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.
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.
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.