A few clicks leads to a lot of provably false BS.
With all due respect though, it’s not YouTube’s job to decide what’s appropriate for your kids, and there’s a big difference between what’s appropriate for children and what’s appropriate for the rest of us consenting adults to watch.
It's not about deciding what's acceptable for one's kids, it's about limiting the range of programming so that one can choose if that range is acceptable. This is a difference from traditional channels which have a distinct flavour and are subject to watchdogs (in my country, UK, at least).
No parent has time to watch TV with their child all the time up until they're 18. You might say 'well don't let them watch TV' and that's a valid choice. But other parents want to choose safe ranges of programming and have someone else police stuff to make sure it stays in that range.
A large portion of this kind of content results in people irresponsibly spreading a deadly disease while hospitals are turning dying people away in some areas of the country, e.g. LA.
I am happy to see content platforms policing thought in this manner!
The residents of Singapore, Taiwan, and New Zealand are also having fun right now, without the 2x-3x people dying. The difference is that they stay at home when the experts tell them to stay at home.
At least in Taiwan everyone also wore masks, which was the opposite of what Western experts prescribed at the time. Telling people to wear masks was even banned in some places (though not on YouTube):
(Note that this is from March! When I left Taiwan in late January, everyone at the airport was masked up and slightly paranoid.)
Taiwan and NZ also closed their borders while Western experts "knew" that the coronavirus was just the flu, and that closing borders was xenophobic, racism is the real pandemic, etc. etc.
2020 is easily the year when Western experts failed the hardest I've ever witnessed. Absolutely surreal. Maybe we should fire and replace our current selection of experts before we ban everyone else.
Are you suggesting I have aided the pandemic? I have barely seen anyone. I am safe. I live in Beverly Hills where fascist authoritarians have destroyed our city.
So nice to see sycophantic unintelligent “hackers” promote blind authoritarianism. You have no concept of the words you so ambitiously spout.
Give me an example of a video that was removed for "critcizing lockdowns" -- and I can guarantee the reason isn't the criticism, but the manner in which it is somehow "backed up" by disinformation about Covid.
Playing into this idea that somehow criticism isn't allowed is disingenuous.
Most advertisers probably already understand that the person being exposed to their content for a brief moment isn't under the impression that the ad doesn't mean strong endorsement of the content by the advertiser.
About 33% of the US actively supported Trump's bid for presidency, and accounting for turnout probably a majority didn't care if he got back in.
Accounting for business owners likely leaning free-market, it seems improbable that they mean 'Trump supporters' when they say 'we don't want to advertise with neo-nazis'. They probably mean literal neo-nazi.
I don't mind if literal neo-nazi are moderated off a channel. Nobody likes them.
Look at all the types of videos YouTube de-monetizes, do you think YouTube wants to pay for hosting and make no money on the videos? No, that's all the types of videos that large advertisers (which pay the most) have complained about over time.
Of course they want to, that is why they are doing it. They'd prefer to keep the network effects going because they know an exodus would undermine their for-pay videos.
If they weren't happy, they would delete the videos on demonetisation. They don't have to pay for hosting. They know these videos are drawing in a valuable audience.
What's a literal neo-nazi? I guess nazis who aren't declaring their support for Hitler are not "literal" neo-nazis and are ok? I mean where you draw that line? Nobody likes them? Lots of people like them.
> but the really important part of the puzzle is the advertiser network
If your main goal is "How can I make money?" then maybe. And that's one of the huge reasons that YouTube is the mess that it is.
For the rest of us, this is not important at all. In fact, I am happy that there is no advertiser network whatsoever. if I put something on the web, I do not do it because I expect compensation. I am not alone in this sentiment.
Most content creators need to be compensated to continue making content. Advertising isn't the only solution but it does allow viewers to watch without paying.
PeerTube needs content creators to get on board. Having options for monetizing content could encourage creators to use PeerTube.
> Most content creators need to be compensated to continue making content.
That's the problem right there. "Content creators". Protein factories churning out videos for money.
Not every platform needs "content creators" - sometimes people with interesting things to share are enough, and these tend to use side revenue to fund their sharing.
What other moniker would you give to people that create videos for others to consume regardless of financial incentive?
