That's the thing: It doesn't have to pay off and it doesn't have to generate revenue. That's not its goal. It is not a business model.
If we want good content und independence from YouTube, perhaps it is time to see, that it might cost us a tiny bit of money each month, to uphold our freedom. One rented server can easily support many users, each of those can chip in to finance renting the server. It can be done transparently, so that users always know what they are paying for and how much is covered already for the month. It is time to learn, that we need to support what we like financially, so that people can actually live from providing us with it. As long as we do not do so, people can only provide us with their creations by generating revenue in other ways.
> That's the thing: It doesn't have to pay off and it doesn't have to generate revenue. That's not its goal. It is not a business model.
This is the answer to so much of what's wrong with the modern web. We need less business and to get more communities back into the center of the web... it should be even easier today since IaaS is so much cheaper, I think it's just a focus problem, nothing is relevant to the big sites that act as the lens to the web unless it's directly pumping money somewhere.
A large amount of small creators do this today only because YouTube is a free service. A lot of people will use their free time to make videos, but not if a portion of their disposable income has to be dedicated to hosting them.
Peertube isn't based on the assumption that as a content creator you have to run your own instance (and pay for it), but rather that a community can pool together resources as part of a non-profit organization and host many content creators at once, without centralizing everything. For example: skeptikon.fr for french-speaking science/critical content, kolektiva.media for social struggle / anarchist content, etc...
So of course content creators can chip in, eg. if they accept donations, and especially if (not on the two instances listed above) they are paid to advertise content and products. But users can chip in, too. Overall, hosting costs are cheap because:
- they're mutualized between artists
- there's no tracking apparatus like Youtube hooked to a machine learning model to keep you addicted
- there's no advertisement to serve or complex upload filter to make sure your public domain recordings bring money to the copyright cartel [0]
- if a video becomes popular (eg. a cool livestream) a sufficient portion of people will seed it via WebTorrent (torrent + WebRTC + STUN), considerably reducing server load [1]
[1] I've heard faithful reports from fellow sysadmins that their small VPS handled load for hundreds of simultaneous viewers on livestream thanks to a few people seeding (by just "viewing" the video in their browser with default settings) from a home fiber connection
For most people, the time/money tradeoff isn't very flexible. Only few have the choice of working fewer hours for less money, while even fewer have the choice of working more hours for more money.
So much goodness out there exists in spite of this. Local model railroad clubs is one that comes to mind. I’d rather that than Walmart, which has mastered its cost model.
Yes. Time invested given for free at the expense of other endeavors. I’m not arguing against doing any of these things. Just simply stating that time = money. I’d rather spend my money/time on model railroad building too. z scale ftw.
> That's the thing: It doesn't have to pay off and it doesn't have to generate revenue. That's not its goal. It is not a business model.
From a purely-technical lens, that may not seem like a fatal flaw. When viewed through a whole-product lens, it is. PeerTube's anonymous, censor-proof nature is enough to attract a certain class of content that repels advertisers, but then what? Until the dark side of distributed technologies is addressed instead of touted as a feature, this doesn't have a chance of popular success.
Peertube is neither of those things. Publishing is pseudonymous, not anonymous: requires an account on the server you'd like to publish videos to, just like youtube and other video platforms. And it's only censorship-proof as much as it uses HTTPS/WebRTC to share content. I haven't seen any study of the Sybil-proofness of Webtorrent protocol, but Peertube certainly does not protect instance operator from DNS/IP censorship or from having their machines seized by law enforcement.
Peertube is based on a federated model (like email/www) where instances are "responsible" for the content/users they host, encouraging smaller, trusted communities. Search is currently being addressed via SepiaSearch (a dedicated search engine), and the joinpeertube.org/sepiasearch.org listings are seriously moderated (i once reported a white supremacist instance and it was delisted in under 24h).
