Blender is testing PeerTube after YouTube blocks their videos worldwide
blender.org
blender.org
I'm not clear if they want that because of bogus copyright claims, EU legislation etc, or just because they favour making money over not making money?
Edit: Either way looking for alternatives seems like a good idea.
I am pretty dismayed to be this right. I didn't think YT would be nearly this aggressive in service of the ideas I outlined.
Basically, they take a cut off that activity. In some cases they could take most of or all the money, which is a clear win for them, but even when they pay out they're earning revenue on the transaction. It's been their core business model, so the problems with advocating an adfree behavior become obvious.
I would add that this becomes more urgent if they're in crisis. Makes me wish I could get the master copies I'd uploaded back, but there's no chance of that.
Bottom line: shots fired. You must work with YouTube the way they want you to work with YouTube, or you'll get punished.
From Wikipedia:
> "Innocent monopoly", or monopoly achieved solely by merit, is perfectly legal, but acts by a monopolist to artificially preserve that status, or nefarious dealings to create a monopoly, are not. The purpose of the Sherman Act is not to protect competitors from harm from legitimately successful businesses, nor to prevent businesses from gaining honest profits from consumers, but rather to preserve a competitive marketplace to protect consumers from abuses.
It's pretty clear that Google used their dominant position(s) in web search and web advertising to then dominate the user-generated video space. And now they're engaging in the type of abuse of customers that the Sherman Antitrust Act was designed to mitigate.
https://twitter.com/AnneMunition/status/1008852515629105152
YouTube preventing Linus Tech Tips from advertising their non-YouTube videos/streams.
In other words, like you said:
> Bottom line: shots fired. You must work with YouTube the way they want you to work with YouTube, or you'll get punished.
As an aside, I have to wonder if you've thought through your desire to serve your website over HTTP instead of over HTTPS.
You noted that you use ad blocking software because ad networks are a common route by which malware propagates. HTTP websites comprise another salient target for malware. If I am at a coffee shop with a compromised wifi router and I load your HTTP website, that compromised router can inject malware into your page and my browser will run it, just like it would have run malware served by an ad server. If your website were served over HTTPS, the router wouldn't have been able to do that.
I imagine you knew all of that, and you're right that HTTPS does have some problems, but trying to avoid those problems by opting for HTTP is exchanging those problems for (imho) much bigger problems.
Here's an idea: if you want to drive home the point that you don't do it for the ad money, and if you want to force yourself not to depend on that money, you could give it all to FOSS foundations.
You could publish your YouTube check every month, as small as it may be, on your blog or website, alongside an equivalent donation to, say, the FSF, Mozilla, Wikimedia, Archive.org, Blender, EFF, or whatever foundation you like.
If you publicize it on YouTube and here, you may even start a movement of sorts.
But that doesn't seem to make sense. There are lots of popular channels that don't have advertising and Blender's videos are popular but not that popular.
Their blogpost about it is here: https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blende...
I haven't looked at the contract they posted, but they seem to have the same interpretation as you. Maybe it's just an updated contract that includes new rules if you monetize?
(that aside, the communication chain from google posted there is just atrocious. I wouldn't sign a 6 page contract based on those robo-emails either)
I’ve received an update from our experts stating that you
need to enable ads for your video. Once you enable, your
video will be available in the USA.
It makes sense if it's staged rollout. I'm assuming all unmonetized good actors (ie not stealing other people's content) will see this ultimatum eventually.
https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/1009010581549060097
> Google sent a contract to Blender Foundation in which we have to accept monetizing our Youtube channel content.
and link to contract:
http://download.blender.org/institute/Contract%20between%20G...
The contract looks like a regular monetization contract, so the cause-effect relationship between blocking and monetization is not made clear.
Why would Google single out Blender for this? Unless they had copyright concerns and needed to revshare with copyright holders, or they want to go "freemium" and make all high-view/quality videos monetized.
Get your act together, Google. This is just stupid.
Seems there are some changes going on.
"Don't be evil."
However, if you read the comments here, they paint a sinister portrait of YouTube that has nothing to do with Blender's issue. Some examples:
- ads are required for big channels (false)
- demonetization of content creators (unrelated)
- anti-trust based on search or social networking (unrelated)
- SketchUp is blocking YouTube videos (false)
We might as well change Hacker News from an article based format to a topic based format if everyone is just going to bring in their unrelated and false pet peeves to every discussion.
