8 ms·

PeerTube v5: the result of 5 years’ handcrafting

196 points by ealhad 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ealhad 4y ago
PeerTube is a free, decentralised and federated video platform, and a part of the fediverse, meaning you can interact with it via Mastodon and other tools, thanks to the ActivityPub protocol. There is only one paid developer, working for the French non-profit Framasoft – and I think it's important to share this in non French-speaking spaces. If you want to help them "Collectivise / Convivialise the internet": https://soutenir.framasoft.org/en/ https://soutenir.framasoft.org/en/
- Tepix 4y ago
  > ... and I think it's important to share this in non French-speaking spaces. Is there a french version of this article?
  - antx 4y ago
    Yes there is! [0] [0]: https://framablog.org/2022/12/13/peertube-v5-le-resultat-de-5-ans-de-travail-artisanal/ https://framablog.org/2022/12/13/peertube-v5-le-resultat-de-...
sys42590 4y ago
I truly like PeerTube as a technology, however I still haven't managed to build even a minimal stock of PeerTube based content creators I'd enjoy to follow. On Youtube it's easy, there's much more high quality content about any topic imaginable than I ever could watch in my limited time on this planet, but on PeerTube instances I haven't found anything that made me come back to that particular creator. So my question is, can you recommend a good cooking PeerTuber, or a good one discussing the newest single board computers? It's really difficult finding something worth watching.
- grey_earthling 4y ago
  Fedi.video has a lot of recommendations, which you may find useful: => https://social.growyourown.services/@FediVideo https://social.growyourown.services/@FediVideo
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  Why? From your comment I get that you haven't checked into peertube in a while. There is tilvids.com that is slowly becoming the premier high quality peertube instance that is taking baby steps into being an educational instance. They will gladly host any creator if they align with their goals. Besides, if a cooking creator wants to roll their own instance, invite other cooking creators to join in, tilvids.com would gladly peer with them. The point is, tilvids.com is showing how you can build a good community outside of YouTube. A good step
  - sys42590 4y ago
    TILvids looks quite well curated, seems to have some interesting content. My main entrypoint is usually sepiasearch.org, where I'm looking for specific topics. And more often than not the results were a bit disappointing.
  - skyfaller 4y ago
    Thanks for mentioning tilvids.com! You got me to subscribe to like my second Peertube channel: https://tilvids.com/c/veronicaexplains_channel https://tilvids.com/c/veronicaexplains_channel I'll say that the depth and breadth of topics still seems lacking (lots of meta content about FOSS and the fediverse, which is only interesting to early adopters), but if it becomes easier to start, join, and use Peertube instances, I feel confident this will change over time.
    - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
      sure. this seems to be a one passionate guy operation so its only so much the guy can do. i literally remember this guy coming on peertube github and reading about him explaining how he was planning to set up a educational instance. anyway, as i said, this is an experiment supposed to urge more people to take the plunge into becoming hosts and managing their communities. If there is a bad apple down the road, the community can self adjust accordingly. the point is, people need to be aware about choice. this is doing a good job
zelphirkalt 4y ago
Question about Peertube: Is it possible to personally view and verify each uploaded video, as the host/admin of the service? (time constraints aside) My concern is, that if I host a peertube instance and anyone uploads illegal stuff, I am going to hang for it. So perhaps I would like a Peetube instance just for my friends an me, where I can personally review each video, to not get into trouble. Basically doing the job which the big platforms are too high and noble to properly do and use their algorithms for.
- nodja 4y ago
  Yes, there's a global setting that will mark newly uploaded videos as blocked automatically, they'll show up in a special moderation area where you can decide what to do with the videos. You can also mark users as trusted in which their videos would bypass the automatic flagging.
- worldofmatthew 4y ago
  Governments are trying to make it harder for the average person to host a community, while claiming to hate big tech.....
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  I thought that platforms were protected as long as they take down illegal content when they are informed about it?
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    In your country, maybe. But in most places, that isn't the case. If there is something illegal on your server, you're going to be held responsible for it, especially if you don't have robust evidence of who else put it there (ie. a verified and accurate name and address of the uploader - something that illegal video uploaders rarely leave behind).
    - viraptor 4y ago
      Even in the US, I would assume there's some practical threshold where you can't hide behind DMCA and say "I wasn't aware 100% of movies I store are copyrighted and I've acted on all requests so far".
worldofmatthew 4y ago
I tried PeerTube but deleted it after it ignored my custom media profiles for AV1 and silently encoded the videos as AVC. No official way of using FOSS formats because the head of PeerTube does not want give people the choice of cutting off Apple users and the official plugin for creating custom encoding profiles just encoded as default AVC when MY AV1 profile was selected.
