Bye YouTube, Hello PeerTube [video]

Peertube discovery is based on a "following" model based on the ActivityPub protocol. You don't need a Peertube account to follow video creators, because:

- you can subscribe to them from Mastodon or any fediverse client

- your friends on the Fediverse can "reshare" (reshare/boost) videos from their favorite content creator

There's also a "decentralized" (as in "selfhosted") search engine called SepiaSearch being developed for use with Peertube.

I can't say i'm fulfilled yet by the content available on Peertube (although there is some great quality content), but at least i'm happy i'm not being dragged into recommendation hell by a hostile machine learning model trying to maximize advertising revenues... and Peertube federation keeps growing with more and more non-profits running instances for specific interests and communities, and more and more content creators ditching the creator-hostile [0] platforms for Peertube.

[0] Some creators believe that tracking their viewers and serving them dubious advertisement is bad. Most creators agree that automated copyright strikes like Youtube is doing (completely ignoring copyright exemptions like fair use) is bad.

joinpeertube.org has a "content selection" featuring 1 video, 1 channel and 1 instance on the homepage. It also has a "browse instances" button above that and further down the page, and a search form powered by sepiasearch.org. It's already not that bad compared to many fediverse landing pages, but i'm sure suggestions are appreciated.

Just consider publishing more content on the homepage would raise questions, like what content to prioritize/ban from the homepage? There's some editorial work to delist certain instances from the instance list, but personally i'm rather glad Peertube doesn't go much further trying to recreate the whole Youtube experience where a single actor decides on what you get to see.

So what's different between Peertube and Youtube, is that Youtube is a single entity with considerable hosting/network resources. They are building their own CDN (developing points of presence across continents), which makes their infra expensive to run, and also reproduces real-world power imbalances such as access to Youtube being real slow (or even impossible) from some countries/regions (eg. sub-Saharan Africa).

Peertube, on the other hand, encourages distribution of content in a peer-to-peer manner. As a person, you can use your favorite Webtorrent [0] client to help seed content from far away servers to your neighbors. As an instance operator, you can opt-in to seeding for another instance (with a disk quota limit) from your own network, helping videos published on the other side of the world reach your local audience.

Example: take three hypothetical FLOSS-oriented instances floss.fr (France) floss.cn (China) and floss.ml (Mali). If those instances all "follow" one another, with sufficient disk quotas, all videos will be replicated across the 3 servers, and video streaming will be smooth from those 3 locations (and neighboring regions).

In all cases, even when initial streaming is slow, Webtorrent scales well because most clients (unless they opt-out) will seed videos via Webtorrent protocol (WebRTC + STUN) so as a video becomes more popular it becomes easier/faster to access without placing the infrastructure/economic burden on the Peertube instance. Clever stuff.

[0] There is a reference Webtorrent client, but libtorrent recently started implementing Webtorrent support so that should become more broadly available "soon".

Even if a specific video doesn't have a lot of peers, people can setup a server close to you to replicate popular instances you'd like to ease access to.

So you could have a peertube.au instance dedicated to seeding content from other instances on an opt-in basis (instance following other instances, and giving them a certain disk quota).

> I have so many options to host videos, least of which is just housing itself on my own damn server!

Peertube is precisely about hosting videos on your "own damn server". Except Peertube is designed in a way that fellow instance operators can seed your content, and that clients viewing a specific videos will also seed it. This means your server can now serve video to more remote places, and will be more resilient to view peaks (a very small VPS with limited bandwidth can handle hundreds of parallel views).

If you don't go the Peertube way, you are usually giving up on serving video to remote areas where you don't have good connectivity to, and crossing your fingers so that your videos don't become too popular. Or you end up building your own mirroring/CDN infrastructure like media.ccc.de and others do, but by then the costs and complexity are much higher than operating a Peertube instance.