I have myself found it pretty hard to publish videos without ads on YouTube, even though I have a minuscule channel.
Their Content ID system is triggered for almost any background music I throw at it, including Royalty Free or CC-BY music. The insidious part is that the videos are not taken down, they just put ads on top of it while you try to refute the claim, even if you tick the "I do not want ads to appear" box. The problem in this instance is anyone can upload a piece of audio and claim copyright on it, and video are then automatically flagged.
There is an interesting support thread about paid-for, Royalty-free classical music, that shows how outrageous the system is: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/iMlPy...
ads are required for big channels (false) [...] everyone
is just going to bring in their unrelated and false pet
peeves to every discussion.
I’ve received an update from our experts stating that you
need to enable ads for your video. Once you enable, your
video will be available in the USA.
I feel your claim that this is a pet peeve that has nothing to do with Blender's issue is unfair.
[1] https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blende...
Are you looking at a different article to me?
The cases which may not apply here, like requiring ads, are real issues that don't get the visibility that the victims deserve. So when a high visibility incident like this happens, people highlight the plight of those past (and current) victims even if not wholly applicable to this case.
Maybe you're right that using this platform to highlight the host of well-documented problems with the platform is "off-topic", but it's understandable and logical when you understand the bigger picture and community here.
That and the number of coincidental "mistakes" in this story requires serious suspension of disbelief. One wonders whether any of those mistakes would have been caught had the channel been lower profile.
> People might be upset because it's emotionally painful to watch a property that was once a middle finger to "the man" become wholly co-opted.
Of course this is just more of the same. Calling YouTube -- a service that spends tens of millions of dollars a year spreading information, entertainment, and news around the world for free -- "co-opted" is beyond stupid. But it's just this sort of black-and-white, "good vs evil" thinking which rules.
> That and the number of coincidental "mistakes" in this story requires serious suspension of disbelief. One wonders whether any of those mistakes would have been caught had the channel been lower profile.
And there's the conspiracy. Baseless speculation without evidence, scare quotes, and a total failure to admit error when proven wrong.
I'm not sure what, if anything, can be done. There's a certain logic at work here that poisons thread after thread. I say logic and not ideology because it's really a style of thinking. It's a kind of general extremism-cum-conspiracy that has been well and truly normalized. The people that will rush in to rage about the latest news from Tesla or Google don't even understand how insane they sound.
YouTube can change the rules whenever they want. If you don't like how they change it, support a different service instead. Continuing to patronize it as they implement changes you disagree with, and then kvetching online won't help.
GP's point that discussions frequently get derailed is spot on. Why even read the comments if you're just going to get a bunch of unrelated opinions on the topic.
I don't know, maybe because it leads to destruction of valuable content, regardless of whether it is legally ok.
The notion that just because something is legal, it can't be upsetting is absurd. What about if the government decided to use eminent domain to acquire your land? It would be legal, but probably still upsetting.
Your choice is to try to avoid having anything that will get in their way or set up your life to not rely on their services.
Recently Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and others are showing the dangers of for-profit data monopolies and are pushing many people to open federated alternatives like PeerTube, Mastodon, Riot.im etc. This is a much healthier and censorship resistant direction for the internet to take, IMO.
Keep right on being negligent and profit-seeking YouTube. The internet will be better off in the long term.
Some of us may not appreciate this "expectation" of absolute topicality; comments are supposed to be a free-for-all. That's why we call them comments.
https://torrentfreak.com/youtubes-piracy-filter-blocks-mit-c...
"Update 2: Blender’s Ton Roosendaal notes that YouTube wants the organization to sign a monetization agreement.""Last night the Youtube Support team contacted Francesco Siddi by phone. As we understand it now it’s a mix of coincidences, bad UIs, wrong error messages, ignorant support desk staff and our non-standard decision to not monetize a popular Youtube channel."
I do wish people thought a bit more criticaly. Removing the ability to host videos ad free would be a gigantic change for YouTube, so people should be more skeptical.
but again i get it, you got some stock and you gotta protect that bottom line.
"We might as well change Hacker News from an article based format to a [corporate sponsor] based format if everyone is just going to . . . [support their company in] every discussion."
