But for someone looking as something similar to youtube but locked down and only for friends and family it's a bit unclear whether this is appropriate (since so much is focused on sharing the content with other servers).
Also, for such a use case the torrent-functionality seems like a real downside but I can't find out if you can disable it serverside so that clients don't have to bother with it.
As for the torrenting, if videos are only available to members it shouldn't be a privacy problem. That being said, disabling it will probably be a possibility in v1.0.
The privacy problem wasn't my concern. But rather a bloated javascript client as well as the issue of accidentally seeding on a mobile connection wasting bandwidth and battery life. I see tons of potential issues but no possible gains at all when server bandwidth is not an issue.
If you don't mind that other instances might mirror your videos, you can run a regular instance and simply not follow any other instances. Only your local videos will show up on your instance, but your videos might show up on other people's instances (if they choose to follow you).
The server is always seeding the videos, so the torrenting part only really kicks in if you have multiple people watching the same video at the same time. If your browser can't use webrtc, it will stream the video like a regular video. I think there is no option to disable the torrent functionality yet, but there is a github issue for it.
These are private videos (though nothing necessarily embarrassing or inappropriate) and making them public must not be possible from a client point of view (other than downloading and manually uploading to a different service).
Neither (correct me if I'm wrong) allows for comments for instance, and have a cumbersome interface for youtube-like watching and discovering.