Many of the YouTube channels I consume didnt start for any other reason than making things for others. They found popularity and decided to make a go at doing it professionally. Making quality content cost money and time. Expecting everybody to make videos on their own dime for posterity is unrealistic.
That might have been a problem a few years ago, but by now many content creators are not solely relying on advertising money (which itself was prompted by YouTube fucking up).
> Most content creators need to be compensated to continue making content.
False. The continued growth of Vimeo and even YouTube show this as well.
> Advertising isn't the only solution but it does allow viewers to watch without paying.
False.
> PeerTube needs content creators to get on board.
If by "content creators" you mean Fuck Jerry Media or whoever, then no, it really doesn't. If by "content creators" you just mean "those who create content without the expectation of financial gain" then PeerTube is doing ok.
> Having options for monetizing content could encourage creators to use PeerTube.
Again, if "How do I monetize this?" is your primary reason for the content, maybe the content doesn't need to be there. That's the point that people are missing.
If your goal is "make money" instead of "share useful information" then you are part of this problem.
There's a possibility to add donation links and the icon is then visible on every video. Patreon is big for a reason: people actually use it.
I'd rather donate to the content creators I want to see thrive than be bombarded with ads for things I don't want anyway.
The peertube devs refuse to incorporate monetization beyond donations, but they DO have a plugin system. It's not beyond imagination for someone (person or group) to add something like "paid scrobbling" where people add e.g 5€ on their account and then it's divided depending on certain criteria. That criteria could be for example:
- always give 50% to my subscriptions
- give the rest to creators of videos that I have watched which:
* have these tags
* are longer than 5 minutes
* and that I have watched at least 50% or 5 minutes of, which ever comes first
All of these would be opt-in or course to reduce the likelihood of uploaders artificially lengthening or shortening their videos (those magic 10 minutes on youtube), or trying to discover common user settings and tailoring their videos to fit those settings.
Tada. No ads, user-defined distribution of resources, yada yada.
Patreon has its own issues. I wished it would be less dominant in the English-speaking donation 'market'.
I was hoping that Flattr would be able to provide a Chromium-free, 'Brave-like' experience, especially with their browser plugin, but if anything it has been losing popularity (despite being years older than Patreon!).
For a reason that escapes me, they even recently decided to officially remove their plugin, so now they can even hardly be differentiated from the other Patreon-likes.
Same. I was also hoping to find something that doesn't require me to have a credit card, only accepts USD, and *has* to go through a third party.
Flattr uses credit cards exclusively, Liberapay only uses Stripe, Patreon a host of third parties but no direct transfers, and I have checked out the rest.
Why can't I just transfer the amount I want, when I want, directly to another bank without an intermediary? I'm fine with the donation subscription service knowing how much and to whom I'm donating and taking out but why does it have to talk to so many other services I haven't picked or agreed to interact with?
The mere fact that you use the terms "content" and "content creators" stems from the fact that you're talking about a different category of creator, namely those whose role is to pull in eyes to see the ads which make money for the site owner. The parent poster wants people to see the videos he puts out and is not in it for the money. In the first case the video distribution system is a tool to make money, in the second it is a tool to distribute videos.
Do people forget that for many years since the founding of YouTube, YouTube didn't have any video ads?
The better question is, was not having ads on the YouTube platform a deliberate choice to help grow adoption over its competitors which would have had to have ads to run (at the time) the expensive servers?
† By the way it's a very SV thing to do to think that everything revolves around SV, and therefore excluding Microsoft from the list of the problematic companies. (And including Netflix, which is problematic in its own ways, but at least an order of magnitude less than the "big 5".)
Sadly, some politicians have also been dropping the trailing M, I guess that those big contracts with the military and the healthcare sector have something to do with that…
This is a great alternative to sharing large video files with others by having someone else just watch what they want of it, if you want to ensure it’s more permanent than- let’s say- Google Music.
If the fear is that an evil Google competitor will come along that will do more damage- this wouldn’t enable that. That would take a serious amount of funding and technology, not a free clone of YouTube without all of the infrastructural backing.