The post is about an YouTube UX issue that caused Blender to choose another video platform, that YT didn't disallow the content as some people believe.
Wouldn't it help if Discussion boards had a logician magician who moderates posts? Someone who's sole purpose is to point out logical fallacies- like whether a post adds value to the conversation. Is it objective or opinionated? Is the post related to the discussion? If not, does the post expand upon the discussion in a way that's relevant or did the writer lack critical thinking? How?
My post is slightly off-topic considering the original, however, I'm relating to user @ariwilson about this discussion's lack of critical thinking and deductive reasoning, which is related.
I'm adding to the discussion similar to ariwilson but not adding new examples since ariwilson covered that. I'm not just complaining that people are "Stoopid and shouldn't be allowed to post of they're not helping everyone so we should ban them"! hehe- because that would be my ignorant opinion based on personal belief void of fact checking or research. Plus, banning people, places or things is never a good idea! Banning speech and freedom of thought are definitely terrible ideas! ;)
It's late a here and I'm rambling, sorry. But, you get the idea...a mod mage with a symbol map depicting the fallacys within each post in an easy-to-understand way. Wouldn't it be nice?
It's crazy and really sad how YouTube bloomed into this awesome, independent alternative to all the crap coming out of hollywood and cable TV, but now they've decided to kneecap the independents, promote the shit out of establishment stuff, and push actual, real-live cable really hard.
It feels like a hostile takeover.
I think if all you were concerned about is advertisers, you'd just let them pick that as a criteria: "Would you like to advertise on channels flagged by our system as potentially offensive?"
Some would, some wouldn't. Problem solved, you don't piss off creators, you make more money.
(Maybe the counter-argument to that is advertisers wouldn't want to appear on any YouTube channel because some other YouTube channel had offensive content, as though all of YouTube were a tainted brand, but that is frankly laughable.)
It's fine if new videos get flagged, you can reupload them, but youtube bots flag old videos and there is no notification whatsoever. Even their own "Video manager board" not showing them as demonitised, because they still get money from youtube red and considered as claimed, you have to enter "edit video" to see the notification. You just have to manually search them... And for gaming channels with 1-2k videos it's a pain.
Not to mention part of the problem was YouTube not enforcing their content guidelines to begin with. Hate speech has always been against their content guidelines, they just never actually enforced it.
They already do this. People need to stop being angry at things they know nothing about.
I've been waiting patiently hoping it comes back, but at this point I feel like I'm going to have to use archive.org or download directly from them.
I was slowly warming up to the idea of paying for Red for commercial-less music and maybe checking out some other paid content, but this has been a bucket of cold water on that notion.
You can not stream videos from the website though as streaming links are from youtube.
20 000 € goal: PeerTube v1, clean and simple
With your help, we can get PeerTube to its first stable release, its v1, planned for October, 2018. You will finance the development of:
○ Interface localization, to support multiple languages;
○ Video subtitles, to facilitate video accessibility for diverse audiences;
○ RSS feeds, to follow instances, users and channels through RSS protocol;
○ Video import from URL (YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc.) or torrent file;
○ Improved and advanced search feature;
○ Software stability (bug fixes) and scalability.
There are important features we dream of including into the v1. We hope you will contribute so far as to helping us finance:
○ Video redundancy (to share bandwidth between instances or as fallback if the original instance is down)
○ Subscriptions to users & channels throughout the federation (for users to subscribe to whatever they want regardless of their instance federation settings)
PeerTube isn't a quick and easy fix to data-centralization through video platforms. It's an alternative that will grow and emancipate internet users on the long run. At this point, your contributions will help us:
○ Finance the development of a webapp that will be available on Android and iOS app stores;
○ Contribute to the ActivityPub community. ActivityPub is the groundbreaking federation protocol that runs PeerTube's federation and also Mastodon's (a federated Twitter alternative);
○ Secure PeerTube's lead developer employment after the V1 release (oct. 2018);
○ Pave the road to V2, where our priority will be a plugin system to facilitate the development of personnalized features and displays.I know ISPs have a bad rep in the states but where I live in europe we still trust some of our ISPs. So I'd like to see a world where ISPs offer mastodon and peertube instances to off load privately hosted instances.
I'd be more likely to trust someone I'm already paying monthly for internet access to keep my social media data safe, than a "free" service.
