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> The first entry in the instance list is "No Censorship Tube" and you don't really see if it's an active instance, popular or anything as it just says "Follows 0 instances" which makes it seem like an abandoned project.

It looks to me as though that page presents every instance matching the user's search criteria in random order, presumably for fairness.

This is a mistake, IMO. Especially at this early stage, the project should be able to point to a curated list of a couple of well-run public instances, not a random listing of every instance they're aware of. (Especially given that some of those instances are private, empty, or broken.)

I think a "normal" user isn't likely to hear about PeerTube and immediately think "how can I join this?" Rather, someone might send them a link to a cool video like https://video.blender.org/videos/watch/8533ea43-4271-4a57-96... and if they like it, they look at some of the other videos on the same instance. So discovering an instance you like is not that much of a problem if you're not starting from the central project website.

Of course the instance that has the videos you like may not allow just anyone to create an account (e.g. video.blender.org doesn't) at which point it does get pretty confusing, because you need to move to some random other instance for no obvious reason. (Of course the reason is decentralization, but "normal" users don't care about that as an end in itself.)

If someone sent me that link I would be confused, since the video doesn't play and it says "0 peers" at the bottom.

Do you have JavaScript disabled maybe?

With JavaScript disabled, it doesn't do anything.

That's interesting, it definitely plays (near-instantly on clicking play) for me. Number of peers should be irrelevant, as it falls back to downloading over HTTPS. It might be worth a bug report if you can track down any reasoning.

At the moment, activists and hackers ("non-normal" people) are really the main audience for decentralized "censorship resistant" networks, since everyone else is happy with Youtube and other centralized services.

Regarding the instances page, it looks like they're pulling instances randomly, which would just be confusing to new users and in cases like you mention where the instance isn't popular, counterproductive.

The frontpage isn't much better - most of it is taken up explaining free software politics and things "normal" users won't care about, and it offers only three content examples - one video, one channel and one instance. Compare that to Youtube's frontpage, which is tiles and tiles of content, with a search bar right on top, basically choking you with content.

I understand they probably care more about the politics and philosophy but if they want to be an alternative to Youtube they need to do what Youtube does and present themselves as content first. The layout for the instances themselves do that, but the homepage needs to pull a bit more weight in that regard, since it's standing between the user and all that stuff. In my humble and unqualified opinion.

Exactly, I think the first impression should immediately show the value of the platform.

In this case it would probably be well rated videos on the default / least niche / most popular instance and not an instance with conspiracy videos or other "censored" content that can't live on the other platforms.

Being in a pretty similar situation I think the https://joinmastodon.org landing page is done in a more user friendly way. They have a "Join now" link which brings you to an instance list that has the most popular ones shown right away and even gives you a way to find out which instance is the best for your language or interests.

> activists and hackers ("non-normal" people) are really the main audience

Respectfully disagree with you. There's quite a lot of content which is getting throttled on Youtube if not outright censored.

I follow Styx on YouTube who's a libertarian and even his channel and videos are constantly censored, throttled. Dave Rubin is another one.

https://www.youtube.com/user/Styxhexenhammer666/videos

Why the downvotes? HN is getting more and more hostile.

I think it has to do with the youtube channel you shared. Best guess is that the content is alt-right or trails on conspiracy.

What's alt-right or conspiracy about it? I don't even know what the definition of "alt-right" is now a days. I am a brown immigrant myself (I hate mentioning that but it seems relevant in this context) and I find majority of the time people using "alt-right" don't know what they are talking about.

" since everyone else is happy with Youtube and other centralized services."

I also respectfully disagree, because YouTube consistently: - recommends pop-culture content that can be found elsewhere, most specifically on cable - recommends content I've already watched even though I'm logged in and they should know I've already watched it - buries the content most relative to my interests - gives me no means of adding or removing tags to help me filter my content - has search functionality that constantly breaks when one applies filters (so you do a search, get a million results, sort by upload data and it returns 'no results found' W.T.F.

