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PeerTube v2

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Re: PeerTube v2

#81

Post by danShumway »

jasode wrote: post #70
tiborsaas wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> 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.

So DNS isn't distributed because my computer caches queries?

I think this is arguing semantics rather than practicalities. Centralization isn't binary -- it's a continuum, and we care about it because of the benefits it provides, not because we think it's an end in and of itself. What we care about is the ability to aggregate search results from multiple places, to bypass search if we have a specific video URL that's being shared, and to build our own search engines without running into copyright problems.

If all of those goals can be accomplished with a caching server, then does anyone actually care if it's technically decentralized?

> 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.

My reading of this argument is I might as well just host my blog on Medium, because Google search is just another point of centralization. And after all, for speed reasons users will prefer to use a search engine that hosts both the blog and the search results -- so eventually Google search is definitely going to lose to Medium anyway.

But of course Medium isn't going to unseat Google, because in the real world speed improvements are relative, and at a certain point users stop caring, or at least other concerns like range of accessible content and network effects begin to matter a lot more.

Re: PeerTube v2

#82

Post by davefp »

timwaagh wrote: post #24

It seems like they did not consider how they want peertubers to be able to monetize. On the contrary, it seems they have something against 'capturing your attention and selling it to Fanta'. I want this piece of work to be exhibit A in how staying inside your ideological bubble will ensure failure. I think it's especially sad since they used crowdfunded money so they aren't just failing on their own dime.

Here's the relevant FAQ entry for that: https://joinpeertube.org/faq#what-is-peertube-s-remuneration...

Re: PeerTube v2

#83

Post by bogwog »

lewisflude wrote: post #43

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!

Anyone can start an instance and post whatever they want. Just because it has "peertube" in the URL doesn't mean it's an "official" instance or anything like that.

Re: PeerTube v2

#84

Post by jcfrei »

I really like the idea behind these types of decentralized projects. However I want to mention that they rarely take off. And it's usually not due to some technical or marketing related reason. The simple economic reason for the lack of their success is that centralized organization like YouTube can operate much more efficiently than a decentralized one like peertube. Some of the reasons are: Higher organizational efficiency (faster restructuring due to an explicit hierarchy), which allows them to quickly adapt to a changing environment. Benefiting from economies of scale (buying specialized hardware for video hosting in bulk). Being a for-profit organization provides them with a constant feedback loop whether they still meet consumer demands. On top of that a constant source of income allows them to have paid employees. Paid employees are (all year round) more motivated to continuously adapt the platform to changing consumer demands.

Re: PeerTube v2

#85

Post by jasode »

tiborsaas wrote: post #79
jasode wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That's all an end-user cares about. I imagined gp (mikece) as a HN techie (not an oblivious end-user) and thought he was wondering about how to use programming technology to avoid central servers ... and therefore, me interpreting "search/discovery in a distributed way" in a very literal manner was the appropriate level of abstraction to mikece. Avoiding central servers (if possible) is an interesting goal to discus…

There could be multiple search servers. I don't understand how that goes against the centralized nature, links to the video hosting instances would still be essential. Distributed services still benefit the traffic from Google, DDG, etc. Why this project is special? I fail to see how an search index would be bad user experience. Compare that to the current situation of 61 isolated, unsearchable PeerTube instances.

Ok, I think we're talking past each other. Let me attempt to unravel.

You/SamBam/danShumway are at the abstraction level of technical protocols, parsing JSON files, index servers, etc.

I'm at the abstraction level of psychology and emergent group behavior that overrides those ideal technical structures.

>Distributed services still benefit the traffic from Google,

This sentence is a perfect example of how we're focusing on different things.

Your interpretation: Google is an index, and it links out to distributed servers. Ergo, an analagous Peertube-Index metadata server that lists PeerTube p2p nodes can be technically accomplished to do the same thing. What's the problem?!?

My interpretation of mikece: Google's index/algorithm/ranking/censorship has "too much power" over the web ecosystem and this a common complaint of its centralized authority of urls. Who gave Google all that power? Us websurfers did! How did it get that power even though it just has links to distributed http nodes instead of serving up the data (NYTimes article, etc) itself? [Excluding Google Amp in this example.]

To me, mikece is asking how to avoid another Google/Youtube type of defacto centralization of power which means we avoid central servers from existing to accumulate that power in the first place. To me this means p2p clients all querying each other and mikece is wondering if this is tehnically possible. That's what my speed-of-light answer is about.