So I think whoever provides these services (Identity, email, Fediverse node) should be independent from the ISP, and allow you to use your own domain so that you can change provider one day
Micro blogging is something society can easily take over from big corporations because it's basically like e-mail, but even more optimized compared to those old days.
But video uploading and streaming is where bandwidth becomes a major factor, and bandwidth=money.
- Decentralised. Anyone can run their own instance, but instances are federated so everyone on any instance can see your toots (Mastodon's tweets). So if you're paranoid about privacy or hate Nazi bootboys, you can run your own instance with complete control.
- A nice progression of feeds from only people you follow; to all toots of your instance; to toots from all instances.
- Polite discourse, at least on the mastodon.social instance which I belong to. Different instances have different rules, so maybe there is one for Nazi bootboys.
- Open, so if you don't like the interface, you can make your own. The stock web interface is fine for me.
- No ads!
- Trump isn't on it.
If you enjoyed Twitter more in the past when real people tweeted about real things, Mastodon is definitely worth checking out.
Unfortu steely I think there's no way around that at this point, as I suspect any growth curve that actually allows a group to keep a culture will never be growing fast enough for the vastajoriry of people to put up with for long enough for it to grow sizable enough. :/
Everything is polite at first, until it gets big. This has been true of all social media platforms in history.
What I find surprising is that Google did not see this coming and thus A. never limited ad-free content to small channels in their ToS, and B. does not provide a paid hosting option.
But these guys have priority support, and still go around for months with youtube without getting any answers, only to then have their whole channel killed without comment.
Why do so many tech companies have these Kafkaesque exception paths?
If they want everything to be monetised in order to fund the ongoing existence and development of YouTube that's entirely their choice, but they need to be very explicit about it.
Especially when they're wiping out entire channels with misleading error messages as a consequence of maybe possibly changing something that they haven't told their support people about.
Support doesn't scale. Better that a million users have a terrible experience than one user takes up staff time getting their problem fixed.
If you cannot (or don't want to) scale support, create the policies from beginning in a way that hardly needs any support. Just like you plan your database from beginning how it is supposed to scale.
However, they're a big company, and it makes sense that they have a policy of "if your channel is big enough, you have to put ads on it to support hosting cost". Making policy exceptions in a big company like this is tricky, and it seems Blender just fell through the cracks.
Given some of the very brand unsafe videos that show on YouTube, it is obviously in google’s best interest to not require ads for all videos.
Not surprising but disappointing. Hopefully people leave YouTube in droves and remind them that their position is not static.
First time hearing of PeerTube, but looks good so far.
However, another reason competitors haven't cropped up is because copyright law in the US and elsewhere highly favors publishers over hosters or creators. Publishers will sue the crap out of you the moment you get big enough to make a difference. If Google hadn't dumped money into YouTube, they'd probably have gone under years ago when Viacom and others sued them for copyright infringement.
We need copyright reform.
Offering to host your videos for free and display ads along them hardly seems like "abusing that position"...
YouTube gives Google _unparalleled_ access to what we like, how we think, what we want, ... It's the best profiling tool there is.
Let's not say "for free" when we are paying a price for it already.
But hey, feel free to upload your videos elsewhere.
For free? No. For your valuable data. You think youtube is worth over $100 billion because it's hosting your videos for free?
https://www.thestreet.com/investing/youtube-might-be-worth-o...
ed: see below comment from OscarCunningham
If they need to charge more, then they should charge more. YT Red is arguably too cheap.
Which is frankly ridiculous anyway, if they want to change the rules for unmonetised videos, they should actually change the rules, have a setting on the button that says "if the video becomes popular enough, YouTube reserves the right to run our own advertising against the video" and just run ads.
https://www.kisskissbankbank.com/en/projects/peertube-a-free...
Whether Alphabet is still making any money off SketchUp, or whether one of the 3D companies is paying them something, I think this move was intentionally targeted on their part. And unfortunately, like most of the things that have happened ever since Google completely dropped the first word from "Don't Be Evil", I'm terrified that they're going to win.
I mean, we're talking about the company that's drowning its users in chat applications/protocols.
That said, the i agree that archive.org or Wikimedia might be good ways to publish. Still, much like blender's other "big projects" (make film, make game etc) - this move potentially helps build out a working distributed video system.
