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PeerTube v2

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Re: PeerTube v2

#61
post #5

Great work! This is a good YouTube alternative I can get behind, however after reading a little bit I kind of frowned at this line on the plugin paragraph. > You could also imagine plug-ins to sort videos in reverse alphabetical order, or to add a Tipee, Paypal or Patreon button below videos! Please don't consider or be tempted by those three proprietary platforms, I would much rather prefer donating using Liberapay…

Just because you prefer it doesn't mean others do or that you should only offer a single option because it's "better".

If I'm a creator and I've already got a Patreon userbase then forcing me to switch to another similar service just to use PeerTube is an unnecessary hurdle so I'll carry on the path of least resistance which is not using PeerTube.

Re: PeerTube v2

#62
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BitTorrent? For a while it was consuming a large fraction of the public internet bandwidth worldwide. This might still be the case. Although paid streaming has certainly taken a chunk out of its market share, there remain to be many things that can't be had on the big streaming providers. For that, there is always the p2p system with the deepest content selection :)

"successful server-based peer-to-peer" - it's certainly P2P, but I thought the whole point of Bittorrent was to avoid needing servers?

At least in private tracker land a lot of us use seedboxes. Install some autodownloaders and plex on it and you've got your own private netflix with any content you want.

Avoiding servers might be the whole point of bittorrent per its creators but us end users just want a good media experience. Server, no server, legal, illegal, pay server company, pay media company, whatever. Best experience > all else.

Re: PeerTube v2

#63
post #19
post #3

The peer-to-peer storage and sharing of video files isn't the hard part: it's the ability to search for and discover content that makes YouTube compelling in my opinion. Are any of these p2p YouTube replacements presenting a compelling way to search/discover content in a distributed way? Or if the search index is centralized, do any of them have a compelling model for staying funded without selling everyone's search/…

> Are any of these p2p YouTube replacements presenting a compelling way to search/discover content in a distributed way? Being "distributed" over p2p/federated architecture opposes the end-user convenience of search/discovery/ranking/recommendations because of speed-of-light limitations. I wrote a previous comment about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17578332 Also, the previous last reply by posting2fast…

It does not necessarily oppose it. All there needs to be done is to expose a static, daily generated JSON file that contains all videos on the instance. This has nothing to do with the speed of light.

Anyone then could build a search index and build a good search experience.

To combat spam, instances should reveal up/downvotes to indicate quality, I guess your fake math video would not get much love from the community.

Re: PeerTube v2

#64
post #20
post #3

The peer-to-peer storage and sharing of video files isn't the hard part: it's the ability to search for and discover content that makes YouTube compelling in my opinion. Are any of these p2p YouTube replacements presenting a compelling way to search/discover content in a distributed way? Or if the search index is centralized, do any of them have a compelling model for staying funded without selling everyone's search/…

Well that's the real problem when you start competing with Google and the like. They're data behemoths. As long as you don't have as much data collected, they'll have a significant advantage. The solution to this is really simple and hardly conceivable at the same time: make competitively important data public. In this case, that's anonymized video browsing/viewing data. Market competition would flourish, the big guy…

But then who will be incentivized to gather the data?

Re: PeerTube v2

#65
post #53

Do I understand it correctly, that the federation in this case means that I can watch video from site A on site B, while it's being hosted on A, meaning bandwidth cost for A and no ability to for instance suggest videos A hosts, show viewer advertisement, etc? Not sure how would I like it if I hosted instance, paid storage and bandwidth costs while noone even visits my site and views all content on site with better S…

Federation in this case means that you can watch videos from site A on site B, simultaneously seeding it for other users, reducing bandwidth cost for A. This only happens if site B federates with site A, meaning that it lists videos A hosts in its catalog (a mild suggestion to maybe watch them). Site A would be unable to include ads, except by baking them into the videos or descriptions etc.

I'm pretty sure PeerTube isn't aiming to provide an easy way to host an ad-supported video site. They want to be an alternative to YouTube, not an exact equivalent. If you need money to produce or host videos, their current suggestion is to ask for it: https://joinpeertube.org/faq#what-is-peertube-s-remuneration...

Re: PeerTube v2

#66

Went on https://peertube.video/ and immediately got a bunch of porn. Not really sure from a consumer aspect this is yet fully there from a UX perspective! But the tech is really interesting and as a federated alternative I could see it doing really well. Best of luck to the team!

Seems like stabot ( https://gitlab.com/juergens/stabbot ) is using that instance as some kind of intermediate store. So what ever is requested of it will get posted.

Re: PeerTube v2

#67

Went on https://peertube.video/ and immediately got a bunch of porn. Not really sure from a consumer aspect this is yet fully there from a UX perspective! But the tech is really interesting and as a federated alternative I could see it doing really well. Best of luck to the team!

Thanks for the heads up! Didn't want to click through on my open plan office - or worse with my son sat next to me!

Re: PeerTube v2

#68

In the space of distributed video platforms, I think Peertube has the right idea: Bitchute is gaining a lot of traction, but the core issue of centralized control remains. Distributed content delivery is not enough to prevent censorship and viewer manipulation. Federation will allow many platforms to proliferate and solves this problem. I hope Peertube gains traction, but they're fighting an uphill battle when it com…

Recommender system could be content based

Re: PeerTube v2

#69
post #6

Does anyone know of a successful server-based peer-to-peer project other than TOR and cryptocurrencies? I'm all for breaking free of the stranglehold of centralized proprietary platforms, but it also seems to me that most of the open source projects that ever really succeed at competing against entrenched proprietary incombents are the ones where a centralized service is being provided by a non-profit (e.g. Wikimedia…

e-hentai with H@H[1]

[1] https://ehwiki.org/wiki/Hentai@Home

Re: PeerTube v2

#70
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are any of these p2p YouTube replacements presenting a compelling way to search/discover content in a distributed way? Being "distributed" over p2p/federated architecture opposes the end-user convenience of search/discovery/ranking/recommendations because of speed-of-light limitations. I wrote a previous comment about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17578332 Also, the previous last reply by posting2fast…

It does not necessarily oppose it. All there needs to be done is to expose a static, daily generated JSON file that contains all videos on the instance. This has nothing to do with the speed of light. Anyone then could build a search index and build a good search experience. To combat spam, instances should reveal up/downvotes to indicate quality, I guess your fake math video would not get much love from the communit…

>This has nothing to do with the speed of light.

Please take extra care to correctly parse what I actually wrote in response to the gp. Yes, speed-of-light is still a limitation based on the gp's constraint of "search/discovery in a _distributed_ way" which means the search algorithm avoids central servers and loops through a bunch of remote p2p nodes to parse a bunch of exposed JSON manifest files.

If instead, the search algorithm loops through data in a cached index server, that's no longer "search in a distributed way" that the gp was originally wondering about. That's the particular point I was responding to.

>Anyone then could build a search index and build a good search experience.

Now, as to the issue with that "cache index server" that pre-parses the JSON files...

The cache server that also contains the actual video data will naturally attract the most users because when they hit the "play" button on their smartphone, the video starts immediately instead of waiting or suffering stuttering from somebody's flakey home video server.

So, the index server with the "good experience" as perceived by users will be the one that also includes the actual videos -- basically acts as a CDN -- and this emergent behavior of user preferences defeats the decentralized ideals of p2p video.

We see that p2p of things like illegal software already works and is proven. However, p2p of mainstream videos has massive technical hurdles that oppose how typical users like to discover content and play them with immediate gratification.

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