Hell I'd even settle for someone to just abstract the AI/tracking/algorithm and link to content on all of these sites so I don't see content on any ONE of them and can search across all of them. Why hasn't anyone done this? If someone has, please promote it more.

Check out https://github.com/omarroth/invidious: no js needed, audio-only mode.. It has some rough edges (channel pages and a couple videos seem to break), but it's very decent.

That's why I use many accounts for YouTube, one for music, another one tech-related, ... using the multi containers extension of Firefox, this way, the recommendations become somewhat more relevant.

Ironically it’s the corporate shills and free market profiteers who end up caring about things like “what does the user want”. So many of these projects are all about ego stroking ideals and not actually providing value to anyone. There’s some food for thought in there about the parts of capitalism that work.

In my opinion, the main problem here is that PeerTube is more expensive to host than, for example, Mastodon or Pleroma. The model is not going to be well-suited to drive-by creators hoping to sign up and start uploading in 5 minutes, because the cost of hosting that user is pretty high for the instance administrator.

With this initiative, I hope to start bootstrapping instances which are comparible to cooperatives. When money and content start flowing into the ecosystem, I hope it'll push for more development towards improving the user experience for non-creators, and provide a bunch of good content to incentivize federation. I hope to see more instances (and better upstream support for instances) which are not focused on uploading/creating - but on consuming - then make this the path that most users follow to participate in the network.

It would be really useful that some instance managers out there give us a cost breakdown on how much it takes to run a "regular" instance with specific volume/traffic numbers and videos served. Transparency can help people to start in case the cost is lower than what they expected.

As a rough estimate:

1 TB cost about $1.20

HD is 5MB per second, UHD is 25MB per second. [1]

If you stream a 3min video in HD, that's about 200seconds which lead to 1GB traffic.

So you can stream 1000 videos for $1.20, or one video for 0.12 cents.

[1]https://www.epiphan.com/blog/bandwidth-for-streaming/

That’s megabits per second, not megabytes, so your numbers are off by a factor of 8.

Where has that $1.20 per terabyte figure come from? It doesn’t match the sorts of rates that I’ve seen talked about. As an example of commercial retail (not wholesale) rates: Backblaze B2 cloud storage is one of the better options available, at $5/TB/month for storage and $10/TB for bandwidth per https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html. (AWS, Azure and Google Cloud are all at least five times the cost for traffic. Seriously.) Meanwhile, your standard $5/month VPS (Digital Ocean, Vultr, &c.) tends to include 1TB of traffic per month (and scale up at that rate for a bit, though not far), but charge overages at $10/TB. I have no idea what’s going on with that lot, because Digital Ocean does bandwidth pooling across all your droplets, so it’ll be cheaper to add a new e.g. $20/month droplet and get 4TB of bandwidth, rather than paying $40 for that 4TB of bandwidth.

But remember with PeerTube that the idea is that some of your bandwidth is covered by peering. I have no idea at all what the expected fractions are, but it’s going to depend heavily on your workload: videos just released that everyone’s watching right now will get better peering than videos from some time ago with scattered viewing (where I would expect you would get just minimal peering effects, but my opinion is hunch only and lacks any actual knowledge).

5Mbps is on the high side for HD (1920×1080 @ 30fps) video streaming. I’d think 3.5Mbps was a more typical figure that people would speak of, and for many sorts of content even 2.5Mbps can be more than you need.

3.5Mbps for three minutes is less than 80MB, rather than your 5MBps’s 1GB. At B2 rates (which are drastically higher than what you quoted), each of your three minute videos costs 0.08 cents to view, and each hour of video costs about one and a half of your pennies of the United States of America.

We come to different results because all my Bs were indeed bits, not bytes. I would love to be confirmed that B2 calculates download costs in bytes and not bits, but I assume that the reference dimension is bits since that would match the AWS numbers. So that $10/TB could actually be $80/TByte.

Some time ago I asked about cheapest rates: [1]

>I'm starting an ISP again, we will charge around $0,25 per TB

The cheapest regularly available rate of which I am aware is hetzner.de at $1.20 (or rather euro) [4].