But the fact that sales drones at Google are handed broken procedures and ordered to chase forced monitization at cross-purposes of certain prominent users - still doesn't mean there's any editorializing working against the Blender foundation in order to further sketchup.
I'm sure Google management would be thrilled if they were able to organize half such a conspiracy to straighten out their own chat apps.
Changing their policies now hurts non-profit organizations like the Blender Foundation and is in effect a bait and switch. Google is using at this point its monopoly to coerce their partners and users into accepting whatever the heck they want. Personally I don't understand them. This is clearly about a very popular channel that is bringing them eyeballs.
I also have no sympathy for their need to monetize — several years back we had a protest in my country against a gold mining company and the YouTube videos made by protesters where preceded by ads of the mining company, ads which were lying and that couldn't be reported for that.
Ads on YouTube are dangerous as they aren't just about products or services, but about social and political issues too and whomever has the bucks to pay wins more attention. As an author, having the ability to disable ads for certain videos is common sense.
---
Also, Google, I would have registered for YouTube Red to pay cash for an ad free experience, but you haven't made it available in my country yet and I've been waiting for a long time.
Pay them for no ads? Nope, that's why I have Disconnect, Ghostery, uBlock Origin, and some userscripts enabled along with a fairly extensive HOSTS file.
Free Google!
There's no good reason why, but that's why we try to regulate monopolies
but i get it, you got some stock and you gotta protect that bottom line.
You should have known that people won't buy your "poor google is dying under the load of Blender videos" approach. Now that you're faced with the facts you try to dramatize the situation even more. I guess the recruiting standards at google went down rapidly or are you the outcome of this recently abolished recruiting strategy?
Thinks about what this means in the big picture, Google cannot get enough people showing ads on their videos to support people who choose not to show ads. What percentage of Youtube videos don't show ads? 5% ? 10%?
Don't hate me for it, but my prediction is that the next lifeline Google will reach for will be charging money for turn by turn directions in maps. They really need to find some way other than search ads to make money.
[1] This is hyperbole, I don't think they will deindex sites but I can see it affecting the page rank.
If Google was really hurting for money they'd curb all the hiring they've been doing.
Lifeline? Google is hardly in a bad financial situation.
For me, it matches up with Google destroying the user value of Google sites (like with the Blender videos in the article), and removing 99% of organic search out of their search engine when their algorithm determines that they might be able to convert the query into some cash, or the line they have crossed repeatedly even after being slapped by the EU not once but twice! to make vendors pay for ranking in the top results of search.
For me, I've been watching their CPC numbers drop for decades (that, in my opinion, is a reasonable proxy for the 'profit margin' on clicks) and I've seen them pay more and more to direct traffic to their sites as their organic traffic has dried up.
I see their business model under siege, their profit margins eroding, their efforts at monetization becoming more and more off putting to the data cows they are trying to milk, and conclude they are in fact dying.
Or maybe they just don't want to.
When I was at Blekko we were analyzing this sort of thing pretty hard. We found that a web page with no ads could point to pages with ads and that the expected rate of return on traffic to the ad free page could be calculated (it was non-zero revenue). I would agree that is only a proxy for browsing behavior as the Youtube example consumes resources for the ad free video as well, but unless YouTube has even worse monetization than the most cynical predictions, I would guess it would be worth it to have the Ad free video surrounded by suggestions.
So if there are large channels that have milquetoast content that is non-controversial (for now, it won't take long before all educational content beyond elementary school level is de facto controversial) but aren't monetized, that really leaves YouTube out in the cold. Paying the hosting costs AND they don't have any increased leverage to regulate those channels contents? Worst case scenario as far as they're concerned... but they also don't want that content hopping to a different platform. Google didn't run YouTube at a staggering loss for a decade for nothing, they did it to suppress competition in the video space and guarantee no one could afford to compete with them unless they also had a search engine advertising business that could prop up the titanic losses.
An alternative solution would be for youtube to compete with patreon, allow sponsorship directly and take a cut. They have in fact been testing this on select channels. On some big channels you see a "sponsor" button next to the "subscribe" button.
Patreon's also got inertia for crowd funding and donations. Twitch has had paid subscriptions for a fairly long time and you still see Twitch streamers talking about their Patreon. Twitch only recently added multi tier support, but their bits for donations has essentially killed PayPal (largely since PayPal's service isn't very good).