- snvzz 4y ago
  Reads like a bug. Did you file a bug report?
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  > because the head of PeerTube does not want give people the choice of cutting off Apple users Why do you think that ? AV1 seems to be supported, albeit still with some bugs maybe ?: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues?q=is%3Aissue+av1 https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues?q=is%3Aissue+a...
AstixAndBelix 4y ago
PeerTube is basically developed by a single guy and has solved the infrastructure problem that many organizations have when wanting to host videos. Any organization can now host VoDs and live events on their own server(s) without being bled to death by the hosting provider since the badwidth will be shared among the concurrent viewers. This is such an underappreciated piece of technology that I hope many intitutions will adopt, at least as a backup against using the usual Youtube/Facebook/Vimeo/Twitter/Instagram as content hosts
- ealhad 4y ago
  Yup, it's that amazing. That's why I think said institutions should donate to the project ;)
- TheCaptain4815 4y ago
  Is it possible to embed PeerTube videos within your own custom frontend or are you forced to use theres? As in, could someone create a clone of the New York Times for example and within each article have a video embedded (from PeerTube tech)? I've wanted to create a combat themed video site for years, since most sites get censored, and PeerTube always seemed like a perfect solution.
  - mxuribe 4y ago
    I'm not sure if the following link is exactly what you need (you'll need some more info)...But, i thinki it is in the direction that you need: https://docs.joinpeertube.org/api-embed-player https://docs.joinpeertube.org/api-embed-player Basically, what you are asking is possible, and you should navigate around the documentation specific to the Peertube api. (Sorry, trying not to sound like a guy who responds with "RTFM"....but, i guess i sort of am; sorry :-) But, hey, what you want is possible! :-)
raybb 4y ago
I love the idea of PeerTube and often browse videos on tilvids (a fairly curated instance). However, lately I've been wishing for a tool where lectures could be hosted that has nice searchable transcripts, allows people have have comments and discussion based on the time. Something kinda like Loom but more oriented around making lectures annotateable by students for referring to later.
- AstixAndBelix 4y ago
  Someone could write a server plugin that passes the video's audio through the latest Mozilla's STT language model to get the transcription with timestamps. The tools are already there, if you know how to make it happen you shouldn't wait for a single guy in France to reach feature parity with Google
  - raybb 4y ago
    Basically, what I'd like is an open source version of otter.ai. It's doable but I think the key is making something with a nice design :)
iandanforth 4y ago
Not a single embedded video on the page showing off the platform. Technologists' blindness to product and market building is so painful.
- codazoda 4y ago
  I came here because the walls of text on this tell me a bunch of very specific features (especially new ones) without telling me what this does. I assume it’s a decentralized video app, that you run yourself, but I can’t find even a little bit of description.
- AstixAndBelix 4y ago
  This is an update announcement on the company's blog. It's not the project's landing page.
  - iandanforth 4y ago
    Neither the homepage of the company, the linked page to get the update, nor the top level https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/ contain any video.
    - AstixAndBelix 4y ago
      then what's this? https://i.postimg.cc/vTHXhxFC/7089-F268-8-C2-A-4935-A280-841268547003.jpg https://i.postimg.cc/vTHXhxFC/7089-F268-8-C2-A-4935-A280-841...
      - iandanforth 4y ago
        A below the fold, secondary tab that contains a link to a separate page with a video?
        AstixAndBelix 4y ago
        That's like asking AWS's landing page to have a live database environment embedded into the website. PeerTube explicitely links you to example videos and channels to showcase the platform. If they just embedded a video you wouldn't understand the scope of the project
ivoras 4y ago
This actually makes me sad :( Hear me out: the Internet was supposed to be about peer-to-peer connected computers, and the privileged roles ISPs and later "cloud" providers assumed changed that for the worse. It was SUPPOSED to enable me, myself, hosting my videos, on my computer(s) and making them available to whomever I want to, including everyone. This is how early protocols were designed. Everyone was supposed to be a SMTP (e-mail) host. Everyone was supposed to run FTP and HTTP. Everyone got an equally routable (the link quality depends, of course) address, not some 3rd level NAT retail monstrosity. If you needed aggregation, you make search sites like Google (and AltaVista and others before it) and RSS to pull data from multiple sources and CACHE IT LOCALLY. Of course I welcome projects like PeerTube, but I'd much rather go back to the original idea. No ISPs or Clouds, only Peers. With Internet like water grid - a utility.
- rakoo 4y ago