Amazon is at $0.09 per GB ($0.05 after 150TB). That's $90 per TB [2],[3]. You have to use Cloudfront to further reduce that cost, much like with Backblaze. But Cloudfront doesn't allow you to stream videos or serve pictures.

In both cases I assume that it is TBit since it is network traffic. I haven't found any further clarification so I assume that they quote the more expensive option.

That 80MByte video would be 640MBit. That's not too far off the 1GBit.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22760447

[2] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/

[3] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

[4] Some providers offer a rate-limited interface, e.g. 100Mbit, with unlimited traffic. This could lead to 32TByte per month for something like $10. However, like Cloudfront, I assume that the provider has the option to end the contract, otherwise there would be plenty of cheap image hosters.

> We come to different results because all my Bs were bits, not bytes.

Such Bs are usually bs, e.g. 'Mbps' vs. 'MB/s'.

So the GB on the AWS sites are actually bytes?

Excepting errors, capital B is always bytes, and lowercase b is always bits. Transfer rates are always done in bits (5Mbps and the likes), but amounts are always done in bytes (5MB and the likes).

The B2 rates are $10/TB. Yes, ⅑–⅕ of the price of AWS, because AWS data transfer is outrageously expensive. (Refer to the B2 pricing page again, it shows this comparison.)

Thanks.

The prices are even more surprising if that quote by morphle is true and he can offer a TB for $0.25. From that perspective, even B2 is expensive.

At the level of colocation and the likes, I believe it’s standard to just pay for the pipe and you can use it as heavily as you like. Some hosting providers extend that to their users, as well.

But there are practicality concerns to this for the specific domain of video distribution; suppose you’re a solo video producer: most of the time there’s a certain background level of watching, but when you release a new video there’s a massive spike of watchers. So in this case, having an enormously fat pipe and charging by data transferred is probably better for you than having a thin pipe that you can use as heavily as you like. If you have a 1Gbps link, for example, and 5Mbps video, you can never have even 200 people watching at any given time. But if you have a 40Gbps link and are charged by data transferred, you’ll be able to cope with a surge of closer to 8,000 viewers at once. (I bet that in practice it’d be struggling before even half that, but the point stands.)

I know some hosting colocation deals are done as a certain baseline with burst capacity, e.g. 1Gbps with 10Gbps burst capacity, which would mean something like “you can use up to 10Gbps, so long as 99% of the time you stay below 1Gbps”.

But all of these sorts of considerations are mostly important only when you’re a big shot, not when you’re just starting out or if you’re just doing it solo.

For myself, though, I’m more likely to accept B2’s ~1.5¢ per watch-hour rates, using it to host the actual video files (you can configure PeerTube thus), because they’ll have gigantic pipes. Then if I magically reach the point where that’s costing large sums of money, then I can optimise it.

*edit: all numbers are indeed Bit, not Bytes. Aren't all network rates quoted in bits?

In case those rates are in bytes: Streaming a 3min video at 2.5Mbitps leads to about 60Mbyte of traffic. At $1.20 per TByte, that's $0.000072 per view, or 0.0072 cents.

Or the other way round: $1.20 allows you to serve 16,667 videos.

I think the killer distributed app would be some kind of peer cache of videos from yt, vimeo and so on. You watch YT and your browser stores the movie then shares it like webtorrent. G decides it doesn't like the movie, bang - deleted! Not so much, still available in distributed cache.

I look thru my yt playlist some as old as yt and half of the entries are dead. And there was a lot of original user content too. So much of human art is lost.

We have technology we need leadership!

other than the threat of copyright strikes, why should anyone allow their bandwidth to be used for this cache?

And if you want to view a deleted video, how would you go about finding it on this distributed cache? If you can search people's caches, this is the same as announcing that you have seen such and such video - which may be an invasion of privacy too.'

If the original author of the video wanted it to be unremovable, they need to put this up on their own infrastructure they control imho.

Take a moment to consider how this architecture would (or would fail to) handle truly abhorrent content -- child abuse, terrorist recruiting material, etc. Not all videos are "human art" which ought to be preserved.