Last time I checked the way that webtorrent/peertube queries for peers watching same video is centralised over websockets to a a select few webtorrent trackers, I think theirs only 2 or 3 running, meaning if you wanted to take down peertubes p2p functionality all you would have to hit would be their webtorrent trackers with a ddos and the platform would go down, I'm not 100% about sibil protections but I do know that peertubes webtorrent trackers verify the structure of an announce, and if it is in invalid format bans you from the tracker, compared to the other webtorrent trackers which are more happy to accept something less strict as an announce
> over websockets to a a select few webtorrent trackers, I think theirs only 2 or 3 running
Maybe you're talking about STUN servers? There's only 2 hardcoded STUN servers for the moment [0] indeed, but that's only for WebRTC discovery and will be easy to fix. It does not prevent server-side redundancy because every peertube instance runs its own tracker, from my understanding on the protocol (let me know if i've got that wrong), but taking those STUN servers down would indeed prevent p2p seeding, except for publicly-routable clients (not behind NAT).
I'm reasonably confident that the protocol I was working with was json over websocket https://openwebtorrent.com/ tracker
this was a few months ago now so peertube could be running something different
So each peertube instance runs its own openwebtorrent compatible tracker, which then has its own protocol inforced at the wire level, compared to when i looked at the other openwebtorrent implementations depending on the server didn't enforce the wire format and you could send json over the wire, the trackers seemed to just be a sort of pubsub system where announces would get resent to other connected clients under the same infohash or whatever they used
Wikipedia is widely mirrored, pseudonymous for writers, anonymous for readers (unlike YouTube!), possessed of internal policies against most kinds of censorship, and quite practically inconvenient to censor externally. Certainly you could do better on these axes, but Wikipedia is already getting an enormous amount of vital information to people despite other people wanting to suppress that information.
The censorship on Wikipedia is internal. Biased articles locked from public editing, delete hungry maintainers that gatekeep content away from the site. Sure some countries can block it, but the subtle internal censorship is far more damaging because it's easy for people to overlook/write off
Latest example I've seen is the article for Marjorie Taylor Greene. It's under "extended-confirmed-protection", listed as a "Good article". Yet starts right off with the summary, "Marjorie Greene,[3] is an American politician, businesswoman, and far-right[4] conspiracy theorist[5] serving as the U.S. representative for Georgia's 14th congressional district.[6]"
Those kind of abstract accusations do not belong in an encyclopedia article, and while there's a wealth of "citations" buried under the [5], none are anything other than news articles repeating the same accusation. It's baseless mudslinging that is the exact opposite of sticking to provable individual claims and facts, like a proper encyclopedia article should consist of.
Granted, it's not an insurmountable bar as it appears anyone with 500 edits can begin to participate. However, it shows a clear attempt to control the narrative to a specific one, and erecting barriers against changing that while officially endorsing the current one. It spans greater than just that, and seems common across other political articles on Wikipedia.
Hmm, by saying that the accusations are "baseless", you seem to be saying that she's not actually a conspiracy theorist. But it's not just repetitions of a flat accusation; for example, NPR quoted her as saying, "There's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it." (Evidently she's also claimed that the Clintons had John F. Kennedy Jr. killed, that Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin performed a human sacrifice in order to drink a child's blood, that the damage to the Pentagon 20 years ago was due to a missile rather than an airplane impact, and that the UN is committing genocide against white people.) Are you saying that NPR was lying in attributing that quote to her, or that she did say that but somehow is nevertheless not a conspiracy theorist? Or am I misinterpreting your claim of "baseless mudslinging"?
It seems to me that describing Marjorie Taylor Greene as a "far-right conspiracy theorist" is just as encyclopedic and verifiable as describing Charles Manson as "an American criminal who led the Manson Family" or Jeffrey Dahmer as "an American serial killer and sex offender who committed the murder and dismemberment of 17 men and boys". Why do you disagree?
Peertube is closer to MediaWiki than Wikipedia. Anyone can setup an instance, and scrap/share content from other instances using URLs. Nothing is distributed, anonymous or censorship-proof... but the entire network is federated and pseudonymous.
> From a purely-technical lens, that may not seem like a fatal flaw. When viewed through a whole-product lens, it is.
YouTube is an advertising business, Peertube is software. They are like day and night different.
Peertube is developed by a community of developers, governed by a french non-profit called Framasoft. Their primary mission is community governance, establishing a legal footprint, and promoting Peertube, in the same vain as Mozilla, the Drupal Foundation and many others.
According to the Peertube website, 90% of Framasoft's funding consists of donations. Since they don't sell a service, don't have to maintain infrastructure to enable hosting of videos, they don't require a complex organization and large investments.
