321–330 of 376 posts
(And no, it is not spelled "VH SKY" - it's a pun on the VHS video format - in Czech to say "multiple VHS casettes - you would say "vhsky", hence the name. :) )
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> An alternative to Big Tech's video platforms > PeerTube is a tool for sharing online videos developed by Framasoft, a french non-profit. > PeerTube allows you to create your own video platform, in complete independence. I think it's pretty clear that it's software for running your own video sharing platform? Sure, people are used to monopolies and consolidation now, but surely you can wrap you head around the idea…
I am both here, and on Reddit, and also on YouTube. I can be in many places at the same time because this is all made of light and there are lots of interesting places to go. I'll probably find myself on Reels before too long. I'm not on PeerTube because I cannot find content that is interesting on PeerTube, which again is the crux of my argument. https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube > PeerTube is a free, decentral…
If you're interested in Debian, you go to Debian's peertube which is part of Debian's website, where the Debian foundation hosts their videos. If you're interested in Blender, you go to Blender's peertube which is part of Blender's website. It's always worked this way. There's also activitypub federation if you want the social parts with a single account so that cooperating instances can interact. Like email, it's an open protocol so any servers can federate. Like email, they can also choose who they accept traffic from.
There is also a search engine that indexes a bunch of instances, but just as Google is not the web, their search engine is not the peertube. "The web" is just the sum total of all of the websites out there. The thing you seem to think has bad UX, the peertube, is just the sum total of all of the peertube instances out there.
There's no giant overlay or mesh network like gnutella or IPFS. There's just people running their own servers, like the web or email.
It's an alternative to youtube for people who just want to share videos in the same way that an email server is an alternative to gmail for people who just want to send emails to each other. Or a web server is an alternative to Facebook for someone who wants a website. It's understood that those monopolies are then distinct and generally incompatible.
For an example of a quite vibrant local PeerTube instance, there is https://vhsky.cz/ running in the Czech Republic. (And no, it is not spelled "VH SKY" - it's a pun on the VHS video format - in Czech to say "multiple VHS casettes - you would say "vhsky", hence the name. :) )
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?
Do you have precise suggestion of what to improve? I'm genuinely interested.
Peertube covers the enterprise use case, but makes unreasonable demands from hobbyists, single users, tinkerers. Kids, gather around and learn from the Peertube design mistakes that an experienced and well-meaning software designer would refuse to subject his users/operators to. Why is this important? Because the number of hobbyist operators is much greater than the number of enterprise operators, given the intended target audience of people who are interested in decentralisation and federation. Peertube engineers and product managers should sit down with the intention to make a smart market move, and expend the next half month of effort to optimise for the majority of operators who make up the long tail, not the minority, so that hurdles to entry are demolished and the stated goal shown on the homepage of "community-owned" becomes attainable for many more people than is the case right now. The resulting network effect would be tremendous.
1. Packaging. Peertube is not packaged by the major players. https://repology.org/project/peertube/versions> Real-life experience shows that this is almost always because of a circumstance which frustrates a distro packager. Other NPM-conformant libraries and software are packaged nearly automatically, there is good support in the distros to create specfile/RPM package, control file/Deb package, etc. from an Nodejs library tarball with just one command. Peertube must investigate why it is so exceptional and difficult to package and demolish the hurdles.
2. Configuration. Peertube must as the installation step make effective an usable configuration that has some sensible defaults, or perhaps auto-configure at install time or run time. A user should be able to install the software (from a distro package, or a git checkout/unpacked tarball and build step), run it, and immediately use it. It is okay when some features are not working until configured. It is not okay for a software to refuse to work altogether until each and every operator spends time and brain power to figure out what are essential configuration options and what are not, and make decisions about them. The reason why I say it is not okay is because this is a clear abdication of responsibility from the Peertube software devs and an externalising of mental burdens onto the many Peertube operators.
3. Database. Peertube should work with Sqlite by default. An enterprise user can configure PostgreSQL additionally when the need arises.
4. Web server. Peertube should work with the Node.js Web server (possibly express.js or a work-alike) by default. An enterprise user can configure Nginx additionally when the need arises.
5. Cache. Peertube should work with a simple file system cache or no cache at all by default. An enterprise user can configure Redis additionally when the need arises.
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This is the same problem as why an admin would run a forum if the feds might knock at the door, or why an admin would run a website about cats if the feds might knock at the door. It's an overblown fear.
You don't have to convince me, you have to convince all the would-be hosts who would rather not take the chance.
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FOSS server software shouldn't be seen as a platform. It should be seen as software that can be used to create a platform. Federation makes it technically a platform but just barely. Mastodon is barely a platform - mastodon.social is, and kolektiva is a different one. PeerTube is software you could use to make a video streaming website like Nebula.
To me the ideal use of PeerTube would be if studios adopted it as their publishing platform. Publish to their instance, syndicated globally. But, they are so hardcore on licensing that they will never adopt a platform that doesn't have complete control over where their media is distributed. The lack of a method for monetizing videos on PeerTube is also like the black mark for a video platform. But, the maintainers of…
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they need a day job to pay the bills then, which does cut down on the scope of videos you can make if we could have less working hours or cheaper rent or less expensive bills more people could do hobby stuff again ofc. but right now is tricky for that
Generally speaking, that's how hobbies work. You do them for fun or enrichment and do something else for money. People who try to turn hobbies into a day job seem to get this weird idea that they're somehow critical to the hobby when in fact they're just hyper focused on getting attention and crowding out actually sincere people so they can sell stuff. e.g. this thread. Here you have people making software for themse…
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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.
Dunno about the storage side, but fly by night operators seem to be constantly available to stream every movie and tv show and somehow afford the bandwidth, transcoding and all other costs while being shunned from the general ad industry…
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Those ad-blocked viewers are important, which is why YT doesn't actually crack down on them. Those are the people who will happily go to an alternative product. And while that product might start as a pirate YouTube, the one that nabs 30% of YT's traffic can certainly make a pivot to legit. If you're a content creator whose audience is mostly in that group, you're likely to start posting content directly on the compe…
Youtube won the war on ad blocking when most views moved to TV and mobile. While I've seen some people have hacked clients to run on TV platforms, the average person just either watches the ads or pays for youtube premium. The friction for ad blocking has gone up to the point youtube makes enough money to not care about the rest.
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> As a video watcher, the main issue I have with YouTube is the presence of monetization. I was replying to that. This commenter is not a hobbyist making video, he watches some hobbyists video, and them getting paid is the issue he has.
The issue he has is he wants to find/communicate with hobbyists, and instead runs into people trying to turn it into a profession. It becomes difficult to find like-minded people when every topic is infected by grifters. Injecting money into a leisure activity will inevitably ruin it and the people participating. The reason why is on full display here: this entire thread has been derailed by people asking how you're…
To me that is in line with my original quote. He actively seeks work people put in while haivng an issue with them getting compensated for it.
Whether YT has monetization or not people's incentives are the same. Imagine that YT has no ads, people would put stuff behind paywalls or upsell aggressively.
> denigrating people who "only" have 100 subscribers (imagine 100 people regularly coming to watch you give a talk or demo or performance out of pure interest!), etc
I would never denigrate those people. But if you work hard enough and put in enough work that people watch 4000 hours of your videos in last year, and eventually you want to quit the job you don't like and just get paid by creating for people like that guy, and that guy says "monetization is the problem I have", it's kind of sociopathic. Drawing this line between work and hobby, like you have to do stuff you hate for money and god forbid you start getting paid for doing stuff you like