Ask Lemmy

What is peer tube? Honest questions

I think the biggest thing for everyone is discovery.

I also think the worst parts of youtube are baked into the videos themselves now so re-uploads are just a worse experience even without the buffering.

About a year ago I started trying to check out peertube to see if it was worthwhile for uploading my videos to. My first challenge was just finding instances to sign up on. Most of them didn't allow registration. Then for the ones I did find, streaming videos was very slow and laggy. In some cases, I couldn't even view videos. And then, it seemed that I could only search for videos that existed on that particular instance.

Like I said, this was a year ago so maybe it's improved. But in general, it seemed totally unusable for someone just looking for a way to share videos.

Lack of content and lack of recommended page to find content

Proper grayjay integration. Though last time I tried peertube, there wasn't much to watch anyway.

What keeps you away from PeerTube?

I don't think that the economics work for a revenue-free video hosting service, not in 2025. Maybe not ever, depending upon what happens with bandwidth costs.

Text is pretty small. In 2025, it's reasonable for someone to serve text to many people at relatively little cost. That lets the Threadiverse work.

Streaming video to many people is a lot more bandwidth-intensive.

Can you do something in software about that? Ehhh...well, there are limited improvements you can make.

If you give up the on-demand aspect and manage to get people Internet-wide multicast access again a la the Mbone, maybe use forward error correction to provide redundancy to permit reconstruction of dropped packets, you can get somewhat-more-efficient network utilization, kinda like TV with recording. It's still soaking up network resources, just not as much at one point, and if it scales up, at some point network providers are going to want to be paid one way or another.

Maybe people have enough upstream bandwidth today that you can require that everyone run a servent, as some P2P systems do, and only provide downstream bandwidth if they provide upstream bandwidth. Think BitTorrent or Mojo Nation or similar. I don't know to what degree that's practical, and it's basically relying on ISPs not to crack down on some services that are a lot more bandwidth-heavy than others, having users offload costs to other network users; it's really more of gaming a pricing strategy, like FidoNet. Also, NAT and firewalling is going to be a pain in the butt on the network as things stand -- I suspect that the average user isn't gonna be able to punch a hole (if their network provider even supports it).

If we assume that bandwidth gets far cheaper in the near future, to the point where everyone is just running around with so much bandwidth that streaming massive amounts of video just doesn't matter, then, okay, maybe that would do it. But I doubt that that's actually going to happen, and there may be fundamental physical limitations that prevent it. Also, while one could maybe do a video streaming service akin to those today, my guess is that if the availability of bandwidth became that much more available, that people could figure out other desirable things to do with that bandwidth that is a substitute for video, and that might largely supplant traditional video. Like, maybe instead of 2D video, you send a 3D voxel field or something, give the viewer freedom of movement.

Honestly, I'm still not sure that the Threadiverse is going to be able to handle free hosting of high-resolution images in the long term in its present form if usage scales up much. A revenue-free video streaming service seems far harder.

Regarding the first question, for me PeerTube has a similar problem as with other fediverse stuff, which besides a lack of greater adoption is a scarcity of sites with a positive, distinct identity/community (last I checked at least) to encourage more people to use it.

Off the top of my head in terms of PeerTube, only TILvids.com comes to mind, which is cool, but remains primarily tech and specifically Linux-related educational videos. I don't mind that, but it'd be cool to see a broader range of educational content on there.

The PeerTube Android App is a huge step forward, but it needs two important features to be a viable YouTube alternative:

• possibility to login with my account
• functionality to cast to Chromecast or similar devices
• more content (not a feature)

PeerTube overall lacks decent support for subtitles, which is my answer to all of the questions. Veronica Explains is (so far) the only channel I make an effort to watch on PeerTube because she provides subtitles.

I’d be more than happy with terrible machine-generated subtitles at the bare minimum since they are enabled by default on YouTube when uploading a video. Accessibility is quite important imo

Controversial opinion: I think PeerTube should add support for paid-access content as you could then persuade the creators on Nebula to join. Since they are promoting their YT-alternative already, this would mean extra PeerTube publicity and users for free.

https://ideas.joinpeertube.org/

I mostly watch youtube on my firetv stick and I don't bother with sideloading. ill check to see if an app has come up but their annoying store is well. annoying. its not really a problem with peertube. I am going to try using it whenever I would otherwise watch youtube on my laptop but its not very often.

Sepia search is great but it could use some modernizing.

The set-up process

Currently, unless you are already familiar with Docker etc, you run headfirst into a brick wall when trying to set up a PeerTube instance.
Until that process is easier to follow and understand, there won't be widespread adoption