PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform • Hacker News Board

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#31

Post by al_borland » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

karmakurtisaani wrote: post #24

CM30 wrote: post #15

It's a promising system, and I'd probably use it over a non-federated video hosting system if I wanted to run a video hosting site of some kind. Yet it's currently hard to find a real usecase for it, since neither the content you want nor audience is there on PeerTube at the moment. If you're interested in open source software or data privacy you might find something here or there, but topics like gaming, music, spor…

Lemmy is pretty ok actually. The lack of big user base is more of a feature than a bug.

Has it normalized? When I first tried Lemmy it was mostly communists talking about communism. Then after some Reddit drama it seemed to be a bunch of people complaining about Reddit.

I generally like smaller sites, but those topics weren’t exactly engaging for me.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#32

Post by StableAlkyne » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #21

jesse_dot_id wrote: post #18

I like the idea of all of these federated services but why does the UX always feel like an afterthought when it is the most important factor for adoption?

Same reason why the Linux desktop often suffers on the UX/UX front: people naturally drawn to these projects tend to lean heavily technical, and highly technical circles have a bad habit of driving out less technical contributors through devaluation of their work and lack of agency within the project among other issues. That sort of work also tends to be less well-compensated than that of SWEs which makes it more imp…

UX work is often also a lot heavier and more subjective than the plumbing.

I might open a pull request to support some new video code, and that might only require a few dozen lines over a few files. That's easy to review, and it either works or it doesn't. Worst case they say "our convention is to register codecs as a subclass of X class, but you subclassed Y class" or something equally straightforward.

Let's say instead I wanted to change the workflow to register an account. Now I'm changing a bunch of JavaScript, CSS, templates, I'm adding pages, and I also need to update the backend. Even if someone is that into frontend work, it might take forever to even get reviewed by the maintainers because it's a massive PR.

Plus, now we've moved into subjectivity land: "I'm used to the old workflow," (because they designed it) "The last one was really easy" (for an engineer), "I think we should focus on the backend before we work on the UI," "I don't like this font because the license isn't free as in freedom" etc.

Even if you just mockup something on Figma or whatever, unless you're a maintainer it's probably going to just get ignored as a feature request. Because there's also the psychological aspect of basically being told that the UI you wrote is implicitly bad, if you're the maintainer reviewing the mockup.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#33

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:38 PM UTC

pocksuppet wrote: post #9

PeerTube has some interesting technology with the P2P sharing between users who watch at the same time. But with these kind of projects I think there are unfortunately social factors that impact their success as well as technical factors. It's one thing to put a element on a HTML page (or implement video over webtorrent), it's quite another to make people actually watch it instead of their TikTok feed.

[deleted]

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#34

Post by paxys » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:38 PM UTC

hungryhobbit wrote: post #23

Stupid question: when people inevitably use this for pirate content, and the feds try to shut the service down ... what's the plan?

They can't shut down the service because there is no single service. They can go after individual servers, and that is fine. The admin is responsible for what happens on their server.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#35

Post by treyd » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:41 PM UTC

hungryhobbit wrote: post #23

Stupid question: when people inevitably use this for pirate content, and the feds try to shut the service down ... what's the plan?

The plan is the same as it always has been. It's no different than running an open FTP server.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#36

Post by WarmWash » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

CM30 wrote: post #15

It's a promising system, and I'd probably use it over a non-federated video hosting system if I wanted to run a video hosting site of some kind. Yet it's currently hard to find a real usecase for it, since neither the content you want nor audience is there on PeerTube at the moment. If you're interested in open source software or data privacy you might find something here or there, but topics like gaming, music, spor…

Creators get 60% of youtube's ad revenue from youtube.

What does Peertube pay?

There is your answer. If people want good stuff, there needs to be money flowing to the source of it. The internet desperately needs to shed this "everything good is totally free" mindset, because what it actually manifests as is "I love taking without the requirement of giving".

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#37

Post by dylan604 » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

WarmWash wrote: post #36

CM30 wrote: post #15

It's a promising system, and I'd probably use it over a non-federated video hosting system if I wanted to run a video hosting site of some kind. Yet it's currently hard to find a real usecase for it, since neither the content you want nor audience is there on PeerTube at the moment. If you're interested in open source software or data privacy you might find something here or there, but topics like gaming, music, spor…

Creators get 60% of youtube's ad revenue from youtube. What does Peertube pay? There is your answer. If people want good stuff, there needs to be money flowing to the source of it. The internet desperately needs to shed this "everything good is totally free" mindset, because what it actually manifests as is "I love taking without the requirement of giving".

Not really sure how people need to be explained this, but for whatever reason, this most basic of information is seemingly skipped over. Even if peertube wants to pay 65%, that's just a bigger percentage of nothing.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#38

Post by jollymonATX » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:48 PM UTC

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #21

jesse_dot_id wrote: post #18

I like the idea of all of these federated services but why does the UX always feel like an afterthought when it is the most important factor for adoption?

Same reason why the Linux desktop often suffers on the UX/UX front: people naturally drawn to these projects tend to lean heavily technical, and highly technical circles have a bad habit of driving out less technical contributors through devaluation of their work and lack of agency within the project among other issues. That sort of work also tends to be less well-compensated than that of SWEs which makes it more imp…

Maybe some devs in OSS are married to their horrid idea of how things should work?

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#39

Post by WarmWash » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:48 PM UTC

GodelNumbering wrote: post #30

Youtube has been incredibly frustrating for many many reasons and is evidently evil in many axes now. We really need competition in video hosting.

Then start loading ads.

Youtube's biggest threat ever died in the cradle because they foolishly thought users would volunteer money to them.

No one with capital and capability looks at youtube, looks at youtube's audience, and says "Yeah, 30-40% ad-blocking and 4.5% paying for premium, these are the people I want to build services for!".

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#40

Post by zelphirkalt » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:49 PM UTC

WarmWash wrote: post #36

CM30 wrote: post #15

It's a promising system, and I'd probably use it over a non-federated video hosting system if I wanted to run a video hosting site of some kind. Yet it's currently hard to find a real usecase for it, since neither the content you want nor audience is there on PeerTube at the moment. If you're interested in open source software or data privacy you might find something here or there, but topics like gaming, music, spor…

Creators get 60% of youtube's ad revenue from youtube. What does Peertube pay? There is your answer. If people want good stuff, there needs to be money flowing to the source of it. The internet desperately needs to shed this "everything good is totally free" mindset, because what it actually manifests as is "I love taking without the requirement of giving".

The matter of compensation or donation can be handled completely separately. Creators can be supported on other platforms like Liberapay, Patreon, Kofi, and many creators are supported that way.

If we are talking about clickbait and making money from getting unwanted ads in people's faces, no thank you we don't need more of that.