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PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

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Re: PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

#21

What the people who want decentralized services don't realize is that the content creators want centralized services (whether they realize it or not). In the old days we needed YouTube because you needed a Flash encoder if you wanted to make video accessible on the web to everyone. Now anyone can host video on anything. You can throw even throw some comments on the bottom if you want. But what those who create want i…

I believe the people behind peertube know about that. That is why Peertube is so much on federation with ActivityPub. If done properly this would allow anyone with an account on a website using ActivityPub (like Mastodon) to interact with the author of a Peertube video.

Granted this a both a technical problem (that I believe solvable) and a financing problem. It is hard to compete with the GAFAM and their advertising departments.

Re: PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

#22
post #12

So a cross between bittorrent and porntube?

Its closer to a cross between Twitter, Email, and Bittorrent. People create accounts like Email, on the servers they like. You can publish new videos to your followers, like Twitter, using ActivityPub. Followers on other servers are notified via ActivityPub that a new video was made.

When followers click on the video, its shared with Bittorrent over WebRTC over everyone's Web Browser (with the PeerTube server as the permanent seed).

Personally, I don't like the idea of the Bittorrent bit, due to the publishing of IP addresses. But I really like the idea of federated video sharing through ActivityPub.

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I guess ActivityPub might be the new RSS, if RSS lists were hosted on servers and had concepts about users. And PeerTube is mostly about notifying ActivityPub members that new videos are available.

Re: PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

#23
post #8

'decentralisation' should not be a design goal, or at least should not be advertised as one, because it is fundamentally unsustainable. It is best understood as a transitional phase between centralized regimes, not an end in and of itself.

I don’t know man - the Internet is distributed and last I checked it was doing great.

Distributed and decentralized mean different things. distributed implies a distributor, which is itself a centralized function and in fact the internet has several of these centers of decentralisation that make sure that the grand partitions of high value 'land' assets such as IP address blocks and domain names are apportioned in an explicitly centralized manner.

'Decentralized' as it is commonly understood is about eliminating such central control points and devolving those powers to the edge of the network graph - to individual nodes, or more exactly to individual people.. This never works long-term, and always collapses right back into a centralized hierarchical system.

Information wants to be free, but value wants to be centralized.

Re: PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

#24

What the people who want decentralized services don't realize is that the content creators want centralized services (whether they realize it or not). In the old days we needed YouTube because you needed a Flash encoder if you wanted to make video accessible on the web to everyone. Now anyone can host video on anything. You can throw even throw some comments on the bottom if you want. But what those who create want i…

I think open protocals will really help in shifting people away from centralized services and towards decentralized or federated services. Activity pub, for instance is awesome. I think once we have open social protocals paired with cryptocurrencies, we might finally get to a point where federated/decentralized networks become attractive to an audience and to content creators and to developers. We can have borderless, uncensorable, and resilient social networks.

Anticipating some downvotes here because I mentioned cryptocurrencies.

Re: PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

#26

What the people who want decentralized services don't realize is that the content creators want centralized services (whether they realize it or not). In the old days we needed YouTube because you needed a Flash encoder if you wanted to make video accessible on the web to everyone. Now anyone can host video on anything. You can throw even throw some comments on the bottom if you want. But what those who create want i…

I think open protocals will really help in shifting people away from centralized services and towards decentralized or federated services. Activity pub, for instance is awesome. I think once we have open social protocals paired with cryptocurrencies, we might finally get to a point where federated/decentralized networks become attractive to an audience and to content creators and to developers. We can have borderless…

That sounds like a way to end up with social networks made entirely of people who like cryptocurrencies. Sounds awful to me.

Re: PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

#27

What the people who want decentralized services don't realize is that the content creators want centralized services (whether they realize it or not). In the old days we needed YouTube because you needed a Flash encoder if you wanted to make video accessible on the web to everyone. Now anyone can host video on anything. You can throw even throw some comments on the bottom if you want. But what those who create want i…

I'm not sure that 'decentralized' in this case means decentralized in community.

I understand it more as decentralized hosting since it's P2P.

Now, peertube does state something about 'instances', so that might separate content from one accessable website. I don't know.

YouTube's big point initially was video hosting was expensive and YouTube made it cheap (for creators).

It is also is a centralized community so you can find a video on virtually any subject just from the search on the homepage. If peertube is able to do this in a similar fashion would aid it's potential adoption (though again, I don't know if instances hinder that).

PeerTube still needs to be build a user base, attract users and creators from YouTube. Getting creators to use both platforms would help.

Lastly though, since it's P2P I don't know if that means only popular videos would then load at a comparable speed YouTube or not.

Re: PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

#28
Interesting that they aren’t trying to get laymen to set up instances. It’s good and bad. Good because they will restrain their instance runners, and thereby governance, to technical people who want this site to flourish. Bad because their governance is potentially limited in scope (for now).

Re: PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

#29

What happened to the Decentralized Facebook that everyone was so excited about a few years ago?

If you're talking about Diaspora, it more or less failed because of some technical decisions made early on, but there was a lot to be learned from their effort.

What you're seeing here is the second wave of stabs at the same concept, after internalising some of Diaspora's lessons.

Re: PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

#30
post #10

What the people who want decentralized services don't realize is that the content creators want centralized services (whether they realize it or not). In the old days we needed YouTube because you needed a Flash encoder if you wanted to make video accessible on the web to everyone. Now anyone can host video on anything. You can throw even throw some comments on the bottom if you want. But what those who create want i…

How many centralized social networks have failed too? Most of them. A lot of successful things have had similarities to previous failures. The first step is to actually try something new instead of sitting around nay-saying everything. Personally my opinion Youtube can keep the the drama rage videos, or they can fall off the face of the internet. I just want educational videos and music without constant ads, and I do…

XMPP / Jabber isn't doing so hot though. I wouldn't call it a "failure", but Facebook / Google, especially with the "hangouts" thing cutting out XMPP support, definitely reduced XMPP's userbase.

Decentralized can certainly fail, or at least shrink over time.

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