Isn't this what peertube is for?
this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2026
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Everyone suggests Peertube here, yet nobody uses it.
I think the biggest problem is that it's not integrated nicely. Only Piefed and maybe some Lemmy apps have an embedded player, which allows you to play the video without leaving the site. But most people will still have to open the link in a new tab, which is especially inconvenient on mobile apps. When I see a Peertube link, most of the time I don't even bother opening it. Another issue is that if you want to upload a video, you first have to find a good instance and then create an account to do so.
And even then, OP was looking for a site that allows direct linking (which would play natively in every app), something that Peertube does not allow. And most of the sites he mentioned, allow uploading without an account.
So I think that Peertube is not a good suggestion here. At least not yet.
Im using it daily. On piefed crossposting and subscribing is super wasy after the fact.
You can install with one click with yunohost.
Does this work as a direct link?: https://techlore.tv/download/streaming-playlists/hls/videos/43d9d434-a748-4fba-a4bb-f1613b064d05-720-fragmented.mp4
I’m on mobile.
Yes, in lemmy connect.
Sure, but the peertube on-boarding sucks. Its miles away from Lemmy or Mastodon. Its also way harder to self-host
I couldn't figure out how to join and which server to join. I assumed it was like lemmy or Mastodon that you pick a server and that's your home. It wasn't obvious to me.
Not really harder. Only naturally more demanding in computational power and storage space.
To be honest, all of the fediverse apps are too difficult to self-host. And yeah, the hardware requirements were what I was referring to. I should have been clearer, sorry.
PeerTube suffers from a lot of defragmentation. Only a few instances federates with a lot of other instances.
With Lemmy or Mastodon, you can almost pick any instance and still be able to federate with anyone.
Does Peertube allow direct linking? I haven't tried it. I thought it was a youtube clone.
PeerTube video is automatically embedded.
I rolled my own, as I grew frustrated with catbox limitations of filetypes and sizes. Mine looks like shit, but it works and its purpose is for embedding/linking, so it doesn't matter.
Mine is more geared towards "publishing" in that users (I don't want to deal with the headache that is anonymous uploads) have a control panel displaying all their uploaded files and then choose what should be available to the public, and whether it will also be available via bittorrent.
Next up is setting up the signup system so users can actually be added without me running a shell script. I've been meaning to implement a sort of sign-up-via-lemmy feature, in that if you're a lemmy user without trash reputation, you can use an OTP to upload files associated with your username@instance instead.
It's not production ready yet, but it works well enough for testing. Most of what I've posted/embedded for the past half a year has been from my own host.
that's funny I was in the exact same situation as you, ended up making my own self hosted image/video hosting service using supabase for auth and 'bucket' storage on my laptop, coded using mistral ai for the majority and claude to clean up
