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PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

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

#211
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don’t really want another step in the already arduous process of making videos - especially when the return on investment will be $0. This website will die off in a couple years and everyone who wastes time on it will be worse off for it. You need to build a product so good that my statement above sounds INSANE. Not just “I think he’s wrong” but “dude absolutely no way. Everyone will want this. Are you stupid?…

Your use of the word "product" here reminds me of the now infamous McDonald's video. It's a decentralized, open source, video sharing platform. It's not a product. It's okay for products to exist, but not everything needs to be one.

Exactly, but good luck convincing a horde of morons of it

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

#212
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They half-ass crack down on them. Not even that, it's dime-assed crackdown at best. You get that little "experiencing issues?" note that the bottom of the screen (which goes away after a few seconds), and an occasional 3-5s delay before video starts. I explained exactly why I think they are important in that entire paragraph. And the evidence I'm right is the fact that YouTube could trivially prevent ad-blockers tomo…

A good way to spot someone you can safely ignore is when they say "X could trivially Y" in regards to a Y you know is extremely non-trivial.

[deleted]

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

#213
post #41

As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization. I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch. This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram. Even a decent 20-minute video can easily take 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor. I have a pretty small…

> most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video. I get your point, but many of them fail to hit some hundreds of views due in large part to all of the large, professional channels that are spending hundreds of man hours as week producing content. If the production was less professional do you think total viewership hours would drop significantly, or would it be distributed across more channels?

Is the argument that such a world is possible to create, where the audience does not have the choice of the ‘professional’ looking content so can't choose it?

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

#214
post #41

As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization. I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch. This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram. Even a decent 20-minute video can easily take 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor. I have a pretty small…

Why couldn't you post it after it's got its money worth?

Or is that the clause of YouTube "you must not post elsewhere"?

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have precise suggestion of what to improve? I'm genuinely interested.

Yeah, it's pretty simple. When I go to YouTube.com, I have access to all of the videos on that platform, sorted based on what I'm subscribed to and other things like what I watch. The first thing I see are videos. I'm off to the races. When I go to https://joinpeertube.org , I'm met with a double hero section that tells me about PeerTube, which is ultimately meaningless to 99% of the population. When I get to actual…

This is like complaining that when you go to nginx.org, you aren't shown a bunch of websites or a search box to discover anything, so this web thing is garbage UX compared to the Facebook app. There's no "the federation". There are various sites that run peertube, some of which are federated with each other. Others have nothing to do with each other. Some are probably completely private.

An example of federation might be that a bunch of universities run their own instances where they post colloquia, and they federate with each other to make it easy to subscribe to departments in your field from another university, or to comment on their videos. IMO state universities should be posting their material online like this, and on a platform that does not require the public to watch ads (something fundamentally against the mission of an educational institution), or agree to some random company's terms.

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

#216
post #41

As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization. I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch. This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram. Even a decent 20-minute video can easily take 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor. I have a pretty small…

YouTubers are now blurring out women's cleavage. Not bare breasts. Cleavage. Nearly all of Pamela Anderson's notable body of work would need to be censored to avoid risking loss of that precious, precious monetization. It's like fucking Iran. And of course you can't say "die", "kill", "suicide", etc. You have to talk like a parody of 80s cartoon censorship—literally. (The neologism "unalive" came from Deadpool in an…

Where are you located? I'm looking as we speak at a bunch of YT videos of women with cleavage, or promoting fashion that involve stripping down to their underwear.

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

#217
post #106
post #41

As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization. I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch. This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram. Even a decent 20-minute video can easily take 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor. I have a pretty small…

I heard that main source of income for some professional YouTubers are Patreon and sponsorships. Ad revenue is dead last and very unstable. Also, if you are building your business on single platform, which one day might decide that your content does not adhere to their rules - that's a high risk to take.

Do you think those creators pay YouTube for bandwidth, storage and transcode servers? Where do you think money for that comes from?

Streaming video is very expensive, even in 2026 and ignoring that someone is paying the main business expense of those creators is not very honest.

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

#219
There are four functions here:

- Discovery (as in search)

- Monetization (as in ads)

- Hosting (as in storage)

- Playout (as in data distribution)

PeerTube only performs the fourth, and maybe the third. It's not a flooding distribution system like BitTorrent. It's just a way for a large number of people to play the same video without overloading a modest hosting server. Playout load is distributed amongst the watchers browsers.

I put videos in PeerTube, tech demos of various rendering tests. Works fine. No ad insertion, which is why I use PeerTube.

Peak view count is 2.3K.[1] Nobody is expected to discover them there. They're linked from various forums. Some are for a very tiny audience, such as "Second Life sim server EstablishAgentCommunication message bug", with 10 views, mostly from the devs who needed to see this.

Technically it works fine, but it's not going to displace YouTube. Unless, say, Taylor Swift decided to stream her wedding on it to avoid ad insertion.

[1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/7usCE3v2RrWK6nuoSr4NHJ

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

#220

Does it have good content? I explored it a bit in the past, but was a bit underwhelmed with content I could find there. Edit: in the past

If you find those few instances that have those few uploaders that interest you, the content can be good.

However it does certainly suffer from the fact that all federated instances can't pull in videos from other platforms in some reproducible way (so that all instances would be able to serve the same content).

I'm sure some YouTubers would allow mirrors if they didn't have to pick an instance and keep it running.

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