There are people throwing cash at the screen, and YouTube is taking the slow road and they're going to end up as far behind as IBM was in the 90s.
No. This doesn't make sense. The channels that are primarily supported by Patreon donations could still be monetized by YouTube, even with ads. The real motivational structure is contaminated by politics and a desire by actors within YouTube to engage in the exercise censorious power using the YouTube platform. Otherwise, YouTube would be running it's own version of Patreon and letting non-mainstream advertisers buy ads on channels not suitable for mainstream advertisers.
Beware of authoritarian mindsets taking over your corporate culture. This can result in a corporate culture incapable of "hands off" policies which can be necessary to foster an ecosystem, and let the company organically adapt to the true direction of the market.
That's ridiculous, and it's totally shooting yourself in the foot. The vast majority of creators with many views do want to monetize, YouTube is losing almost nothing by allowing people not to if they choose. They must be really be desparate for revenue over there.
Advertising is certainly one way to square that. Honestly I don't see what the big deal is here.
Also don't forget that YouTube gave them the option to not advertise on those videos. It's so arbitrarily capricious I was convinced it was a technical mishap when the news first broke.
The Blender Foundation isn't "Blender", though. It's a financial entity with income (there's literally a giant "donate" link on their home page) and expenses. They pay for all sorts of stuff that they need (obviously I have no clue what their balance sheet looks like).
And no one whines that they don't get free conference admission or airline tickets or printer paper or whatever. Why is their video hosting any different?
Those are terrible analogies. YouTube offers free hosting with the ability to opt out of monetizing your videos -- features that they will apparently punish you for using. That is absurdly user-hostile.
If people picking that option is causing problems for your business, you take that option away.
YT is free to block whatever content they want for whatever reason. However, creators will follow the path of least resistance and viewers will follow creators.
Push the creators away and there will be no viewers to show ads to.
I'd venture to say most people learning blender will spend a significant time on YouTube, blender isn't the easiest thing to learn by a long shot.
That's ridiculous, and it's totally shooting yourself in the foot.
People using power over the private YouTube platform to push political agendas through censorship crossed the "ridiculous, and it's totally shooting yourself in the foot" threshold awhile back. It's just that it's leaking into the monetization realm.
This is what happens when you let authoritarian mindsets take over your company's culture. You wind up with a company that can't keep its hands off the ecosystem it's supposedly fostering.
This is a speculation of mine from what I observed on some tech channels I am not familiar with YT Terms and Conditions.
If you get third party sponsors and not allow monetization is YT getting nothing? If yes then we can see what they are trying to make here.
Google wants creators funded, but they want the system to push their ad-focused approach. The last thing Google wants is a future where the (unethical, horrible, destructive) surveillance-capitalism-ad-tech economy goes away…
What would be really nice, from a viewer standpoint, would be if it was done on a flat subscription rate, like Sirius XM and the BBC do it. Basically make a premium version of YouTube, but I'm sure their marketing department will try to give it a cooler, but less useful, name than YouTube Premium.
And they shouldn't freaking block videos because the creators flipped a switch. That's just stupid. If they're not willing to offer the videos without ads, then offer the videos with ads.
Google's strategy as they offer patronage options will be to make it a ransom that removes ads. That way, the ads are still there for non-patrons and Google gets to keep their primary business model.
What I'm saying is that patronage should go to those who treat the public better by not showing ads to anyone. We shouldn't reward bad behavior through ransoms that make the bad stuff go away just for those who pay up.
http://mimiandeunice.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ME_486_P...
Because the corporate culture of Google/YouTube has changed into one of authoritarian adherence. This is the natural result.
Really? Is that what you've taken away from the Maven debate?
There's a couple simpler, far more plausible explanations.
It's a number of observations. It's only natural that a company like YouTube would seek to monetize and shift towards the mainstream. It's what they are doing with the long tail and the creative margins which is suspect.
Publish something YT doesn't like, and we'll demonetize you!
Publish something YT likes, and... we'll force you to monetize?
Shocking.
I think if enough people write in, they’ll change their mind.
Peertube, d.tube, and other federated/decentralized streaming service are really not that reliable, at least from my experience.