  You can perfectly run peertube at home.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > Hear me out: the Internet was supposed to be about peer-to-peer connected computers, and the privileged roles ISPs and later "cloud" providers assumed changed that for the worse. The main problem aren't privileged actors like ISPs (although shit like asymmetric DSL or CGNAT definitely prevents people from self-hosting)... it is abuse and the complete unwillingness of almost everybody from private actors over governments to international organizations to put a fucking stop on it. You open up a server on the Internet? Not even sixty seconds and the first Shodan or whatever using script-kiddies will attempt to hack you. And god forbid you run some popular software that can be sniffed like Drupal or Wordpress - you end up in Shodan just as well and will be automatedly exploited as soon as the CVE gives enough hints to people to write an exploit. You wish to send your own emails? You find yourself greylisted by almost everyone in their futile attempts to keep their users from spam. You wish to communicate with someone? Better read up on crypto because governments and ISPs just love to mine data. Operate a service that allows user-generated content? Beware for a deluge of everything from warez groups to CSAM spreaders that can and will expose you to serious legal liability. The old protocols were all designed with implicit trust in mind and the assumption that no actor on the internet would abuse their position. That worked reasonably well as long as it was only universities (but even then, first viruses appeared from enterprising prankster students)... but once the Internet got mainstream, all of that broke down, and it completely collapsed once people started realizing they might make money shilling grey-imported penile enlargement pills. And the more people were on the Internet, the harder the work of "abuse departments" got, which led to most organizations simply dismantling the department or redirecting complaints to /dev/null. The fact that some governments (particularly China and Russia) take a completely blind eye towards hacking originating from their countries as long as they themselves aren't targeted (just look how many malware samples have a dead-man switch when they encounter information that the target might be Russian) just makes the problem worse. Unfortunately, by that time the old protocols and standards were so widespread in use there was no chance to replace them, and so layers upon layers upon layers of bullshit got placed over the old layers in the end.
kmfrk 4y ago
Has anyone here experimented with IPFS to create a mirrored video archive for things like their YouTube channels? I don't hear much about IPFS these days.
- explorigin 4y ago
  IPFS got their fat investment check and got to work on their own crypto-currency (filecoin). I kinda feel like the project lost its way.
- rakoo 4y ago
  IPFS still has poor performance for very little innovation. Bittorrent still works perfectly fine, and in fact peertube uses webtorrent to distribute content from browser to browser to offload the server. It is perfectly possible to mirror peertube channels on bittorrent
- Sidneys1 4y ago
  I have - I've used IPFS to archive the channel of a creator I like (in true data-hoarding fashion). It is neither convenient nor especially easy. It's mostly managed by a home-grown bash script that uses yt-dlp to archive videos, organized by playlist, and then update a IPNS key. I plan on writing up a blog post about it at some point, if there's interest. I mentioned the project to the particular creator's fan discord (the creator doesn't participate with the community at all themselves) and there was a surprising amount of backlash from the community leaders. Most of the concerns revolved around the notion that I was somehow stealing ad revenue from the creator (despite my explanations that IPFS is not at all a convenient platform for video consumption). I might take the IPFS node off of the public network to circumvent this worry, and only peer with other parties interested in archival of that specific channel.
- unintendedcons 4y ago
  The incentives are aligned towards token value and investment growth instead of technology development, inside the sausage factory. I hope they get back to making useful software soon, but I'm not holding my breath. At least it's all open source.
Zuiii 4y ago
What are the privacy implications of using peertube for the viewer? Is his IP address exposed to other viewers? Does peertube offer a way to shield viewers from one another?
- DoItToMe81 4y ago
  It's exposed to anyone who cares to packet sniff. There are features for users to opt out of P2P data sharing, but no way to hide the user IP with it enabled, short of the user connecting with a VPN.
DoItToMe81 4y ago
Peertube is amazing. My cheap VPS punches well above its weight thanks to it, and I can host videos that have had (low) hundreds of thousands of views without having to rate limit anybody or force registration. I'm always quite concerned that it's practically a one man project, though. I hope it can build the community of developers that it deserves.
KronisLV 4y ago
Looking at the article, I can't help but to find the summary of the past releases to be really nice: PeerTube v1 (Oct. 2018) allows you to create a video platform with federation, peer-to-peer streaming, redundancy, search tools and multilingual interface. PeerTube v2 (Nov 2019) brings notifications, playlists and plugins. PeerTube v3 (Jan. 2021) adds federated search, live and peer-to-peer streaming. PeerTube v4 (Dec. 2021) allows to customise each platform’s homepage, to sort and filter displayed videos, and to manage them more easily. Kind of makes me wish most software projects had summaries of changelogs like that. For example, for versions of PostgreSQL/MySQL/React/Vue/Java/.NET or anything else - just to see what the most notable features have been in the releases over the years. Also, PeerTube itself is pretty nice, I'm still hosting v4 for my own needs and use it as a solution for backing up and encoding stream VODs from Twitch. Might eventually get a YouTube account, but still keep it as a backup just to minimize the risk of losing the videos, though storing hours of them does definitely take up some space on my server's HDDs, backups of those included.

