I read many comments on how PeerTube isn’t sustainable as a YouTube alternative and, while it’s certainly true right now, are we sure it will be the same in the near future?
The platform is growing and the new mobile app is making great progress; I can certainly see some people investing in a major instance some day, accelerating the platform adoption.
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Hosting video requires a lot more resources than hosting text, hyperlinks, or even pictures. It might be too much for individuals to self host video on a scale that could even distantly resemble how we use youtube today.
Then again, maybe there are ways to make that burden smaller. IIRC Peertube does do some p2p stuff to try and share the burden a bit but I’ve also heard that it’s not really feasible to rely on that to scale.
Then again, maybe there are ways to make that burden smaller.
Yes: encode on lower resolutions.
Most of the videos on Youtube don’t ever need to be 4K. They don’t even need to be 1080p. Heck, most don’t even need 720p! Things like music videos, where what’s important is the music, orthings like old TV broadcasts or play rips of old consoles, where the source barely gets to 360p, can be encoded to 360p or even 244p without any suffering (I played Monster Hunter on the 3DS for years and I can attest 244p can do great works of magic).
This mixes wonderfully with Peertube’s idea about hosting your own instance. If you are hosting your own video storage, you’ll want to maximize the amount of stuff you can throw into it. If someone complains that your videos aren’t 1080p, tell them to go to
/donate.phpand do their part.How does the p2p work? I thought there was a bittorrent-like aspect to it but what you’re describing sounds different.
If multiple people are watching the same video, at the same resolution, it uses WebRTC (HLS P2P) to share data between them, saving bandwidth from the PeerTube instance.
A PeerTube instance can also function as a peer (seed) for another PeerTube instance.
I have a server with less than 100gb that’s running it for a year so far. No issues and even has a channel with 100 or so subscribers (literally my dog).
It’s p2p capabilities make it pretty easy to distribute videos. And the server admins have the ability to toggle if they want to host other videos from other instances or not. They even have the ability to host specific individual videos if they want to support certain creators. Its a very intelligent system.
If anyone wants to take a look, we have a couple different communities/channels/videos over on !peertube@lemmy.world
For small-scale stuff like that it will surely work. It’s unclear if it scales to youtube volumes. Maybe it doesn’t have to though, small scale stuff is valuable too.
Like others have said, it’s way more resource intensive than text based systems. Even discounting higher res vids, if you go to any random larger YT channel and download all their videos in 144p 480p and 720p it’ll be quite a lot larger than you might expect. Sure, if you’re serious about it you could get an array of hard drives and a small server, but you’re talking hundreds of bucks and lots of upkeep. Outsource it to a VPS and AWS buckets and you’ve still got upkeep but now you’ve added an extra 0 to your bill.
There’s not enough charitable nerds on the internet to host even a fraction of 1% of Youtube. It’s even worse if self hosting instances is pushed. Even as a fellow tech nerd, no way I’m hosting my own instance just so I can share a video once in a blue moon. Something that always gets my goat in fediverse discourse is when people always jump to saying something along the lines of “just host your own” then wonder why AP went from ~2.5M users to 0.8M users.
There’s also some Fediverse specific issues that hold back a more mainstream audience. There’s some fringe political stuff on both sides of the isle which can pretty easily scare off people, and defederation combined with peertube’s more siloed approach makes discovery near nil. (can’t see content from remote peertube instances unless somebody has already subscribed to that channel on the remote instance from your local instance AFAIK).
Then there’s the new platform (or in this case many platforms connected via one protocol) issues. Lack of users, limited/no monetization, limited development/support, and very few pros + a lot of cons at first glance from somebody who doesn’t consider tech a hobby and is comparing it to established platforms.
Edit: Can’t remember who, but iirc a peertube user I follow who regularly deletes their videos because their host doesn’t give them too much space. It’s great for a less big tech way to see their latest videos, but not acceptable if anyone’s gonna bill something like that as the next big video platform.
Yes, yes, you named the benefits and convenience of a centralized system.
Federalized systems require individual federated maintenance, and that comes with some challenges, but maybe it’s not the worst thing in the world if the random videos you uploaded to youtube that never get any views eventually disappeared… Maybe the planet shouldn’t bear the burnt of indefinitely holding those videos in replicated backed up storage forever. Maybe that’s not valuable data we need for future civilizations.
What if a valuable creator dies and noone is there to run their instance? These are important things to consider and think through so we can solve them. Maybe the answer is a community driven peer node replication?
These aren’t unsolvable hurdles, they’ve been solved already.
Anyone can backup any other peertube instance. But that of course comes at a cost.
Running an actively used Peertube instance is a lot more expensive than, for example, a Lemmy instance. Videos take up a lot more storage than text. Not only that, the videos also need to be processed and then served. Who will keep paying for the monthly server bills?
Then there’s monetization. Most YouTube creators are there because they make a living out of YouTube. There is no such thing on PeerTube. They would need to solely rely on donations.
The ideal PeerTube network would be where every somewhat big content creator ran their own instance and maybe a few general instances for smaller content creators that are regularly donated to.
If YouTube ever gets killed by Google, don’t expect many people to come here.
