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Comment by memet_rush | Hacker News Reader

looks interesting! surprised something like that never caught on. I looking for something like Twitch basically. It has really good quality and is live. But obviously Twitch is just losing money and using all Amazons resources so I wanted to see if there's a more sustainable p2p approach

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What do you mean by never caught on? It's 'live' at https://joinpeertube.org/ where you can either go to https://joinpeertube.org/browse-content and put something into that search form, or limit that search to specific 'instances' under https://joinpeertube.org/instances

Or to get back to your original question: https://docs.joinpeertube.org/use/create-upload-video

edit: Your'e not limited to these addresses, for one there are other instances, for another you can selfhost your own, if your'e into that.

Technically that is one of many possible solutions, 'ready to roll' right now.

addit: Regarding sustainability, and who is behind it, maybe https://framasoft.org/en/ would be of interest?

Linked from there https://framablog.org/2024/12/17/peertube-v7-offer-a-complet...

and

https://framablog.org/2025/04/10/2025-peertube-roadmap/

Thanks! i will just check it out.

I just meant like never caught on as in like it's not super popular, but looks like it's on the come up. would be nice to have a real youtube competitor lol

Yes. It's the typical 'hen & egg' problem. I'm watching there from time to time, and even found some things (independent trance/ambient/goa music) which didn't exist on YT at all! Though the selection is limited, compared to YT or whatever, it's less algorithmic, and because of this you're not forced to use most exaggerated grimacing or clickbaity titles, IF you have no commercial interests and give a shit about ads.

If that's your thing. And you have some sort of presence online elsewhere, then you can link to peertube, no matter which, or selfhosted, without problem.

That's why I pointed you to it. If you need/want the most massive audience, because of platform familarity/network effect, then probably not. At least not now. But someone has to start somehow :)

For massive video distribution, getting acquired by a company with "infinite bandwidth" is the sustainable approach.

Orchestrating p2p realtime video distribution is going to have a lot of problems, and spend VC money until someone acquires you is just a lot easier.

Here's a small list of challenges you'd face:

You'll need to have a pretty good distribution network to handle users who just can't manage to p2p connect.

Figuring out the right amount of user's bandwidth you can use without people getting upset; there's a lot of internet accounts with bandwidth quotas, especially for mobile

Trying to arrange so that users connect to users with the least transmission delays would be needed to reduce overall latency. Between cross oceanic connections having unavoidable latency, the potential of buffer bloat, and having a reasonable jitter buffer, pretty soon you have wild delays and potential rebuffering.

Bandwidth constraints / layer switching is going to be a big challenge; it's one thing when your server can just push the best stream the client can manage, but if you're streaming from a peer and the stream is too big, the peer probably doesn't have a smaller stream to switch to and there's no good way to know if where the bandwidth constraint is ... maybe you should switch to the same stream from someone else or maybe you should switch to a smaller stream. Can you get even packets from one peer and odd packets from another ... should you?

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