196 points by ealhad 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

PeerTube is a free, decentralised and federated video platform, and a part of the fediverse, meaning you can interact with it via Mastodon and other tools, thanks to the ActivityPub protocol. There is only one paid developer, working for the French non-profit Framasoft – and I think it's important to share this in non French-speaking spaces. If you want to help them "Collectivise / Convivialise the internet": https://soutenir.framasoft.org/en/ https://soutenir.framasoft.org/en/

Tepix 4y ago
> ... and I think it's important to share this in non French-speaking spaces. Is there a french version of this article?
- antx 4y ago
  Yes there is! [0] [0]: https://framablog.org/2022/12/13/peertube-v5-le-resultat-de-5-ans-de-travail-artisanal/ https://framablog.org/2022/12/13/peertube-v5-le-resultat-de-...

sys42590 4y ago

I truly like PeerTube as a technology, however I still haven't managed to build even a minimal stock of PeerTube based content creators I'd enjoy to follow. On Youtube it's easy, there's much more high quality content about any topic imaginable than I ever could watch in my limited time on this planet, but on PeerTube instances I haven't found anything that made me come back to that particular creator. So my question is, can you recommend a good cooking PeerTuber, or a good one discussing the newest single board computers? It's really difficult finding something worth watching.

grey_earthling 4y ago
Fedi.video has a lot of recommendations, which you may find useful: => https://social.growyourown.services/@FediVideo https://social.growyourown.services/@FediVideo
2Gkashmiri 4y ago
Why? From your comment I get that you haven't checked into peertube in a while. There is tilvids.com that is slowly becoming the premier high quality peertube instance that is taking baby steps into being an educational instance. They will gladly host any creator if they align with their goals. Besides, if a cooking creator wants to roll their own instance, invite other cooking creators to join in, tilvids.com would gladly peer with them. The point is, tilvids.com is showing how you can build a good community outside of YouTube. A good step
- sys42590 4y ago
  TILvids looks quite well curated, seems to have some interesting content. My main entrypoint is usually sepiasearch.org, where I'm looking for specific topics. And more often than not the results were a bit disappointing.
- skyfaller 4y ago
  Thanks for mentioning tilvids.com! You got me to subscribe to like my second Peertube channel: https://tilvids.com/c/veronicaexplains_channel https://tilvids.com/c/veronicaexplains_channel I'll say that the depth and breadth of topics still seems lacking (lots of meta content about FOSS and the fediverse, which is only interesting to early adopters), but if it becomes easier to start, join, and use Peertube instances, I feel confident this will change over time.
  - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
    sure. this seems to be a one passionate guy operation so its only so much the guy can do. i literally remember this guy coming on peertube github and reading about him explaining how he was planning to set up a educational instance. anyway, as i said, this is an experiment supposed to urge more people to take the plunge into becoming hosts and managing their communities. If there is a bad apple down the road, the community can self adjust accordingly. the point is, people need to be aware about choice. this is doing a good job

zelphirkalt 4y ago

Question about Peertube: Is it possible to personally view and verify each uploaded video, as the host/admin of the service? (time constraints aside) My concern is, that if I host a peertube instance and anyone uploads illegal stuff, I am going to hang for it. So perhaps I would like a Peetube instance just for my friends an me, where I can personally review each video, to not get into trouble. Basically doing the job which the big platforms are too high and noble to properly do and use their algorithms for.