That's kind of an issue then - YouTube is only partly (probably a single-digit-percent given they dropped the direct share feature[0]) about sharing videos with friends - most people stick around for the recommendations, ie. the endless stream of interesting/intriguing/funny content. Most of that content currently dominating YT (at least, at the quantity that it's produced) is only possible due to these creators making YouTube their full-time job and getting paid to do it. Linus Tech Tips (which also runs Techquickie and Techlinked) attributes 26% of their total revenue to YT Ads[1], and the other categories (like merchandise/affiliate links) aren't something everyone can do if their videos aren't about products available on Amazon or can't grow their merch at the rate LTT does. If PT is just about sharing videos, then you might as well run a nextcloud instance instead since 'no ads' is a huge downside to PT for creators.
I'm pretty sure that one of the main reasons that YouTube 'won' is that it was easy to just share these videos with friends/family, and also straightforward to enable/disable public sharing of them.
I've never even heard of that 'direct share' feature, but have used the private and unreferenced settings on my videos many times over the years.
Enough advertising already. There have to be better ways to monetize things than turning everything into a billboard. I'm willing to pay for stuff, but I'll fight tooth and nail against being advertised to.
Besides the unwanted cognitive load it imposes, advertisers want feedback and that means they're incentivized to invade my privacy as well as intrude upon my attention.
Unless you're a baller youtuber with subscribers in the millions, youtube's monetization sucks. The game if you're a small fish is to use youtube to get people off youtube, because if you don't, you won't make anything.
Advertisement on Youtube is as irrelevant as it has ever been.
After the "Adpocalypse" where the money you could make from advertisement significantly dropped for most creators, they recognized that relying only on Youtube is a bad idea and diversified. Since then other avenues (Twitch, Patreon, merch, ad placements) have become their primary sources of income.
For mid-size creators Youtube ads are not enough to make a living from it and for big creators with low production expenses (e.g. gaming videos) that _could_ make a living from it, it's not a significant portion of their income if they diversified (and most creators that haven't are not on the platform anymore).
The technology behind the fediverse is an important brick, so PeerTube 3 is interesting. But the house will only be liveable when someone figures out how companies like AppNexus integrate profitably and successfully into the fediverse.
To directly answer your question, I would say no - however it is ideological activism to only enforce those ToS for specific services. The #killallmen hashtag has trended more than once on twitter, for example.
I would suggest in this specific incidence they are enforcing it very consistently in that they aren't punishing anyone for inciting that particular type of violence.
Sure, but no one has actually tried to kill all men. They didn't do this latest action until after people were actually killed by the violence incited.
That is giving "kill all men" a metaphorical reading. That is a fair reading, it probably isn't actually a call to violence, they just feel frustrated about something.
The issue is that a fair reading is not being applied evenly. Twitter interprets "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th" [0] as a call to violence. That isn't even close to a fair metaphorical reading, and it was probably meant literally.
The post made clear that it wasn't about the tweet itself, but the broader context and how the tweet was being interpreted by communities who sought to do harm.
You can argue that's not fair to Trump, and don't pretend his accounts were banned for the literal meaning of the words, when the post you linked to makes clear the thinking behind the decision.
That is no way comparable. This would be like if there was a video game where you killed politicians with machetes and then suddenly a bunch of politicians were killed in machete attacks.
At that point, you wouldn’t be able to say the video game was not a cause. This is not blaming Trump for abstract violence in general, but for specific violence that he called for actually happening.
Right, but the violence actually happened. If we suddenly had people reading the #killallmen hashtag as literal, and start killing men, then Twitter would likely ban it. Once Trump’s tweets led to an actual terrorist attack, they banned him.
It is not a perfect system, but I think banning based on result is not an unfair system.
After a quick search, yes there is at least one incident of a woman who killed a boy and stated that she wanted to kill all men. There may be more, I haven't spent much time on the subject, either way the definition of incitement doesn't require anyone to follow through with the incited actions.
I definitely think that the person who killed a boy and stated that she wants to kill all men — I definitely think they shouldn’t have a Twitter account
Has Twitter been made aware of this person and won’t suspend their account?
How is it going to be a profitable opportunity? No brand wants to be associated with the content that is being blocked, so there is no advertiser demand for alternative platforms.