Edit: Apparently vimeo reversed its position in 2014. https://vimeo.com/blog/post/new-upload-rules
I find the service is actually quite good, but I'm currently investigating moving to protonmail instead.
The Blender team is working on Blender 2.8 which will bring a lot of new features, including a lot of UI changes.
There was an article about some of these changes a while ago on their blog [1], and more recently a video showing a lot of these UI changes... available on the Blender Developers Youtube channel (how ironic!) [2].
[1] https://code.blender.org/2018/04/tools-toolbar-and-tool-widg...
Different instances of peertube can follow each other (doesn't have to be mutual - think twitter follow) and essentially share content to improve discoverability (think twitter timeline showing content from all the instances you follow).
When it came to searching for all content across all instances (in a way like how we can search all content on YouTube) is this something that would be possible?
> The administrators of a PeerTube instance can follow each other. When your PeerTube instance follows another PeerTube instance, you receive the videos preview informations from this instance. This way, you can display the videos available on your instance and on the instances you decided to follow. So you keep control of the videos displayed on your PeerTube instance!
"The sharing system used by this video implies that some technical information about your system (such as a public IP address) can be accessed publicly."
Which is then expanded on in an about page:
"PeerTube uses the BitTorrent protocol to share bandwidth between users. It implies that your public IP address is stored in the public BitTorrent tracker of the video PeerTube instance as long as you're watching the video. If you want to keep your public IP address private, please use a VPN or Tor. "
Seems like a large privacy leak that can be exploited by anyone who signs up to the tracker.
Requiring a VPN or Tor just for privacy from other users seems like an excessive requirement.
Connecting to bittorrent would give you the following information:
* Key (IP) to connect to other data sources (but joins will be dirty, IP addresses change, people use multiple ip address, multiple people use the same ip address).
* ISP name
* Rough location (mine says I'm in a suburb about 20 miles away, when I'm actually in the city)
* Which files you have and are willing to share.
* Which files you are requesting.
There is no PII, and the only thing interesting would be to do location analysis or to try to cluster the files based on taste (people that watch movie A are likely to also watch movie B)
Yes, I like my privacy.
> Every server I connect to knows my IP address.
And in this case it is every server plus every peer which is a much larger number of people having this information.
> * Key (IP) to connect to other data sources (but joins will be dirty, IP addresses change, people use multiple ip address, multiple people use the same ip address).
Not always. IP addresses can be correlated with other data sources. IP Addresses changing depends on the ISP. People using multiple IP addresses isn't always the case. Multiple people using the same IP address is not always the case.
> There is no PII
IP addresses can be PII depending on who you talk to. e.g. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/eu-dynamic-stati...
This is just another chink in the armour of online privacy no matter how noble the intentions.
I think sharing ip addresses, and using multiple ones, is probably the most common case in The United States.
Most households have multiple internet users and one ip addresses. Most people have a cellphone connected to the internet. A lot of people access the internet in locations like offices, school, and libraries.
Even then "Peer to Peer" technical details can be lost on people.
Still, kudos to them to actually bring this to the forefront but I won't be using it.
"4. ADVERTISING
"4.1 Delivery, Ad Revenues, Payments, Reports.
"Google will have the right, but not the obligation, to serve advertising in any and all Google Services, including but not limited to the display of ads on the Playback Pages and within the YouTube Video Player in conjunction with the display or playback of Provider Content and Monetized Content. Provider will receive 55% of Ad Revenues recognised by Google . If one or more Google content providers claim a portion of Monetized Content for monetization through the Content ID system, Provider will receive a pro rata share of the Ad Revenues that would otherwise be due, with such pro rata share to be determined by Google in its reasonable discretion . Recognized revenues do not include items listed in clause 4.3 or taxes. Payments to Provider for Ad Revenues will be sent by Google within approximately sixty (60) days after the end of any calendar month, provided that Provider’s earned balance is $100 or more in the aggregate. When Provider’s monthly earned balance is less than $100, there will be no payment and the balance will accumulate until it exceeds $100, at which time it will be paid to Provider in accordance with the preceding sentence. Any payments to Provider will be made in the manner that Google pays its partners. Google reserves the right to retain all other revenues derived from Google Services, including without limitation any revenues from ads that may appear on any search results pages. Within thirty (30) days of the end of each month, Google will provide Provider with usage reports in the form generally made available to partners at that time . Google may create an account for Provider to access information about payments owed to Provider. To ensure proper payment, Provider is responsible for providing and maintaining accurate contact and payment information associated with its account."
