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Comment by Endy | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of PeerTube, but there are many hurdles.

Anyone whose ISP/firewall/etc blocks all Torrent traffic is going to have a major challenge - which means that while part of what PeerTube has been so far is educational videos, they're not accessible in most school environments. That's a big challenge to overcome.

The other is pretty simple, and a reason I have not used PeerTube to watch a single video. If you're using my machine and my bandwidth to host or transfer your video to another person, you're going to pay me for it - upfront and at a rate I agree to. You're slowing down my connection and your website is causing me send data to someone I do not know. You're going to be liable for anything malicious that gets sent back; and if you're MitM'ing it to scan it properly, why are you wasting my bandwidth and storage?

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> If you're using my machine and my bandwidth to host or transfer your video to another person, you're going to pay me for it

That's a bit ridiculous. No one is ever gonna pay you for that. You get something for free, the video you want to watch, and the deal here is that your unused upload bandwidth gets used to help transfer it to others. It's a social contract thing, and thinking you might get a better deal magically by refusing it won't make that deal appear.

> You're slowing down my connection

In which way? It is using your upload while you download a video. That does not harm you.

> causing me send data to someone I do not know

You never seeded a torrent? You never connected to an internet site you did not know the owner of? It's pretty much the same thing.

> You're going to be liable for anything malicious that gets sent back

Who is the you here? A Peertube instance won't be liable for malicious data, how would that even work anyway. Even if it were possible: The websites spreading malware with their ads were not liable either. This won't happen.

> if you're MitM'ing it to scan it properly, why are you wasting my bandwidth and storage?

Right, that would be a bad idea.

Just because you’re downloading something doesn’t mean uploads don’t affect it. In fact, upload often cripples bandwidth.

https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/Introduction...

> It is using your upload while you download a video. That does not harm you.

An outbound connection is one of the very first things that happens when requesting anything over a network. Not to mention if you're doing any video chatting or gaming.

> thinking you might get a better deal magically by refusing it won't make that deal appear.

I mean, actually he trivially could get that deal by modifying the client a bit - but as long as the majority of people don't go out of their way to do that it doesn't really matter if there are leechers.

As long as there are a handful of people like myself who have big pipes and rarely use them to their fullest, who seed public torrents to 200x because why the hell not, you're not going to have a serious issue.

Honestly, if PeerTube wants to catch on, all it has to do is be easy to use and full of pirated content.

> That's a bit ridiculous. No one is ever gonna pay you for that.

There is a p2p network that does exactly that using cryptocurrency tokens. https://substratum.net/

Also FileCoin:

https://filecoin.io/

I think you should be able to limit the upload rate though, although maybe the browser should be responsible for that.

Any time you allow the browser to do something without user input, you take away more user control and put it in the hands of a browser developer. That's a mistake.

> Anyone whose ISP/firewall/etc blocks all Torrent traffic is going to have a major challenge - which means that while part of what PeerTube has been so far is educational videos, they're not accessible in most school environments.

Are you sure? PeerTube uses the WebTorrent protocol, which operates over WebRTC and consequently doesn't look like most torrent traffic. And the player can fall back to a plain HTTP download from the host server.

> Anyone whose ISP/firewall/etc blocks all Torrent traffic is going to have a major challenge

WebRTC is over port 5004, which is common for telecommunications like VOIP providers. VOIP isn't as common as port 80 (www), but I'd imagine that there's a good risk of outrage if ISPs start blocking the VOIP port.

> You're slowing down my connection and your website is causing me send data to someone I do not know.

This is a legitimate concern IMO. So the PeerTube federation needs to be clear and allow users to opt-out (or even opt-out default / opt-in for benefits) to stay on the moral high ground.

If you can't access the video via webrtc, it gets served as a regular video directly downloaded from the server.

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