The advertiser network is one of the main things that Flixxo has tried to capitalize on, but with YouTube(/Twitch) being so dominant, and them being backed up by Google(/Amazon), it so far doesn't seem to be able to break out of its South American bubble.
That piece of the YouTube puzzle is important to capitalists. It is of no importance to people who want to share video. And as for those who want to (try and) make a living off of sharing videos online - they can ask for monetary support and often get some.
Now to wait and see how long until we get fined / arrested for using it! /s
On a more serious note, this release looks awesome! I wonder if at some point, the real value add / perceived value of search and / or discovery on streaming and video platforms will cease to be relevant. It seems like search / reach is quickly becoming the only reason creators who directly monetize content distribute their content solely on YouTube.
This seems extremely relevant given everything going on. Do we have to worry about the same deplatforming and data tracking as we see on other media sites? Asking because I just don’t know - I don’t want to hop over just to have the same problems.
It's decentralized. You can run your own server and post your stuff on it. That doesn't guarantee you a platform in the first place, but PeerTube itself can't really deplatform you. You could be deplatformed further up the stack, though, by your hosting provider, ssl provider, DNS registrar, etc.
Maybe hosting isn't that hard to do it yourself, but what about SSL and DNS, or maybe even up to the ISP level? Is it feasible for a small group of people to build infrastructure to achieve total independence from deplatforming (within charity budgets)?
TOR hidden services are, I think, the only quick and easy way to do this. Pirate Bay has been reasonably successful at staying accessible in the open, but not without considerable expense as I understand.
Onboarding that guy on any alternative platform would be a huge marketing coverage and grow in userbase for the said platform. I wonder if a company will try to play this card.
The issue is that then a lot of very toxic people will go to that platform and there will be a lot of very toxic content. Then all the people who aren't toxic will leave the platform because they don't want to be subjected to that content. Then advertisers will leave because they don't want their brands associated with that content. Then app stores will drop the app because they don't want their brands associated with that content. Then the platform essentially dies or stagnates.
In what way? Gab was banned on most app stores as I understand it. Gab seems to be user financed which has historically paid out less than advertising. Mastodon basically blacklisted them everywhere it could (clients, instances, etc.) so they're not really part of the fediverse. Gab is for all intent and purposes not part of the Mastodon platform because Mastodon knew what would happen if it was.
Gab was indeed blacklisted in many (though not all?) Mastodon apps.
My point is that, since Gab "joined" Mastodon, nothing of what you have predicted happened to Mastodon. My hope is that the same things will (not) happen to Peertube, for the same reasons.
Except the point I responded to talked about marketing and a huge user increase. Mastodon hasn't gained marketing or users, Gab did. They use the same code mostly but are separate platforms for all intent and purposes. You can't have your candy and eat it too.
Just in case this is a serious question, without editorialising, the following has happened in the past 48 hours:
* Trump has been bannned from Twitter.
* Trump has attempted to use the POTUS account, and had those tweets removed.
* Trump has been removed from Facebook.
* Trump has been banned from Twitch.
* The Discord server for the_donald has been banned from Discord.
* Parler has been removed from the Google Play Store and the App Store.
* AWS has announced plans to discontinue Parler's hosting.
And I think that's about it, for very recently. For those who support Trump, "deplatforming" is a major concern, as Trump has now lost access to essentially all of his base via social media. Once he's out of office, he's not going to have anywhere near as significant a reach as he may have.
I think this is roughly equivalent to Visa telling you that it won't do business with you. Which they recently did with Pornhub.
There doesn't seem to be many good solutions. The Refragmentation (http://paulgraham.com/re.html) was the only pg essay I truly disliked, because I didn't want it to be true. Yet here we are.
Maybe not, it's just that even more developers are going to use AWS without even considering other alternatives for hosting, just like using Github for their "open source" projects ?
> * Parler has been removed from the Google Play Store and the App Store.
I support the other "deplatformings" (he loooong had it coming), and am neutral about AWS, but this is bullshit. Google, and especially Apple (where there's no workarounds) shouldn't have the right to ban generic software like that !