The interesting statement is the first sentence: "Google will have the right [...] to serve advertising in any and all Google Services, including but not limited to the display of ads on the Playback Pages and within the YouTube Video Player in conjunction with the display or playback of Provider Content and Monetized Content."
"Monitized Content", judging by other parts of the license, appears to be those videos that have "allow ads" checkbox; "Provider Content" are those without that check.
If yes, YouTube should have notified the affected channels first and ask them to change their settings or leave.
Basically, overzealous automatic piracy filters
In my limited testing from central San Francisco: it doesn't. Which makes me sad. Anybody have any insight into the pros/cons/ultimate performance/scalability limits for Peertube? Is the flakiness a function of immature technology or inviable technology?
Most of the amazing work google has done to make youtube fast is the magic behind google's omni-presence established world wide. Like they say in the post they have one datacenter in the EU serving this content. If they used AWS and spun up an instance serving content from every AWS region available the performance would be much better.
I was able to play the video but it lagged a bit to get started until I was able to find peers near me. This is likely a latency thing to the remote host in the EU.
PeerTube should scale much more easily than a conventional site because viewers, I assume, are peers of the content. More people looking at something means more people serving that content. The biggest con is that if you're viewing the video you're shoveling data to other viewers which, previously, you've likely not done.
I hope more people try things like this tech.
This actually could be done by anyone since PeerTube uses WebTorrent. Good samaritans could run a webtorrent-hybrid or WebTorrent Desktop instance and help serve those videos from their home connection or personal server(s).
> This Software must be used for Good, never Evil. It is expressly forbidden to use YouPHPTube to build porn sites, violence, racism or anything else that affects human integrity or denigrates the image of anyone.
Sigh.
> This video contains content from BlenderFoundation. It is not available in your country.
For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kes2qmijy7w and all other videos in "Blender Fundamentals" playlist.
I'm located in Sweden.
> Please don't install PeerTube for production on a small device behind a low bandwidth connection (example: a Raspberry PI behind your ADSL link) because it could slow down the fediverse.
Would this be because of fear of establishing a precedence where if a lot of people did that you'd have a situation of a lot of leechers but few seeders.
If thats the case, its the same situation where you have a lot of users watching videos on a server. The server can limit membership to protect itself I suppose but a personal instance would be better then a user that just watches but does not contribute.
I suppose somebody could make a RPI client that becomes a member to one or more instances and just downloads. Just let the servers protect themselves by limiting use here and there.
Recently the Peppa Pig shock videos thread started up again. As a parent it does worry me - but if we had to visit "grot-peppa-porn-1234.com" before viewing the video instead of choosing "bbc.com" I think managing the problem would be easier.
So, peertube is nice. Perhaps it's not the right solution still?
Well if that is not to take advantage of the user. What is it?
The only difference is you don't go through YouTube.
They were conducted from an IRC channel, and ranged from 5 minutes to a couple hours, with random-ish topics: a chair, a pair of binoculars, boombox, etc.
I am fairly certain this experience also contributed to well-developed spatial skills (mentally representing and manipulating objects). I hope you encourage your daughter along this path. :)
They recently demonetized all of the Salad Fingers videos, causing David Firth to remove all those videos from YouTube and only allowing them to Patreon subscribers via Vimeo.
I hope this pushes towards more independent, distributed toob sites. YouTube is simply too big a monolith.
The blog post mentions 1M views [1]. At €1 per TB [2], and assuming a video of 100Mb which are roughly 1GB, you end up with 1000TB a €1000.
Even if Google just pays a fraction like $0.1 per TB, they still have to earn $100 somewhere else to break even.
[1]: https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blende...
1. The bad press generated is easily worth more than $100.
2. Youtube exercises the option recommend other videos. Blender gave them 1M opportunities to attract attention to other videos that are monetized.
3. Blender's videos were probably much larger than 100MB. I remember watching several that were over 30mins.
1 - https://www.kisskissbankbank.com/en/projects/peertube-a-free...
It’s Typescript on client and server.
:-/
[0] https://twitter.com/app4soft/status/1009218500383080449