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Video tutorials now on PeerTube

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Re: Video tutorials now on PeerTube

#41

Post by dilap »

Andrew Kelley of Zig also moved away from YouTube because of forced ads (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjz6xNO63mI)

YouTube is an amazing collection of knowledge, but it's unfortunate that it's in the hands of an entity whose primary goal and motivation is avarice. A degradation of the experience over time seems inevitable.

How to organize human endeavors in a way that captures the innovation and superbly focused effort of early-stage companies without devolving into the raw exploitation, rent-seeking, and monopolistic behavior of late-stage companies seems an open problem.

Re: Video tutorials now on PeerTube

#42

Post by weinzierl »

ghaff wrote: post #20
clord wrote: post #8

What are the per-viewer costs these days to host video files on a plain web server? Perhaps with a CDN?

It's going to totally depend on how popular you are. For videos with a relative handful of viewers, host it wherever. If you're a popular site, costs could be hundreds, maybe thousands per month. But you'd have to make some assumptions and do the math. And, as peer says, discoverability unless you already have an audience.

I'd argue the risk aspect is what prevents more people from self-hosting than the actual cost. At least it is for me: The idea of waking up to a bill of a few thousand dollars is chilling. And then there is also this conflict of objectives: With an ad-supported platform more popularity means more money, with self-hosting more popularity is less money. Can't have your cake and eat it too.

Re: Video tutorials now on PeerTube

#43

Post by marci »

RL_Quine wrote: post #6

It's pretty hard to imagine what people think they gain by "switching" to PeerTube. Beyond idealism, there's not a whole lot going for the platform technically; it isn't peer to peer meaningfully. It would be better to just claim you are paying to self host your videos, which is what the author is doing.

Technically, if I understand correctly, one of the thing going for peertube is that it allows you to survive [insert any popular forum]'s hug of death. Some website don't even handle a surge of connections when it's just text. With peertube, most of the time, you're serving directly from your website, but in case of virality, the video will be distributed across most of the simultaneous viewers.

Re: Video tutorials now on PeerTube

#44

Post by Filligree »

abacadaba wrote: post #13
duxup wrote: post #7

I wonder at what point we as internet users will decide that we're willing to pay for services in order to maintain more control? In the meantime I sympathize with folks who in a way have ground rules changed on them, but then again were using a free service where they were the product... The internet is a weird place where we demand everything be free as just a baseline rule, and then complain when the product that…

the main holdup i think is truly effortless and secure, private, and widely accepted micropayments. there's plenty of stuff i'd be willing to pay for if it didn't involve creating yet another account and giving them my credit card info.

There once was such a system —Google Contributor. It was supposed to be expanded into a full micropayment system once there was a baseline market activity to set the prices by, using the price of ads to bootstrap.

It didn’t work, obviously, but mostly because people just don’t want to pay. Not even if a typical cost is single digit dollars per month, or less.

Re: Video tutorials now on PeerTube

#45

Post by duxup »

dilap wrote: post #41

Andrew Kelley of Zig also moved away from YouTube because of forced ads ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjz6xNO63mI ) YouTube is an amazing collection of knowledge, but it's unfortunate that it's in the hands of an entity whose primary goal and motivation is avarice. A degradation of the experience over time seems inevitable. How to organize human endeavors in a way that captures the innovation and superbly focused…

>it's in the hands of an entity whose primary goal and motivation is avarice

And we gave it all to them, for the price of the convince of using their service.

Re: Video tutorials now on PeerTube

#46

Post by api »

weinzierl wrote: post #42
ghaff wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's going to totally depend on how popular you are. For videos with a relative handful of viewers, host it wherever. If you're a popular site, costs could be hundreds, maybe thousands per month. But you'd have to make some assumptions and do the math. And, as peer says, discoverability unless you already have an audience.

I'd argue the risk aspect is what prevents more people from self-hosting than the actual cost. At least it is for me: The idea of waking up to a bill of a few thousand dollars is chilling. And then there is also this conflict of objectives: With an ad-supported platform more popularity means more money, with self-hosting more popularity is less money. Can't have your cake and eat it too.

Self-host at places like OVH or Hetzner that bill by pipe bandwidth rather than gigabytes transferred. Your site may get slow if it gets a hug of death but you won't get a stupid high bill. You can also get 2-4X the compute and RAM for pennies (comparatively).

If you are using AWS, Google, Oracle, or Azure and are just using VMs, you are getting horribly ripped off. There is absolutely zero advantage to using these for just compute. None. They only make sense in a business setting if you are leveraging their managed services to save on labor costs, or if you need to elastically scale to really enormous sizes and have confidence that you won't run out of resources.

VPS providers like Digital Ocean, Vultr, or Linode charge for bandwidth overages but their costs are generally at least an order of magnitude less than the big cloud vendors.

Re: Video tutorials now on PeerTube

#47

Post by godshatter »

RL_Quine wrote: post #6

It's pretty hard to imagine what people think they gain by "switching" to PeerTube. Beyond idealism, there's not a whole lot going for the platform technically; it isn't peer to peer meaningfully. It would be better to just claim you are paying to self host your videos, which is what the author is doing.

If people want sovereignty, they can run their own server, but no one would find it. Peertube is a good middle ground, especially since you can run your own instance if you really want more control.

Re: Video tutorials now on PeerTube

#48

Post by TheChaplain »

I understand and a sympathize with his opinion, at the same time the platform must be financed somehow, no?

Yeah I know Google are rich but still, from a technical standpoint YT is pretty damn good. I've never had any issues watching videos or streaming, and instantly served in EU, Asia and the US.

For that and the massive selection of content I'd say it's worth it for me.

Re: Video tutorials now on PeerTube

#49

Post by andai »

ghaff wrote: post #35
abacadaba wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the main holdup i think is truly effortless and secure, private, and widely accepted micropayments. there's plenty of stuff i'd be willing to pay for if it didn't involve creating yet another account and giving them my credit card info.

Clay Shirky wrote a couple of decades ago about the problem of mental transaction costs associated with paying a few cents to read an article or consume some other sort of media. I still tend to agree with that. If it were just a technology or network effect problem, I have to believe it would have been solved given how many media payment issues could in principle be solved by micropayments.

Here is Clay Shirky's article on Micropayments:

https://web.archive.org/web/20030911092002/http://www.shirky...

Re: Video tutorials now on PeerTube

#50

Post by crazygringo »

input_sh wrote: post #5
clipradiowallet wrote: post #2

Some examples of what the OP means by "lost sovereignty" would be useful. I assume he means ability to monetize how he wants, or to avoid algorithmic claims against his work etc....but who knows - the author does not explain.

Mentioned in the first minute here: https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/videos/watch/6b779810-671... He had no intention to ever monetise the channel, but with YouTube's ToS update he had to agree that YouTube can monetise his channel even if he doesn't want it to. Considering he's basically forced to serve ads he has no control over and he does not earn a cent from it, I'd say "lost sovereignty" holds true.

What does he expect for a site that serves his videos for free, not to mention recommends them to people as well to get a wider audience?

"Sovereignty" is a bizarre word here. It's a business deal. Nobody's ever "sovereign" in any exchange, it's either a good deal or not.

If he wants to pay for hosting himself, then go ahead, but no need to act like it's a question of "sovereignty". Nobody's a king here.

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