Therefore, discussing what's "technically feasible" with indexing p2p video nodes seems to be missing the point if the abstraction level is emergent group behavior.

Re: PeerTube v2

#86

Post by richardARPANET »

Unfortunately, "normal people" are never going to use something like this in significant numbers.

We need a centralized video hosting website, with freedom of speech values, with huge funding, which markets to normal people.

The only way I see this happening is a single bored billionaire going for it.

Re: PeerTube v2

#87

Post by ddalex »

richardARPANET wrote: post #86

Unfortunately, "normal people" are never going to use something like this in significant numbers. We need a centralized video hosting website, with freedom of speech values, with huge funding, which markets to normal people. The only way I see this happening is a single bored billionaire going for it.

We need centralized access for discovery, but distributed access for storage and accessing, as to spread the costs.

And then we need countless people on the internet to buy, install, maintain and replace the hardware that powers all of this.

That's not easy.

Re: PeerTube v2

#88

Post by smilliken »

jcfrei wrote: post #84

I really like the idea behind these types of decentralized projects. However I want to mention that they rarely take off. And it's usually not due to some technical or marketing related reason. The simple economic reason for the lack of their success is that centralized organization like YouTube can operate much more efficiently than a decentralized one like peertube. Some of the reasons are: Higher organizational ef…

You're right on all points.

Still, some of the most successful systems are decentralized: internet, telephone, email, torrent, bitcoin et al, the web (caveat that DNS is centralized), etc.

All of these examples are basically networks of people. Do we want these networks operated by private companies?

Re: PeerTube v2

#89

Post by synctext »

danShumway wrote: post #81
jasode wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 s…

> 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. So DNS isn't distributed because my computer caches queries? I think this is arguing semantics rather than practicalities. Centralization isn't binary -- it's a continuum, and we care about it because of the benefits it provides, not because we thin…

> Centralization isn't binary -- it's a continuum

It's both I would argue. Distributed systems professor here. My lab has been working on a "academically pure" distributed Youtube for 14 years and 7 months now. That means no central servers, no web portals, and no discovery website. Pure Peer-to-Peer and lawyer-proof hopefully. Distributing everything usually means developer productivity drops by roughly 95%. Plus half of our master-level students are not capable of significantly contributing. Decentralised==hard. This is something the "Distributed Apps" generation is re-discovering after the Napter-age Devs got kids/s

> All there needs to be done is to expose a static, daily generated JSON file that contains all videos on the instance.

Or simply make it real-time gossip. Disclaimer; promoting our work here. We implemented a semantic clustered overlay back in 2014 for decentralised video search, that could make it just as fast as Google Servers[1]. This year we finished implementing a real-time channel feed of Magnet links protocol + deployment to our users. Our 51k concurrent users ensure that we can simply re-seed a new Bittorrent hash with 1 million hashes, then everybody updates. Complete research portfolio, including our decentralised trust function [2].

> does anyone actually care if it's technically decentralized?

That is an interesting question. Our goal is real Internet freedom. In our case, logically decentralisation is a hard requirement. Our users often don't care. Caching servers quickly introduce brittleness into your architecture and legal issues.

[1]https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/foci14/foci14... [2]https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki#current-items-under-...

Re: PeerTube v2

#90

Post by jasode »

danShumway wrote: post #81
jasode wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 s…

> 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. So DNS isn't distributed because my computer caches queries? I think this is arguing semantics rather than practicalities. Centralization isn't binary -- it's a continuum, and we care about it because of the benefits it provides, not because we thin…

>So DNS isn't distributed because my computer caches queries?

Again, I'm not talking about a technical engineering component. I'm talking about users aggregate behaviors. Please see my other reply of how we seem to be talking at different abstraction levels.

>Centralization isn't binary -- it's a continuum, and we care about it because of the benefits it provides, not because we think it's an end in and of itself.

Right, but that's not what I'm arguing. I'm talking about centralization as a emergent phenomenon that bypasses the ideals decentralized protocols that the protocol's designers didn't intend.

>If all of those goals can be accomplished with a caching server, then does anyone actually care if it's technically decentralized?

I guess I don't understand the premise then because if that were true, why would the adjective "distributed" even be mentioned in the question "search/discovery in a _distributed_ way?" To me, something about distributed/decentralized as a characteristic in the technical implementation is very important to the person asking the question.

EDIT: here's another example of that type of "search without central indexing server" question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20282397

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