nodja 4y ago
Yes, there's a global setting that will mark newly uploaded videos as blocked automatically, they'll show up in a special moderation area where you can decide what to do with the videos. You can also mark users as trusted in which their videos would bypass the automatic flagging.
worldofmatthew 4y ago
Governments are trying to make it harder for the average person to host a community, while claiming to hate big tech.....
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
I thought that platforms were protected as long as they take down illegal content when they are informed about it?
- londons_explore 4y ago
  In your country, maybe. But in most places, that isn't the case. If there is something illegal on your server, you're going to be held responsible for it, especially if you don't have robust evidence of who else put it there (ie. a verified and accurate name and address of the uploader - something that illegal video uploaders rarely leave behind).
  - viraptor 4y ago
    Even in the US, I would assume there's some practical threshold where you can't hide behind DMCA and say "I wasn't aware 100% of movies I store are copyrighted and I've acted on all requests so far".

worldofmatthew 4y ago

I tried PeerTube but deleted it after it ignored my custom media profiles for AV1 and silently encoded the videos as AVC. No official way of using FOSS formats because the head of PeerTube does not want give people the choice of cutting off Apple users and the official plugin for creating custom encoding profiles just encoded as default AVC when MY AV1 profile was selected.

snvzz 4y ago
Reads like a bug. Did you file a bug report?
BlueTemplar 4y ago
> because the head of PeerTube does not want give people the choice of cutting off Apple users Why do you think that ? AV1 seems to be supported, albeit still with some bugs maybe ?: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues?q=is%3Aissue+av1 https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues?q=is%3Aissue+a...

AstixAndBelix 4y ago

PeerTube is basically developed by a single guy and has solved the infrastructure problem that many organizations have when wanting to host videos. Any organization can now host VoDs and live events on their own server(s) without being bled to death by the hosting provider since the badwidth will be shared among the concurrent viewers. This is such an underappreciated piece of technology that I hope many intitutions will adopt, at least as a backup against using the usual Youtube/Facebook/Vimeo/Twitter/Instagram as content hosts

ealhad 4y ago
Yup, it's that amazing. That's why I think said institutions should donate to the project ;)
TheCaptain4815 4y ago
Is it possible to embed PeerTube videos within your own custom frontend or are you forced to use theres? As in, could someone create a clone of the New York Times for example and within each article have a video embedded (from PeerTube tech)? I've wanted to create a combat themed video site for years, since most sites get censored, and PeerTube always seemed like a perfect solution.
- mxuribe 4y ago
  I'm not sure if the following link is exactly what you need (you'll need some more info)...But, i thinki it is in the direction that you need: https://docs.joinpeertube.org/api-embed-player https://docs.joinpeertube.org/api-embed-player Basically, what you are asking is possible, and you should navigate around the documentation specific to the Peertube api. (Sorry, trying not to sound like a guy who responds with "RTFM"....but, i guess i sort of am; sorry :-) But, hey, what you want is possible! :-)

raybb 4y ago

I love the idea of PeerTube and often browse videos on tilvids (a fairly curated instance). However, lately I've been wishing for a tool where lectures could be hosted that has nice searchable transcripts, allows people have have comments and discussion based on the time. Something kinda like Loom but more oriented around making lectures annotateable by students for referring to later.

