This is the answer to so much of what's wrong with the modern web. We need less business and to get more communities back into the center of the web... it should be even easier today since IaaS is so much cheaper, I think it's just a focus problem, nothing is relevant to the big sites that act as the lens to the web unless it's directly pumping money somewhere.
So of course content creators can chip in, eg. if they accept donations, and especially if (not on the two instances listed above) they are paid to advertise content and products. But users can chip in, too. Overall, hosting costs are cheap because:
- they're mutualized between artists - there's no tracking apparatus like Youtube hooked to a machine learning model to keep you addicted - there's no advertisement to serve or complex upload filter to make sure your public domain recordings bring money to the copyright cartel [0] - if a video becomes popular (eg. a cool livestream) a sufficient portion of people will seed it via WebTorrent (torrent + WebRTC + STUN), considerably reducing server load [1]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27004577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325 etc
[1] I've heard faithful reports from fellow sysadmins that their small VPS handled load for hundreds of simultaneous viewers on livestream thanks to a few people seeding (by just "viewing" the video in their browser with default settings) from a home fiber connection
Nothing is free, if you don't pay for the product YOU are the product.
From a purely-technical lens, that may not seem like a fatal flaw. When viewed through a whole-product lens, it is. PeerTube's anonymous, censor-proof nature is enough to attract a certain class of content that repels advertisers, but then what? Until the dark side of distributed technologies is addressed instead of touted as a feature, this doesn't have a chance of popular success.
Peertube is neither of those things. Publishing is pseudonymous, not anonymous: requires an account on the server you'd like to publish videos to, just like youtube and other video platforms. And it's only censorship-proof as much as it uses HTTPS/WebRTC to share content. I haven't seen any study of the Sybil-proofness of Webtorrent protocol, but Peertube certainly does not protect instance operator from DNS/IP censorship or from having their machines seized by law enforcement.
Peertube is based on a federated model (like email/www) where instances are "responsible" for the content/users they host, encouraging smaller, trusted communities. Search is currently being addressed via SepiaSearch (a dedicated search engine), and the joinpeertube.org/sepiasearch.org listings are seriously moderated (i once reported a white supremacist instance and it was delisted in under 24h).
Maybe you're talking about STUN servers? There's only 2 hardcoded STUN servers for the moment [0] indeed, but that's only for WebRTC discovery and will be easy to fix. It does not prevent server-side redundancy because every peertube instance runs its own tracker, from my understanding on the protocol (let me know if i've got that wrong), but taking those STUN servers down would indeed prevent p2p seeding, except for publicly-routable clients (not behind NAT).
I agree that deletionism is a big problem.
Those kind of abstract accusations do not belong in an encyclopedia article, and while there's a wealth of "citations" buried under the [5], none are anything other than news articles repeating the same accusation. It's baseless mudslinging that is the exact opposite of sticking to provable individual claims and facts, like a proper encyclopedia article should consist of.
Granted, it's not an insurmountable bar as it appears anyone with 500 edits can begin to participate. However, it shows a clear attempt to control the narrative to a specific one, and erecting barriers against changing that while officially endorsing the current one. It spans greater than just that, and seems common across other political articles on Wikipedia.
It seems to me that describing Marjorie Taylor Greene as a "far-right conspiracy theorist" is just as encyclopedic and verifiable as describing Charles Manson as "an American criminal who led the Manson Family" or Jeffrey Dahmer as "an American serial killer and sex offender who committed the murder and dismemberment of 17 men and boys". Why do you disagree?
YouTube is an advertising business, Peertube is software. They are like day and night different.
Peertube is developed by a community of developers, governed by a french non-profit called Framasoft. Their primary mission is community governance, establishing a legal footprint, and promoting Peertube, in the same vain as Mozilla, the Drupal Foundation and many others.
According to the Peertube website, 90% of Framasoft's funding consists of donations. Since they don't sell a service, don't have to maintain infrastructure to enable hosting of videos, they don't require a complex organization and large investments.
Sharing the costs of a common good tends to work out on a small scale, and it's a valid alternative to private for-profit initiatives. Reeading tip: ERS's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
> PeerTube's anonymous, censor-proof nature is enough to attract a certain class of content that repels advertisers, but then what? Until the dark side of distributed technologies is addressed instead of touted as a feature, this doesn't have a chance of popular success.
Peertube isn't a single service that contains a "certain class of content that repels advertisers". It's software that allows anyone to set up their own server and hook it up in a federated network of servers.
It's a bit like online fora. Like, PHPbb and vBulletin are just sofware. Anyone can download a copy, install it on their own server, run their own forum and develop their own community. It used to be that there were fora about anything and everything ranging from gaming, knitting, books, history to the less savory topics and themes. Few would argue that these weren't successful in their heyday.
The biggest challenge federated networks face is this: discovery of content. That's what defines how much they will appeal to a large audience.
Centralized services like YouTube are popular because they've perfected the discovery of information relevant to their audience to a fine art. YouTube becoming an ad business is a paradox: they arrived at that point because that's the only viable business model to cover the cost of centralized hosting of billions of videos, and the bandwidth required to serve billions of viewers.
Federated networks don't suffer that problem because the costs of hosting content are shared across the nodes of the network. Peertube leverages WebTorrent as their file sharing protocol. The existence of individual nodes across the network is predicated by local economic conditions. Some nodes may disappear if they can't recoup their own operational costs. But distributed character of the network implies that its enduring success is predicated by the longevity of a majority of nodes.
that's still "generating revenue". maybe not profit, but servers and bandwidth cost non-trivial amounts of money and somebody has to pay for that. whether it's donations, or user-fees, or ads, or private benefactors, the revenue has to come from somewhere. but if a video service has no answer as to how it can sustain itself, it's questionable whether it's worth the effort of developing it or developing your audience on it.
It's even possible to streamline the experience for torrents like how Popcorntime has done. Users don't need to even be technical enough to understand what torrents are - the same way users don't need to understand tcp/ip to visit a website.
You can try to think of Peertube as Popcorn Time with user following and channels and comments... and interop with the rest of the Fediverse.
The same way we get good software from a ´community´ which is explicitly copyleft.
> Will the vast majority of creators use this even as a backup?
The best way to use platforms like Peertube and Odysee is by using it as a primary source, with Youtube and Vimeo essentially playing the role of CDN. Should the censors not like your video for $reasons they can block them 'till they turn ultraviolet but they can not deny anyone access to them. Make sure to advertise your alternative distribution channel(s), use the same channel names and video titles so they can be found through regular web search and you're set [1].
[1] that it, until censorship reaches the network layer
Video (movies) should be enjoyed on a big screen with a good screen.
These platforms should give creators a way to prohibit viewing on small screens, Linux, etc.
And as for blocking the most popular video playing platform out there - at least for large screens - the only question would be “why”
What does the have to do with the licence of the PeerTube source code?
If we want good content und independence from YouTube, perhaps it is time to see, that it might cost us a tiny bit of money each month, to uphold our freedom. One rented server can easily support many users, each of those can chip in to finance renting the server. It can be done transparently, so that users always know what they are paying for and how much is covered already for the month. It is time to learn, that we need to support what we like financially, so that people can actually live from providing us with it. As long as we do not do so, people can only provide us with their creations by generating revenue in other ways.