So I’m not sure if y’all are following this series, its insane and it gets really dark. I highly recommend.
Anyway, the scary thing is how much control big tech and the oligarchy, corrupt police, (and Scientology) has over squashing justice and doing anything they can to keep the little guy down.
Just an example of why we desperately NEED to get people off these platforms
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I consider Peertube to fall under the “comically bad experience” for a multitude of reasons. There’s too many to really get into but to give you an idea of my experience with the platform, after the “pick a meaningless instance to house yourself” gauntlet that all fediverse outlets do, I was met with not one or two, but three instance refusals to allow me to create an account “because I was not a creator”(the admins literally emailed me to state that was the reason they declined my membership) so was left with the prospect of not having any means to manage or track subscriptions, get notifications of new content, etc. In spite of this, I tried to push through figuring I was missing an obvious manner of use that made it better than it initially seemed. I started searching for content I regularly subscribe to on YT, like “guitar playthough, rehab, urban exploration, drag racing, abandoned” and kept getting results 5 years old, completely unrelated to my search query or so poorly created that it was practically unwatchable.
I tried really hard to use it, it’s just clearly for the nerd crowd that wants to use it in spite of how bad it is as a video serving social platform. I love Lemmy, tolerate mastodon and keep checking on things like Loops and Pixelfed but Peertube is an entirely different beast. It punishes those that try to use it in any way like YT.
I think you’re absolutely right but if they move to another platform, they lose their subscriber base, views and interaction that advertisers demand so they don’t bother with the alternate platforms and for that reason alone, there’s nobody willing to waste time on platforms that none of their creators use.
I would have appreciated some of my creators at least copying their releases but nobody does. I don’t know if it’s hard to manage another platform that makes it not worth the time for the minuscule view count they get from it.
People do, you just don’t notice it because they aren’t in your sphere. And FYI it’s easy to setup. You can setup a sync on peertube with a YouTube channel and just let it get the videos forever. No maintainance is necessary. Odysee does the same thing and there ate creators on there too.
Peertube is far from perfect, I grant you that, but I use it through GrayJay ever day and do not face issues.
The search function on peertube is hot garbage, I still pay the every month hoping it will improve but it doesn’t seem to be changing
The seeding idea intrigues me… anyone know if there’s already relevant discussions or feature requests on the PeerTube codebase?
Seeding was a thing with webtorrent, then they defaulted to their new HLS method and it is now practically unused. You can still download the entire file via torrent on some instances.
Their problem was they needed to be able to stream chunks of the video via webtorrent and also switch between different resolutions. Supposedly that isn’t true, but I do believe it is ( I’ve seen other people talk about possible implementations). Dunno if the maintainers are actually receptive to a webtorrent HLS or DASH solution.
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Webtorrents are torrents that run in the browser. From my understanding, they have all the features of torrents except that they run in WebRTC (because browsers don’t directly speak torrent). If they do, then requesting specific chunks of torrents should be possible. Therefore, it should be possible to have torrents by resolution.
There could be preferences per user / per session to allow customisation of the seeding preferences with reasonable defaults depending on network speed.
As for hard drive space, it probably won’t be an issue. Users can selectively seed what they want by using qBittorrent which supports WebTorrent. If there were thus a webtorrent solution, tools could also be written to download and seed videos depending on preferences e.g most watched videos, least watched videos, hottest videos in last 24 hours, maybe even a protocol where the server dynamically requests seeders depending on which video is being streamed by users, and so on and so forth.
WebTorrents in peertube could really change the video distribution game altogether.
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Torrents alleviate the distribution problem, not the storage problem. You can’t tell me that distribution isn’t a problem. A few federated instances won’t be able to scale viewership if it goes into 1M concurrent views or so. Hell, even 100 or 1k streaming a 1080p video can easily bring a server to its knees.
There have been proposals to use IPFS for storage, but frankly, IPFS is nowhere near ready for production usage.
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I’m not sure you’re aware, but peertube also federates videos. Instances can choose to federate the metadata and the data too. That means if one instance goes down, there’s a chance the data will be available on another peertube instance. Furthermore, as I said, using webtorrents will allow alternative clients (like qBittorrent) to store copies of the data. That’s why I brought up (maybe in another comment) tools written around that which could, independently or with coordination from an instance, download and see the X “hottest” videos of the day, most viewed videos of interval Y, or whatever else.
Regarding torrents solving the storage problem: it’s possible. The main instance where the video is uploaded to will still have to keep the primary copy of the video and all the different resolutions. You can’t just upload the video, make a torrent, and then delete the content. It will have to be distributed to be kept redundant. And if the primary copy is deleted without any redundancy, you will have a problem. You could hope that all federated instances copy the data and that many do-gooders (probably archivists) decide to seed every video of every instance out there, but I think it’s more likely that popular videos will be seeded and obscure videos only exist once on one instance.
One could imagine the main instance deleting the content after a certain seed threshold has been reached (e.g 500 seeders have 100% of the file), but that could be easily abused: somebody wants to take down a video and controls a few hundred IPs --> tell the instance you have 100% of the file, instance deletes video --> video is gone. So, again, I don’t think it solves the storage problem. Federation could though. If instances have a max number of users they accept, users would have to spread out across instances and thus distribute the storage requirements.
In any case, webtorrents would improve the current situation. Right now in order to duplicate a video and contribute bandwidth, you must run an entire peertube instance. It’s simply the “easiest” way to do so. Nobody, to my knowledge, has successfully written a minimal client that just communicates with instances and downloads, then hosts the video files and makes itself aware to instances as another instance (though stripped down).
Webtorrents would allow somebody to just grab the torrent file (or magnet link) paste it into qbittorrent, and be part of the swarm without having to go through weird hoops or run an entire instance.
I myself care 0 about resolution. And yeah, a lot of times videos are listened to instead anyways.