AstixAndBelix 4y ago
Someone could write a server plugin that passes the video's audio through the latest Mozilla's STT language model to get the transcription with timestamps. The tools are already there, if you know how to make it happen you shouldn't wait for a single guy in France to reach feature parity with Google
- raybb 4y ago
  Basically, what I'd like is an open source version of otter.ai. It's doable but I think the key is making something with a nice design :)

iandanforth 4y ago

Not a single embedded video on the page showing off the platform. Technologists' blindness to product and market building is so painful.

codazoda 4y ago
I came here because the walls of text on this tell me a bunch of very specific features (especially new ones) without telling me what this does. I assume it’s a decentralized video app, that you run yourself, but I can’t find even a little bit of description.
AstixAndBelix 4y ago
This is an update announcement on the company's blog. It's not the project's landing page.
- iandanforth 4y ago
  Neither the homepage of the company, the linked page to get the update, nor the top level https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/ contain any video.
  - AstixAndBelix 4y ago
    then what's this? https://i.postimg.cc/vTHXhxFC/7089-F268-8-C2-A-4935-A280-841268547003.jpg https://i.postimg.cc/vTHXhxFC/7089-F268-8-C2-A-4935-A280-841...
    - iandanforth 4y ago
      A below the fold, secondary tab that contains a link to a separate page with a video?
      - AstixAndBelix 4y ago
        That's like asking AWS's landing page to have a live database environment embedded into the website. PeerTube explicitely links you to example videos and channels to showcase the platform. If they just embedded a video you wouldn't understand the scope of the project

ivoras 4y ago

This actually makes me sad :( Hear me out: the Internet was supposed to be about peer-to-peer connected computers, and the privileged roles ISPs and later "cloud" providers assumed changed that for the worse. It was SUPPOSED to enable me, myself, hosting my videos, on my computer(s) and making them available to whomever I want to, including everyone. This is how early protocols were designed. Everyone was supposed to be a SMTP (e-mail) host. Everyone was supposed to run FTP and HTTP. Everyone got an equally routable (the link quality depends, of course) address, not some 3rd level NAT retail monstrosity. If you needed aggregation, you make search sites like Google (and AltaVista and others before it) and RSS to pull data from multiple sources and CACHE IT LOCALLY. Of course I welcome projects like PeerTube, but I'd much rather go back to the original idea. No ISPs or Clouds, only Peers. With Internet like water grid - a utility.

rakoo 4y ago
You can perfectly run peertube at home.
mschuster91 4y ago
> Hear me out: the Internet was supposed to be about peer-to-peer connected computers, and the privileged roles ISPs and later "cloud" providers assumed changed that for the worse. The main problem aren't privileged actors like ISPs (although shit like asymmetric DSL or CGNAT definitely prevents people from self-hosting)... it is abuse and the complete unwillingness of almost everybody from private actors over governments to international organizations to put a fucking stop on it. You open up a server on the Internet? Not even sixty seconds and the first Shodan or whatever using script-kiddies will attempt to hack you. And god forbid you run some popular software that can be sniffed like Drupal or Wordpress - you end up in Shodan just as well and will be automatedly exploited as soon as the CVE gives enough hints to people to write an exploit. You wish to send your own emails? You find yourself greylisted by almost everyone in their futile attempts to keep their users from spam. You wish to communicate with someone? Better read up on crypto because governments and ISPs just love to mine data. Operate a service that allows user-generated content? Beware for a deluge of everything from warez groups to CSAM spreaders that can and will expose you to serious legal liability. The old protocols were all designed with implicit trust in mind and the assumption that no actor on the internet would abuse their position. That worked reasonably well as long as it was only universities (but even then, first viruses appeared from enterprising prankster students)... but once the Internet got mainstream, all of that broke down, and it completely collapsed once people started realizing they might make money shilling grey-imported penile enlargement pills. And the more people were on the Internet, the harder the work of "abuse departments" got, which led to most organizations simply dismantling the department or redirecting complaints to /dev/null. The fact that some governments (particularly China and Russia) take a completely blind eye towards hacking originating from their countries as long as they themselves aren't targeted (just look how many malware samples have a dead-man switch when they encounter information that the target might be Russian) just makes the problem worse. Unfortunately, by that time the old protocols and standards were so widespread in use there was no chance to replace them, and so layers upon layers upon layers of bullshit got placed over the old layers in the end.