If we go back to October-November, we also had a major newspaper banned from Twitter for weeks for posting a story critical of Hunter Biden with an implication that Joe Biden may have been involved in some type of corruption.
To those who voted down the parent, know that your reaction is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Pravda and Izvestia only printed "approved news", we made fun of them here in the west while in the Soviet Union is was said "there is no news in Pravda, no truth in Izvestia". I don't want to go there and will speak up against this type of censorship no matter who gets censored. Let the law be the bar which needs to be passed to be allowed to publish, not some ideological stance. If you do want to use ideology as a guideline to what gets published you a) have to be honest about it and b) don't get too claim protection as a common carrier, i.e. you will be responsible for what gets published through your channel.
Preventing dangerous incitement to violence is in no way recent, not is what is happening now in any way new. The only difference between now and 200 years ago is the amount of damage that speech that is unconstrained by social norms can do. I get very frustrated with all this "Oh no, if we prevent this dangerous person from saying dangerous things our society will fall apart!" while it has been precisely this clamping down on dangerous speech throughout the last ten thousand years that allows us to live together at all.
This would be great if it applied universally. Except,
2020 demonstrated very clearly it only applies to specific violent protest, not all violent protest in general.
I have a hard time understanding why people feel like this is a new thing. If I start shouting obscenities during a live interview on ANY major media outlet, they will immediately kick me off. Is their refusal really the end of Free Speech?
Consider it from this perspective: Donald Trump was elected, not because he represented conservative people so well. Not even close.
He was elected because conservative opinions have been given so little credence versus liberal opinions on the biggest platforms that they turned to someone who would fight those platforms head on.
Liberal voices and opinions have been lauded, applauded, and promoted more than their fair share by most media and social media platforms for decades. That has created deep resentment in large areas of the country.
Donald Trump is a symptom of the disease that American politics and the associated media outlets have contracted.
He is not the disease itself.
The way he is acting is not that surprising to anyone who pays attention to his personality. And the response in the last week by media and social media and big tech companies has also not been surprising, although I think they should have been more measured.
But the underlying problem still remains. De-platforming Donald Trump will not fix the broken and biased system. And every move and countermove escalates the resentment.
I hear you - but, at least in my case, it doesn’t feel true.
I’m from a small town in the upper Midwest. My entire childhood and teenage years were dominated by Rush Limbaugh/Charlie Sykes/et al on the radio and Fox News on the television (always Fox News). Did NPR/CNN/etc exist? Sure - but I (literally) didn’t know anyone who listened/watched them until college.
This idea that conservatives are being crushed under the boot of “liberal” media feels like a cop-out. Conservative politicians could have gone big tent in the 80-90’s, but they didn’t. They focused on consolidation of a specific demographic and are now in a kerfluffal because that base is becoming a cultural minority.
Edit: also - the resentment was always there. Go listen to Rush in the 90s. Nothing about what conservatives are complaining about is new.
I'm afraid that Trump's case is exceptional to the point that it's only hindering the discussion about what Twitter(/Facebook/YouTube) should be allowed or not to do.
Press releases rely on press organisations to distribute, which aren't under Trump's control, unlike his previous social media accounts, which had a reach of millions by themselves.
I am not trying to impute any kind of values onto these facts. They're just things that have happened around the deplatforming of Trump, post 6th January.
The merged entity known as Centurylink/Lumen/Level 3 is a common carrier unlike Twitter, Facebook, etc, they have no need to cease serving anyone and would lose their status as a common carrier if they were to start moderating the content of the data that clients move over their pipes.
If served with an injunction by a court, or if the user failed to pay their bills, those are the only cases in which you would see them stop serving a client.
And? Those multi-billion companies have been toeing a certain line for a long time now, partly in the hope of being left alone to gather even more money if they only did some token gestures, partly because they've taken on their own share of activists in their HR and communications divisions.
they're referring to seditious government officials skirting with calls for violence against political rivals being banned from large social media platforms because enough is enough.
So will PeerTube just become a tool for extremism?
Or is that a feature? Are humans actually ready for the internet? I am not so sure. Just visited parler, and imagine a whole world filled with bat shit. Crazy, right?
The tool might be used for extremism, in the same sense that ffmpeg, email, and HTTP are. That is not the same as saying most users of PeerTube will be inundated with extremism though.