Sharing the costs of a common good tends to work out on a small scale, and it's a valid alternative to private for-profit initiatives. Reeading tip: ERS's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"
> PeerTube's anonymous, censor-proof nature is enough to attract a certain class of content that repels advertisers, but then what? Until the dark side of distributed technologies is addressed instead of touted as a feature, this doesn't have a chance of popular success.
Peertube isn't a single service that contains a "certain class of content that repels advertisers". It's software that allows anyone to set up their own server and hook it up in a federated network of servers.
It's a bit like online fora. Like, PHPbb and vBulletin are just sofware. Anyone can download a copy, install it on their own server, run their own forum and develop their own community. It used to be that there were fora about anything and everything ranging from gaming, knitting, books, history to the less savory topics and themes. Few would argue that these weren't successful in their heyday.
The biggest challenge federated networks face is this: discovery of content. That's what defines how much they will appeal to a large audience.
Centralized services like YouTube are popular because they've perfected the discovery of information relevant to their audience to a fine art. YouTube becoming an ad business is a paradox: they arrived at that point because that's the only viable business model to cover the cost of centralized hosting of billions of videos, and the bandwidth required to serve billions of viewers.
Federated networks don't suffer that problem because the costs of hosting content are shared across the nodes of the network. Peertube leverages WebTorrent as their file sharing protocol. The existence of individual nodes across the network is predicated by local economic conditions. Some nodes may disappear if they can't recoup their own operational costs. But distributed character of the network implies that its enduring success is predicated by the longevity of a majority of nodes.
One could also post chunks of videos to a channel on an existing (corporate) video platform in an obscured form, such that they survive transcoding, and reconstitute them in the client. For example, invert the Pr channel, and reverse audio frames (realistically, do something better). There's your free CDN, provided by a legacy video platform in a way which (at least conceivably, if one properly tailors his approach) does not violate their ToS.
How would they notice? I'm not suggesting to publish "random noise" videos, but maybe to make abstract art video/music that could "hide" the information?
>perhaps it is time to see, that it might cost us a tiny bit of money each month
that's still "generating revenue". maybe not profit, but servers and bandwidth cost non-trivial amounts of money and somebody has to pay for that. whether it's donations, or user-fees, or ads, or private benefactors, the revenue has to come from somewhere. but if a video service has no answer as to how it can sustain itself, it's questionable whether it's worth the effort of developing it or developing your audience on it.
So why not just make the video available on torrent?
It's even possible to streamline the experience for torrents like how Popcorntime has done. Users don't need to even be technical enough to understand what torrents are - the same way users don't need to understand tcp/ip to visit a website.
Bittorrent protocol is not supported in browsers. Peertube uses Webtorrent, which is a WebRTC port of the Bittorrent protocol. Those two networks are incompatible but the magnet hashes are the same and there is progress in desktop clients implementing Webtorrent peering.
You can try to think of Peertube as Popcorn Time with user following and channels and comments... and interop with the rest of the Fediverse.
Those are commercial alternatives, with curated content. So creators can get paid directly from the subscription income. Clearly it serves a somewhat different community than the fediverse. Personally, that seems okay. There should be room for both things to exist.
i absolutely love this answer, and we need more people who think like this. props to you friend. much love, and much support. lets spread awareness to these poisoned minds.
> How do we get good content from a platform that is explicitly copyleft?
The same way we get good software from a ´community´ which is explicitly copyleft.
> Will the vast majority of creators use this even as a backup?
The best way to use platforms like Peertube and Odysee is by using it as a primary source, with Youtube and Vimeo essentially playing the role of CDN. Should the censors not like your video for $reasons they can block them 'till they turn ultraviolet but they can not deny anyone access to them. Make sure to advertise your alternative distribution channel(s), use the same channel names and video titles so they can be found through regular web search and you're set [1].
[1] that it, until censorship reaches the network layer
I know. But people who cares about the server code care more about such things. I made a copyleft movie and the PeerTube site I put it on went down forever. YouTube and archive.org remain up
If we want good content und independence from YouTube, perhaps it is time to see, that it might cost us a tiny bit of money each month, to uphold our freedom. One rented server can easily support many users, each of those can chip in to finance renting the server. It can be done transparently, so that users always know what they are paying for and how much is covered already for the month. It is time to learn, that we need to support what we like financially, so that people can actually live from providing us with it. As long as we do not do so, people can only provide us with their creations by generating revenue in other ways.