kmfrk 4y ago

Has anyone here experimented with IPFS to create a mirrored video archive for things like their YouTube channels? I don't hear much about IPFS these days.

explorigin 4y ago
IPFS got their fat investment check and got to work on their own crypto-currency (filecoin). I kinda feel like the project lost its way.
rakoo 4y ago
IPFS still has poor performance for very little innovation. Bittorrent still works perfectly fine, and in fact peertube uses webtorrent to distribute content from browser to browser to offload the server. It is perfectly possible to mirror peertube channels on bittorrent
Sidneys1 4y ago
I have - I've used IPFS to archive the channel of a creator I like (in true data-hoarding fashion). It is neither convenient nor especially easy. It's mostly managed by a home-grown bash script that uses yt-dlp to archive videos, organized by playlist, and then update a IPNS key. I plan on writing up a blog post about it at some point, if there's interest. I mentioned the project to the particular creator's fan discord (the creator doesn't participate with the community at all themselves) and there was a surprising amount of backlash from the community leaders. Most of the concerns revolved around the notion that I was somehow stealing ad revenue from the creator (despite my explanations that IPFS is not at all a convenient platform for video consumption). I might take the IPFS node off of the public network to circumvent this worry, and only peer with other parties interested in archival of that specific channel.
unintendedcons 4y ago
The incentives are aligned towards token value and investment growth instead of technology development, inside the sausage factory. I hope they get back to making useful software soon, but I'm not holding my breath. At least it's all open source.

Zuiii 4y ago

What are the privacy implications of using peertube for the viewer? Is his IP address exposed to other viewers? Does peertube offer a way to shield viewers from one another?

DoItToMe81 4y ago
It's exposed to anyone who cares to packet sniff. There are features for users to opt out of P2P data sharing, but no way to hide the user IP with it enabled, short of the user connecting with a VPN.

DoItToMe81 4y ago

Peertube is amazing. My cheap VPS punches well above its weight thanks to it, and I can host videos that have had (low) hundreds of thousands of views without having to rate limit anybody or force registration. I'm always quite concerned that it's practically a one man project, though. I hope it can build the community of developers that it deserves.

KronisLV 4y ago

Looking at the article, I can't help but to find the summary of the past releases to be really nice: PeerTube v1 (Oct. 2018) allows you to create a video platform with federation, peer-to-peer streaming, redundancy, search tools and multilingual interface. PeerTube v2 (Nov 2019) brings notifications, playlists and plugins. PeerTube v3 (Jan. 2021) adds federated search, live and peer-to-peer streaming. PeerTube v4 (Dec. 2021) allows to customise each platform’s homepage, to sort and filter displayed videos, and to manage them more easily. Kind of makes me wish most software projects had summaries of changelogs like that. For example, for versions of PostgreSQL/MySQL/React/Vue/Java/.NET or anything else - just to see what the most notable features have been in the releases over the years. Also, PeerTube itself is pretty nice, I'm still hosting v4 for my own needs and use it as a solution for backing up and encoding stream VODs from Twitch. Might eventually get a YouTube account, but still keep it as a backup just to minimize the risk of losing the videos, though storing hours of them does definitely take up some space on my server's HDDs, backups of those included.