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PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

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

#101

Post by shittyadmin »

onli wrote: post #66
Endy wrote: post #58

I like the idea of PeerTube, but there are many hurdles. Anyone whose ISP/firewall/etc blocks all Torrent traffic is going to have a major challenge - which means that while part of what PeerTube has been so far is educational videos, they're not accessible in most school environments. That's a big challenge to overcome. The other is pretty simple, and a reason I have not used PeerTube to watch a single video. If you…

> If you're using my machine and my bandwidth to host or transfer your video to another person, you're going to pay me for it That's a bit ridiculous. No one is ever gonna pay you for that. You get something for free, the video you want to watch, and the deal here is that your unused upload bandwidth gets used to help transfer it to others. It's a social contract thing, and thinking you might get a better deal magica…

> thinking you might get a better deal magically by refusing it won't make that deal appear.

I mean, actually he trivially could get that deal by modifying the client a bit - but as long as the majority of people don't go out of their way to do that it doesn't really matter if there are leechers.

As long as there are a handful of people like myself who have big pipes and rarely use them to their fullest, who seed public torrents to 200x because why the hell not, you're not going to have a serious issue.

Honestly, if PeerTube wants to catch on, all it has to do is be easy to use and full of pirated content.

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

#102

Post by ReverseCold »

lylecubed wrote: post #54
ReverseCold wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest thing holding back p2p/"truly decentralized" networks (in my opinion) are NAT/Firewalls. You cannot reliably get past them on the inside without manual configuration. There's no way you can convince millions of people to try to port forward, and UPnP is very hit or miss. If that was solved, lightweight applications like 1:1 messaging could easily be fully peer to peer/decentralized/trustless.

How does bittorrent get around this? It isn't particularly troubled by nats or firewalls unless you live on a college campus.

The nice people you're downloading from have their ports forwarded. If possible, most clients try to use UPnP, but it doesn't always work.

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

#103

Post by codefined »

jasode wrote: post #68
lylecubed wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why couldn't you make the discovery service decentralized as well?

Because the laws of physics (speed of light) makes a decentralized discovery service slower which means it's extremely inconvenient for typical users. For example, go to youtube.com and see how fast it loads the main landing page with 20+ suggested video thumbnails. On my computer, it loads in 1136 milliseconds. The same centralized -system's speed advantage happens for video search results such as "3d printing".[1]…

I always considered my favourite system to be one where the discovery system was centralized, but the actual content itself and the ability to produce it was decentralized. So, for instance, you'd have "PeerTube" as a protocol for uploading your videos to be discovered, then you'd use something like "Youtube" to view videos from multiple peers. This prevents a massive amount of lockin as happens with the current services, but also enables all the QoS you expect from modern websites.

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

#104

Post by sk_hazratali »

wongarsu wrote: post #14
themagician wrote: post #2

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…

youtube is great for building an audience, but not nessesarily good for keeping it. A lot of niches have great success with patreon, but great trouble with keeping their videos on youtube (and in some cases keeping them in their subscribers feeds even when they are not taken down). The issues range from youtube's automatic enforcement of content guidelines (which appears more or less random), their ever increasing st…

Agree with u. https://www.sherekhudahazratali.com/2017/05/sohbat-sex-karne...

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

#105

Post by tathougies »

jasode wrote: post #68
lylecubed wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why couldn't you make the discovery service decentralized as well?

Because the laws of physics (speed of light) makes a decentralized discovery service slower which means it's extremely inconvenient for typical users. For example, go to youtube.com and see how fast it loads the main landing page with 20+ suggested video thumbnails. On my computer, it loads in 1136 milliseconds. The same centralized -system's speed advantage happens for video search results such as "3d printing".[1]…

The claim you make (that the speed of light) is the main limiting factor is incredibly undersubstantiated. Firstly, it is incredibly likely that the same query within you tube is handled by as many computers as it would have been in your DHT.

The difference between youtube and your DHT is that youtube doesn't need to do constant connection re-establishment. In a DHT -- especially one used for short-lived queries such as these -- the establishing of short connections can add a lot of overhead. This is a challenge mainly because of the protocol stocks in common usage on the network, not really a property of distributed systems in and of themselves.