Wouldn't having all speech be controlled by giant platforms be batshit?
It isn't anyone's job to rescue Parler. They're locked into a cloud provider, and that was their own doing. If they can't survive, tough kitty.
However, an open internet, with the ability to run apps outside of app stores (needed for new peer to peer stuff to thrive), and use of crypto would mean someone could make a Parler. Mastodon and Matrix have had major controversies.
Your local community library is also full of extremism. You will find copies of The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kamph, The Turner Diaries, The Anarchist Cookbook, Platos Republic, In Defense of Selfishness and The Koran.
It has “problematic” works like Huckleberry Finn, Satanic Diaries and To Kill a Mockingbird.
It has works written by known racists such as HP Lovecraft, TS Elliot, Roald Dahl, Dr Seuss and Kingsley Amis.
It has hard copies of dangerous films that have been memoyholed by Prime and Netflix like Gone With The Wind and The Jazz Singer. It may also have DVDs that have been produced, directed and acted in by vile, cancelled individuals like Kevin Spacey, Louise CK, Harvey Weinstein, or Mel Gibson.
Good God, it might even have a copy of the Jenna in blackface episode from the third season of 30 Rock. I am clutching my pearls and getting the vapors just thinking about it.
Probably, that's OK, because while there's no central platform authority there's also no barrier to anti-extremists using disruptive tactics against it.
Opensource needs to somehow unify. With more awareness of open-source developers and projects between each other, we could maybe make some real difference.
Opensource devs and maintainers could all from each other and collaborate together.
Damn... I sound like a business person that throws around words like synergy.
I upgraded my Peertube instance to 3.0 and tried to stream. I noticed that when I did a 4k 60 stream, it was very unstable. It turns out that streaming uses more RAM on the server (I only had a 2 GB digitalocean instance).
When I did the upgrade, I didn't see any mention of how much memory is going to be needed for streaming (in particular if you have multiple streams going in parallel).
I spent like 20 minutes trying to find something I would legitimately want to watch on PeerTube and came up empty. I can't tell if it's because PeerTube just happens to have a different type of content than what I like to watch, or because I don't understand how to make the best use of the search functionality, or if the search functionality is just bad. Regardless, it's a real tough sell for me to replace YouTube with a video service where I can't find anything I want to watch!
YouTube used to be like that. I think most people don't realize that for years YouTube was only good for watching Simpsons and Family Guy episodes. Without that start it never would have taken off.
Some instances have global search (search across instances) activated, but there's also a website written by the devs of peertube to do that global search https://sepiasearch.org/
You can use that to first find the videos you like and decide if you like the instances they are on.
Edit: To be honest, I spend 20 minutes on youtube trying to find the stuff that I want to watch and give up often too. Their content discovery really is terrible and only shows the highest rated and most watched, which doesn't help if you've watched them already.
Yeah, I tried SepiaSearch, but I couldn't find anything. As an example, I searched for "Golf". The first two videos are Twitch clips of people playing video game mini-golf and "golf bowling". Then there's a video about the Trump administration and coronavirus, and then a bunch of videos on topics that have low edit distance, like "wolf" and "gold".
Maybe that's just a bad topic and no one is uploading golf content to PeerTube.
It would be great if https://media.ccc.de/ would switch to PeerTube but they have their own stack. Still, conference videos are one way to resolve the chicken egg problem.
Random side note, what if they have a mass-marketed "echo-like" device that is to form a meshnet that's not part of the regular internet. Would it happen?
I get it's not like a trans atlantic line connecting continents and bandwidth etc... but other than jamming it would be "free". The other paranoia is hardware backdoor/software itself eg. AES encryption... seems overkill
I host a site with lots of videos so am curious about this.
If I add this and another peertube syncs with mine it sounds like I would still be responsible for bandwidth to their users watching my videos from their peertube?
Does any have experience with how much bandwidth is saved from p2p part? Given my content I imagine most users will not be watching same videos at same time so p2p is negligible benefit.
For live streaming, the p2p is very interesting. I will try to link a very interesting test where a lot of server bandwidth was supplied by p2p. That can be very useful. About regular videos, even if only 1 other person is watching, p2p is in effect.
