PeerTube is a decentralized and federated alternative to YouTube. The goal of PeerTube is not to replace YouTube but to offer a viable alternative using the strength of ActivityPub and P2P protocols.

Being built on ActivityPub means PeerTube is able to be part of a bigger social network, the Fediverse (the Federated Universe). On the other hand, P2P technologies help PeerTube to solve the issue of money, inbound with all streaming platform : With PeerTube, you don't need to have a lot of bandwidth available on your server to host a PeerTube platform because all users (which didn't disable the feature) watching a video on PeerTube will be able to share this same video to other viewers.

If you are curious about PeerTube, I can't recommend you enough to check the official website to learn more about the project. If after that you want to try to use PeerTube as a content creator, you can try to find a platform available there to register or host yourself your own PeerTube platform on your own server.

The development of PeerTube is actually sponsored by Framasoft, a french non-for-profit popular educational organization, a group of friends convinced that an emancipating digital world is possible, convinced that it will arise through actual actions on real world and online with and for you!

Framasoft is also involved in the development of Mobilizon, a decentralized and federated alternative to Facebook Events and Meetup.

If you want to contribute to PeerTube, feel free to:

report bugs and give your feedback on Github or on our forums

submit your brillant ideas on our Feedback platform

Help to translate the software, following the contributing guide

Make a donation to help to pay bills inbound in the development of PeerTube.

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[–] Dee@lemmy.world 12 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I really want to see Peertube flourish but I'm just not sure it's going to work out. Video streaming platforms are a much different beast than the micro blogs of Mastodon or forums of Lemmy. But, this is a good step in that direction so good luck to them.

[–] MHLoppy@fedia.io 4 points 11 months ago

From the submission:

Not a rival, just an alternative

The realization that led us to develop PeerTube is that no one can rival YouTube or Twitch. You would need Google’s money, Amazon servers’ farms... Above all, you would need the greed to exploit millions of creators and videomakers, groom them into formatting their content to your needs, and feed them the crumbs of the wealth you gain by farming their audience into data livestock.

Monopolistic centralized video platforms can only be sustained by surveillance capitalism.

Even though we cannot pinpoint the exact budget Framasoft spent on PeerTube since 2017, our conservative estimate would be around 500 000 €

With these two perspectives it seems to be doing well, even if it can't / won't entirely displace the major players.

[–] spaduf@slrpnk.net 2 points 11 months ago

I was fairly skeptical initially, but as I've seen it interoperate with Lemmy/Mastodon my whole perspective has changed. The issue of cost is maybe still a big one (I think it depends on how the instance landscape shakes out) but I am no longer worried about the issue of discovery.