Hacker News Reader

Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

Also see PeerTube which is an attempt to provide a federated youtube based on activitypub. What I like about peertube vs others is that the primary development focus is on video and not monetisation althought there is a plugin system which would allow something in the future.

Full disclosure. I am the dev of Thorium an android PeerTube client. If anyone wants to help with development please let me know

View on HN

> Also see PeerTube which is an attempt to provide a federated youtube based on activitypub.

Eric Buijs already wrote few articles about PeerTube and how he fully migrated from YouTube to PeerTube.[0,1,2,3]

[0] https://homehack.nl/bye-bye-google/

[1] https://homehack.nl/distributed-social-networks/

[2] https://homehack.nl/youtube-or-peertube-what-will-it-be/

[3] https://homehack.nl/welcome-to-the-new-decade/

Another example of ActivityPub is learnawesome.org (which intends to be an equivalent of GoodReads but for all media formats, not just books). I recently implemented ActivityPub support in their webapp, so it's now possible to subscribe to a LearnAwesome user's book/course reviews and get that feed in Mastodon or any other ActivityPub client.

The ActivityPub standard is straight forward and was quite fun to implement actually. Here is the issue in case someone is curious how to do it in a Rails app: https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn/issues/121

I’m confused how a site about learning resources is supposed to be like GoodReads, a site about books.

You can search for things, browse their reviews, add things to your collections, add reviews, follow people interested in the same topics, subscribe to topics to make a personalized dashboard - just like GoodReads. But you can do it for all kind of media like podcasts, courses, blogs, livestreams etc.

So it supports some features of goodreads in a completely different area. Seems like a strange comparison.

Seems like most of those features are the basic features of a social content site - YouTube, for example.

Hopefully constructive feedback: the namespace Thorium is already heavily saturated in the Google Play store; while you're the only one on F-droid, there's competition with what appears to be well established apps with high ratings for some sort of solution named Thorium. $0.02, might be easier to rebrand sooner rather than later.

How do you find content to watch on PeerTube? I have my own Mastodon instance running where I can subscribe from to PeerTube chanels so they show up when they upload something but I have no idea how and where to find content.

There is a list of instances here https://joinpeertube.org/instances#instances-list each instance has a discovery page which includes videos from all the other instances they follow.

Can you suggest a prominent one with the most videos/links a la youtube

I'm not really sure either. I have never heard of PeerTube until this thread. I was wondering the same thing. I found this https://joinpeertube.org/instances#instances-list. I tried to filter down to particular kinds of content with mixed results.

* I found an interesting music instance which had some cool music videos. Well worth the while. Though now I can't find it while on another computer. * I tried to find an instance with some kind of software dev/programming videos. Haven't been able to find anything really yet.

That's about as far as I've got yet. Maybe there's room to improve search/discovery. Or maybe I just need help being pointed to the right spot.

Many months ago I found lots of Youtube clips of shows from the 80's and 90's from a TV station in another country (locally produced shows).

I had been looking for that stuff for years and then given up. Some years later I see it's on Youtube. I'm ecstatic.

I go now and way too many of those clips have been taken down. I really doubt the TV station did this - they are practically defunct. My guess is it was some kind of automated DMCA thing because the opening credits contained clips of well known pieces of music.

This is tragic. I hope PeerTube can be a place for such videos.

If the content contains illegal material people would be taking on legal risk by hosting it. However since the network is decentralized, there would be many small servers to police and prosecute, likely making it overwhelmingly costly to do, like torrents. Soft illegal stuff like what you describe could probably survive. I predict yes.

Peertube is really cool in theory buy they are pushing torrent crap that displays the viewers public IP to all the other viewers and that is a major deal breaker for me.

I've never understood why they set it up this way instead of just letting you host the videos normally.

Why is displaying your public IP (prefix?) is an issue?

If this bothers you, shouldn't you use a VPN ?

What do you mean by "normally" ? Torrent is the normal way to host large files in a distributed manner!

The release notes for the latest has this:

Add ability to disable WebTorrent (and only enable HLS) [HTTP Live Streaming]

https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/releases/tag/v2.1.0

WebTorrent has been able to be disabled for a while. It's useful in some cases, but if you want to run your own host without it, it's trivial.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com