Can peertube be split into two parts that live on separate servers: one that hosts the web interface and the other that seeds the videos?
I would love to use peertube but the webhosting infrastructure I use would never be able to provide the large bandwidth needed for seeding videos. I do have ample bandwidth on non web hosting servers though.
If you would live in a country where CP is accepted, rent a server or VPS there, get your domain there, get SSL there, and maybe accept only local payments, you'd be 'fine'. As in: nothing will stop you.
You can replace CP with 'copyrighted material', or 'political activity' etc. in above.
Turned around: the providers, and/or operators of a node (server, instance) are liable. Not the platform.
To go further: there is a configurable cross activity between instances, such that videos and comments published on one side can be seen from the other side, but only if the admins have allowed it. You can't end up accidentally showing unwanted material unless you trusted someone who publishes it, so it comes down to who do you accept in your circle
You can’t label everything you disagree with as extremism. Advocate for the destruction of Israel on the basis that the Muslim god said so? That’s extremism. Holding different political views? That’s part of being a healthy and diverse society.
I wish Americans would grow up and learn to coexist.
The problem is that a lot of these websites that exist as a safe haven for those who have been deplatformed are cesspools. The early adopters are the most toxic people, and things just go downhill from there. Seriously, go look at parler or voat. Here's an archive the voat post where it's shutdown was announced: https://archive.is/0kOST Open it up and Control-F the n word or any antisemetic slur. That's not the sort of discourse you'd expect on a healthy and diverse platform.
Edit: I should add that the threshold for Youtube demonetization is probably lower than the threshold for getting a subreddit banned, so maybe Peertube won't face the same fate. The federated model might help too, does each Peertube instance behave like a separate community? Are there any instances with communities yet?
So you provide the tools for users to moderate their own content,. I understand that my email provider has a spam filter, but it would be unacceptable if I was unable to tweak those settings myself. Why do we expect anything less from social media?
Considering that Gab has (kind of) "joined" Mastodon, and Mastodon hasn't collapsed into a garbage fire, federated and/or decentralized services seem to be resistant to this issue.
Please don't post political or religious flamebait to HN. This comment is seriously not cool—it's basically starting yet another fire where there wasn't one already burning. HN is burning in 17 different places right now and we need users like you to refrain from arson and/or criminal negligence. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too, dang. You’re asking us to refrain from politics in the same breath in which you’re sweeping any sign of dissent under the rug. No wonder your house is on fire! This whole damn country is on fire, and you don’t fight fires with more gasoline.
That's not what I'm asking. I'm asking people to stick to the site guidelines. The rules don't stop applying when a topic is political—on the contrary, they apply more.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
We ban accounts that consistently disrespect those rules and ignore our requests to correct this. What else would we do? The alternative is to allow a minority of flamewarring users to destroy the entire commons for everybody.
As for 'sweeping dissent under the rug', that's not what we're doing at all. People with contrarian views and people with non-contrarian views both need to follow the rules here.
"… What about Twitter? I have no idea what Twitter is good for. But if it flips out every tyrant in the Middle East, I'm interested." - Michael Rogers, Founder, Practical Futurist; Futurist-in-Residence, New York Times Company[0]
Looking at the list of instances available, it seems that PeerTube is particularly popular among French-speaking people compared to relative relative popularity of the language itself.
Is there any reason cultural-wise to suggest why that may be?
The great feature of this v3 is live streaming, and we are proud to say that it works very well !
...
The main points to remember :
The lag (between video maker and audience) varies between 30 seconds and 1mn, as expected ;
Depending on the power of the server and its load (number of simultaneous live shows, transcoding, etc.), PeerTube can provide hundreds of simultaneous views (but we’re not sure that it will scale to thousands… at least not yet !) ;
Administration options are included for people hosting the instance ;
The features are minimalist by design, and we have documented our recommendations for creating a live ;
The live can be done with most video streaming tool (we recommend the free-libre software OBS), with two options :
An « short-lived » live, with a unique identifier, will offer the possibility to save the video and display a replay on the same link ;
A « permanent » live stream, which will work more like a Twitch channel, but without the replay option."