PeerTube initially aims precisely at being a Youtube alternative, which is why such questions are not tackled in the article I guess. However federation with other servers is totally controlled by admin-defined rules, so you can make a “private” instance. I'm not sure whether making videos watchable by logged-in users only is already possible but it's a very easy thing to implement.

As for the torrenting, if videos are only available to members it shouldn't be a privacy problem. That being said, disabling it will probably be a possibility in v1.0.

Thanks, yeah but it's hard to find these answers at the project site as well.

The privacy problem wasn't my concern. But rather a bloated javascript client as well as the issue of accidentally seeding on a mobile connection wasting bandwidth and battery life. I see tons of potential issues but no possible gains at all when server bandwidth is not an issue.

If your instance does not use HTTPS, it can't follow other peertube instances and vice versa. You can also close registration. However, the videos are still public.

If you don't mind that other instances might mirror your videos, you can run a regular instance and simply not follow any other instances. Only your local videos will show up on your instance, but your videos might show up on other people's instances (if they choose to follow you).

The server is always seeding the videos, so the torrenting part only really kicks in if you have multiple people watching the same video at the same time. If your browser can't use webrtc, it will stream the video like a regular video. I think there is no option to disable the torrent functionality yet, but there is a github issue for it.

Something like that was exactly what I was afraid of and that certainly is a dealbreaker.

These are private videos (though nothing necessarily embarrassing or inappropriate) and making them public must not be possible from a client point of view (other than downloading and manually uploading to a different service).

I just checked the upload settings. Actually there is a 'private' visibility setting for videos (and 'unlisted'), but I'm not sure how it works and who specifically can see private videos. Peertube is still in early stages right now and lots of features are still missing.

If it's just for friends and family why not setup a plex server?

Or Nextcloud as well.

Plex has a weird centralization of accounts that frankly disgusts me. In combination of a closed source solution makes it even worse. I chose Emby instead. But both Emby and Plex (as well as nextcloud) are poor youtube alternatives in my eyes - at least for the scenario I'm thinking of.

Neither (correct me if I'm wrong) allows for comments for instance, and have a cumbersome interface for youtube-like watching and discovering.

Mediagoblin is another option, but as far as I know just like Peertube I don't think you can restrict content to registered users yet. For a family setup easy to solve though by putting the entire site behind some form of authentication.

Yeah, but that's like 10 seconds of editing htaccess or whatever for HTTP simple auth.

Use MediaGoblin then?