PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by synchronise » Sat, Jul 21, 2018, 2:18 AM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #7

NedIsakoff wrote: post #3

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

"What happened" to it? You're LOOKING at it, right now! PeerTube builds on top of the Mastodon / ActivityPub network, which is Decentralized Facebook. In effect, this is showing the network effect of the new open-source / federated protocol. It can be extended to host videos over Bittorrent over WebRTC through the Web Browser (all port 80, no configuration, Javascript clients only), while publishing over the Mastodon…

Mastodon is a decentralised Twitter, Hubzilla would be the decentralised Facebook.

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

#232

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Jul 21, 2018, 2:28 AM UTC

not_that_noob wrote: post #16

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.

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

Paul Baran's original spec, 1964

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420.html

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

#233

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Jul 21, 2018, 2:30 AM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #29

NedIsakoff wrote: post #3

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.

Which tech decisions? Link is fine if you happen to have one.

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

#234

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Jul 21, 2018, 2:32 AM UTC

pschon wrote: post #49

I wonder how this is different than usenet. I can recall our sysadmin complaining about having to manage usenet.

Readier access to feeds, perhaps.

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

#235

Post by noitsnot » Sat, Jul 21, 2018, 2:33 AM UTC

ryrobes wrote: post #224

People want viable services not "tech". Red flag: both their concept as well as name have YT's brand name in it. The equivalent of calling your company "Uber for X". I'm all for decentralization where it makes sense - but this seems like they might be shooting themselves in the foot everywhere EXCEPT the tech (which, ultimately won't matter if they fail). From the article: "Online since March 2018 in a beta version,…

$60k is mind-blowingly low. I wouldn't expect much, if anything from this site.

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

#236

Post by lucideer » Sat, Jul 21, 2018, 2:34 AM UTC

themagician wrote: post #159

resters wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conten…

I'm not wrong. We have moved towards a world of centralized services because that's what people want. To many people it's the centralized services that "are" the Internet: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—that's it. YouTube is the lowest common denominator of video. You aren't going to "fix" its problems with a more complex decentralized network. If you want to solve the problems with YouTube you have to do it w…

> We have moved towards a world of centralized services because that's what people want.

We have moved towards a world of centralised services because decentralised ones are—by definition—difficult to monetise for the platform/software-maintainer(s). What people want is irrelevant when all potential options have to be initially well-funded: the choice is too restrictively limited to perform an honest comparison.

> To many people it's the centralized services that "are" the Internet

That's because they dominate, because they're profitable for the central host.

> If you want to solve the problems with YouTube you have to do it with another YouTube. Build another centralized service that fixes the problems that YouTube has

The problems with YoutTube are caused by it being centralised, so this proposal is paradoxical.

> they all go from Active to Dead or Stalled

It's a difficult challenge. It's David v Goliath. Many fail.

> YouTube's audience doesn't care about anything at decentralized network has to offer. It's just entertainment for them. They just want to watch videos and shitpost in the comments.

YouTube's audience want to be able to find entertaining/useful/educational/whatever content according to what they've come to Youtube looking for, and promptly leave after having been entertained/educated/generally fulfilled. Youtube is not incentivised to give them this; in fact it's strongly incentivised to make what they're looking for as difficult to find as possible so that they'll spend hours and hours binging vacuous addictive content looking for something but never quite finding it and getting no satisfaction from the experience.

This is not something that's unique to YouTube, it's a property of any model whereby the profits of the host/platform maintainer are tightly linked to users spending as much time navigating the platform as possible (see also Facebook/Instagram/Pinterest infinite scroll psychology).

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

#237

Post by robotkdick » Sat, Jul 21, 2018, 2:47 AM UTC

smolder wrote: post #218

yroc92 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The top comment of almost any post on HN is negative.

And that doesn't mean it's not very valuable feedback.

Having worked in TV for 15 years, I can say without a doubt the top comment is correct in many, many ways.

Content creation and hosting is a small problem compared with distribution and marketing. That's much of the reason why it's taking so long for software to eat entertainment. Distribution to interested parties is a process that took Hollywood half a century (and YouTube and Netflix) decades. Keep in mind, Netflix started by focusing just on distribution.

Good news is always good, but there's a difference between gaining access to tens of thousands of euros and getting to a first video distribution with 20 million views, for example. That's when people who work in content/entertainment will turn their heads and take notice.

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

#238

Post by syrrim » Sat, Jul 21, 2018, 2:53 AM UTC

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…

This is a very silly way of looking at the world. The reason people prefer centralized services is because:

- they have greater capacity to add features

- they have more ability to have search and other discovery

Neither of these are inherent to a centralized service. All you need is a centralized website on top of a decentralized video host. Different websites can compete on features like search, while providing access to the same database of videos.

The fact that no one has succeeded yet is not proof that this is impossible. Moreover, this would be to ignore protocols like email and the web, which are decentralized, and which are very popular. Centralization has been preferred because we are in a period of very rapid change, where centralized services can pivot ten times before a decentralized service even gets started. People are beginning to realize the downsides of centralized services, change is starting to slow down, and decentralized services are now able to make headway.

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

#239

Post by ekianjo » Sat, Jul 21, 2018, 3:04 AM UTC

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.

Looks like you never heard of Mastodon. It's thriving.

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

#240

Post by sperm » Sat, Jul 21, 2018, 3:07 AM UTC

syrrim wrote: post #238

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…

This is a very silly way of looking at the world. The reason people prefer centralized services is because: - they have greater capacity to add features - they have more ability to have search and other discovery Neither of these are inherent to a centralized service. All you need is a centralized website on top of a decentralized video host. Different websites can compete on features like search, while providing acc…

This is a very silly way of looking at the world. The reason people prefer centralized services is because:

- they have a monetization layer directly linked to their users' bank accounts.

At the end of the day people need to pay bills in order to produce content for a living. Without that, you can't compete. With that, and you're not decentralized.