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

#106

Post by ReverseCold »

WJW wrote: post #85
ReverseCold wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest thing holding back p2p/"truly decentralized" networks (in my opinion) are NAT/Firewalls. You cannot reliably get past them on the inside without manual configuration. There's no way you can convince millions of people to try to port forward, and UPnP is very hit or miss. If that was solved, lightweight applications like 1:1 messaging could easily be fully peer to peer/decentralized/trustless.

That is definitely a thing hindering adoption, but if there was really a big demand for decentralization, they would have been gone already. There are many more things holding back decentralized networks like the difficulty in filtering spam without easy coordinated effort, fixing network wide search and efficient monetization of content for creators.

Yes, there definitely are other problems.

For spam, you can have centralized blocklists that people can subscribe to. The iOS version of whatever would need it anyway to follow the App Store guidelines. If you feel you're being censored, unsubscribe from the list. Alternatively (or in addition to that), have everyone publicly publish who they blocked, and then trust what your friends or friend of friends blocked.

Network wide search is a problem, yes, but for chat (which I really want to be decentralized :( ) it doesn't matter too much.

Monetization for content creators also doesn't matter for chat.

So maybe I should rephrase my initial comment: Lack of NAT/Firewall bypass is the largest (and maybe only) problem needed to be solved for decentralized chat.

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

#107

Post by drexlspivey »

onli wrote: post #66
Endy wrote: post #58

I like the idea of PeerTube, but there are many hurdles. Anyone whose ISP/firewall/etc blocks all Torrent traffic is going to have a major challenge - which means that while part of what PeerTube has been so far is educational videos, they're not accessible in most school environments. That's a big challenge to overcome. The other is pretty simple, and a reason I have not used PeerTube to watch a single video. If you…

> If you're using my machine and my bandwidth to host or transfer your video to another person, you're going to pay me for it That's a bit ridiculous. No one is ever gonna pay you for that. You get something for free, the video you want to watch, and the deal here is that your unused upload bandwidth gets used to help transfer it to others. It's a social contract thing, and thinking you might get a better deal magica…

> That's a bit ridiculous. No one is ever gonna pay you for that.

There is a p2p network that does exactly that using cryptocurrency tokens. https://substratum.net/

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

#108

Post by ddingus »

Endy wrote: post #48
willio58 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Podcasts are, for the most part, decentralized and seem to be still booming in popularity. I don’t see why a decentralized video platform couldn’t work too.

Really? I don't agree here. I've never seen any that weren't being pushed to one of the major podcast apps - and thusly centralized. I mean, the whole term comes from the fact that it was originally downloadable to your iPod through iTunes. None of the podcasts I've ever found could really be considered decentralized - they might have a webpage somewhere, sure, but if they're not in Apple's iTunes/Podcast app, I'm no…

I never use iTunes.

Agree with other commenter. Finding shows is not hard, many apps will take feed links various ways and have catalogs.

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

#110

Post by jasode »

tathougies wrote: post #105
jasode wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the laws of physics (speed of light) makes a decentralized discovery service slower which means it's extremely inconvenient for typical users. For example, go to youtube.com and see how fast it loads the main landing page with 20+ suggested video thumbnails. On my computer, it loads in 1136 milliseconds. The same centralized -system's speed advantage happens for video search results such as "3d printing".[1]…

The claim you make (that the speed of light) is the main limiting factor is incredibly undersubstantiated. Firstly, it is incredibly likely that the same query within you tube is handled by as many computers as it would have been in your DHT. The difference between youtube and your DHT is that youtube doesn't need to do constant connection re-establishment. In a DHT -- especially one used for short-lived queries such…

>same query within you tube is handled by as many computers as it would have been in your DHT.

For the poster I responded to, and the topic of this thread (Peertube), decentralized means WAN (wide area network) and not LAN (local area network).

(I noticed you substituted "decentralized" with "distributed" which muddies up the discussion. The poster asking the question and my response used "decentralized".)

>because of the protocol stocks[sic] in common usage on the network, not really a property of distributed systems in and of themselves.

The overhead of network latency and multiple round trips is absolutely a property of decentralized systems. It's technically impossible to invent a protocol that can query thousands of home-based nodes to return a result that's as fast as a centralized system such as Youtube.

For the purposes of this particular thread, the "distributed network" means something like PeerTube with home nodes over ISP networks. We're not talking about the "distributed network" of 10,000 computers within Google and Facebook datacenters.

[To downvoters, please point out the technical flaw or show a protocol stack that removes ISP latency and round trips that makes it equivalent network performance to Youtube as tathougies suggests.]

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