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PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

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

#141

Post by hueving »

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…

Just because you use a centralized service to find podcasts doesn't mean all of us do.

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

#142

Post by dmoy »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #75
izzydata wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would process of taking down an obviously illegal video be on PeerTube?

Contact the peertube host. If they choose to leave it up, you can contact law enforcement / a court who can make a genuine judgement as to the legality of the content and take up approrpriate enforcement.

How do peertube hosts pick what to host? Do they manually curate everything?

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

#144

Post by resters »

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…

Your assumptions are completely wrong. Content creators simply want a platform for gathering an audience. Youtube wants to play as many ads as possible. Let's not pretend that somehow those interests align perfectly in the product we know as youtube.

The audience generation mechanics are an important ingredient for replacing youtube, but youtube has gone from being a free service that had little user generated content and focused on gray area "Napster model" hosting of copyrighted content.. and then gradually found content creators and introduced interruption advertising (full screen commercials).

There are a lot of holes in youtube's profit model. Imagine what youtube could be if it didn't have the dark patterns everywhere (young kids get served algorithmically generated disturbing content!).

It's so refreshing that an alternative model is getting some traction. Also, it would be fairly easy to just slurp up the best content from Youtube since most is in the public domain.

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

#145

Post by hueving »

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]…

>That "cache server" is an example of feature-creep towards centralization.

That's a tiresome slippery slope argument. "Better not install that proxy server or soon everyone will host all of their content on it instead of on their own servers!"

ToR is decentralized, it has servers. Bitorrent is decentralized, it has servers. Etc etc.

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

#146

Post by tCfD »

deckar01 wrote: post #130
tCfD wrote: 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.

Peering video content with a web seed fallback is actually a very sustainable and scalable solution. Content availability scales automatically with its popularity without increasing the cost to the host by using the upload bandwidth of users (which they generally have a surplus of).

The part that doesn't scale is not delivery (which can be parallelized independently among nodes), it is the custodial directory function -the tracking, location, identification and availability of high quality seeds and hosts. This is the function that will start out optimistically decentralized by hobbyists and enthusiasts and eventually succumb to opportunistic centralization as anything close to serious scale begins to kick in.

YouTube as a service has very different performance expectations than something like bittorrent. for one thing the directory function is built in and not externalized to another set of directory services, which are notoriously unreliable in the case of BitTorrent anyway.

And unlike BitTorrent or Mastodon I don't only want to know where I can find a given file, I want to know where I can find it delivered immediately, consistently, smoothly, without hesitation, in a variety of cross encoded formats I'm almost certain to have supported on my device, and with some sort of consensus mechanism to establish a better than chance confidence that the file I start streaming is the file I expected to stream and not something else with the same filename.

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

#147

Post by onion2k »

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…

How many attempts at decentralized social networks have failed? All of them.

Practically every social network has failed in some way or another , decentralised or not. Very few of them have failed due to the tech though - tech seems to be the easy part in comparison to building a large enough audience to keep the network active.

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

#149

Post by s73v3r_ »

onion2k wrote: post #147
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…

How many attempts at decentralized social networks have failed? All of them. Practically every social network has failed in some way or another , decentralised or not. Very few of them have failed due to the tech though - tech seems to be the easy part in comparison to building a large enough audience to keep the network active.

But for most decentralized social networks, the selling point, the focus, has been that it's decentralized. Which tends to point to the idea that most people don't care about decentralization.

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

#150

Post by s73v3r_ »

Kalium wrote: post #139
lylecubed wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You're right! You can do that! It's possible that some things - like guarding against abuse - are sometimes difficult in distributed systems. But I'm sure these are mere matters of solvable technology...

I'm not sure that it is. And as it is, no one working on these systems seems to be interested in finding a solution.
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