Getting started with PeerTube | Hacker News Reader

Getting started with PeerTube

medium.com

151 pointszeograd43 comments

Sadly all of those decentralized / federated app all have this same accessibility issue.

Maybe there is some sort of business case, or at least some preliminary solution to get there, that offers a middle ground between "you're only the customer of our SaaS" and "you have to be your own IT department"? something like a standardized cloud-ready deployment, where instead of only d/l the server side app, the site also points you to the cloud providers that also support that app (or this standard) so that you're just 3 clicks away from running your own instance.

That'd be nice, not sure it would pay for the team developing that standard though.

I can't think of any projects that use it off the top of my head, but i'm pretty sure i've seen "one click setup" buttons for heroku and digital ocean

binder is kinda similar for python jupyter notebooks

https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-apps/

https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-button

https://mybinder.org/

edit: after looking at the github, they actually have this with YunoHost (whatever that is): https://install-app.yunohost.org/?app=peertube

I doubt YouTube would ever have been successful if it had required this level of explanation.

The fact that there is an entire Medium article on how to "get started" essentially guarantees it's a non starter.

The presence of a Medium article is not a reliable indicator of anything (except there being someone writing Medium articles about it).

Case in point: "Recipe: Medium-Boiled Eggs" https://medium.com/@corey_nelson/recipe-medium-boiled-eggs-7...

See, that's why medium-boiled eggs have never caught on.

https://medium.com/@ouidapetru/perfect-hard-boiled-eggs-ba6c...

Or the lack of anyway to monetize your content other than link to a method for accepting donations.

Content creators on PeerTube could do in-video product endorsements.. that's already a fairly standard practice on YouTube, which does support monetization.

It's a bit of chicken and egg problem though. To get in video endorsements, you need to get very popular. To get very popular, you need a more popular platform than peertube.

It depends. You obviously need a millions of subscribers to promote the 'appetite suppressant' lollipops - and you need a TV to promote the new life insurance brand. But to triple the sales of HackRF, a couple of thousands niche auditory is enough.

Sponsorships are only one form of monetization. The competitive feature for content creators here is ad revenue sharing.

The only thing I got from reading this write up is that it will be pretty easy for someone to create their own instance and throw ads on someone else's content.

It seems like for many creators on youtube the ad revenue sharing is no longer a notable source of their income.

For the top 1% of the top 1% maybe. Keep in mind that this is long tail distribution and many creators rely on ad revenue.

That long tail is what drives growth for these platforms anyways.

All (well, almost all) the videoblogging in China is monetized by direct donations.

Which payment processors do they use? Is it managed by the video hosting platform or a direct transfer via e.g. WeChat Pay/Alipay?

https://medium.com/@swaysnt/virtual-gifts-a-live-streaming-b...

Most YouTubers now use Patreon, in-video ads, referral codes, etc.

Plenty of huge YouTubers don't use any YT ads at all.

The amount of money you make off youtube ads has fallen off a cliff, almost all big content makers rely on patreon these days.

Even for millions of views on a video its typically less than $100

Is there a source for this? It wouldn't surprise me but I'd like to read more about it.

Half of the explanation here consists of explaining the very-slightly-different-but-still-entirely-natural ontology of PeerTube, to people who were expecting exactly the ontology of YouTube.

For someone who has never used YouTube as a content creator, a "Getting Started" guide for PeerTube would actually be quite short.

I'm not sure what exact word you're looking for, but it's not ontology

In trying to figure out what word you were looking for, I realized the word his migrated from philosophy to computer science and changed meaning a bit. So maybe it works in that context. Sorry.

A very cromulent explaination. Thank you.

You mean because the word "ontology" has been embiggened a bit?

lets go with the Ux concept of "Mental Model"

paradigm

This website isn't a service, it's the website for a piece of software you can download and host yourself. So it's not really comparable to Youtube. Explanation/documentation is normal for that kind of site.

If you want the equivalent to Youtube, take a look at something like https://framatube.org/

Or any of the instances listed on https://instances.joinpeertube.org

This feels like a guide for an early podcast player, the way you connect to different instances and their channels using urls. Kinda refreshing actually.

peertube worked fine the few times I tried it, it's not in my mind when I want to see videos but I have to say it never felt a disappointment.. pretty neat for such an effort

My guess is that none of these things (including things like Mastadon) will become very popular. Then, one day, Amazon will create an AWS instance for it, and popularity will skyrocket.

And no, I’m not being sarcastic. I love the idea, but can’t for the life of me think what it will take to make something like this truly popular. (Though I wish I could!)

I keep reading Mastadon in HN, but the real name is Mastodon. Where did you get "Mastadon" from ?

> I have a lot to say because I have a lot to think about.

Oh boy.

Oof. I forgot my description said that.

Thanks for the dose of humility.

OK. So PeerTube doesn't actually host anything, right? You need a streaming server to publish. Maybe someone will let you have space and bandwidth on theirs. PeerTube is just the lookup system. Is that right?

Nope.

Peertube is just the software. The linked has no lookup system, it's just a site telling you about the software, linking to sourcecode & documentation, and linking to other sites that host that software.

The primary instance references on the site (i.e. the streaming server that they embed their own videos from) is https://framatube.org/

It's using torrents through WebSockets, it would be nice if the regular torrent protocol supported them. You just need to download a torrent to stream, or be one of the peers viewing to stream it to other viewers.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube

PeerTube is very exciting and I've been thinking about running an instance. Only showstopper for me atm is lack of live streaming support, which admittedly is difficult to figure out.

I honestly think that article 11 and 13 will grow more decentralized options. Peertube is only federated, so it won't benefit as much as it could, but it will still help. If the platform is responsible for copyright, then it will definitely be easier to just burn that server and then spin up a new one. Just my 2 cents

“only” federated?

Small platforms (ie business under 50 empl, or 10mil € ATO) don't have to adhere the copyright filter at all and are under the previous Notice&Takedown protection.

https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube

License is AGPL v3.0...

tldrlegal shows us this

https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-affero-general-public-lice...

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