I feel like it would be best to proxy YouTube, or subscribe to paid indie channels like nebula, but without a user base and without ad revenue or subscription revenue I don’t know how quality content can come to PeerTube. Maybe I’m just missing the content but when I’ve checked it’s all very low quality, just random unedited webcam vblogs mostly.
This is what has stopped me from switching to Peertube.
Nebula is pretty good, though alot of it just doesn’t interest me. I find it’s more affordable and feel the handful of creators I follow there are worth the cost.
As much as I want to switch away from YouTube, it’s my main source of entertainment and I don’t see the creators I follow switching to any other platforms anytime soon.
The linux experiment is great
Youtube was known for hosting pirated content in the early days to attract people
makertube has some good vids.
There is, but it’s still inferior to YouTube
If you’ve got the storage and bandwith, there’s nothing stopping you from “mirroring” your favorite content creator’s videos.
Copyright and ethics
When I look at the trending videos on YouTube, it makes me want to become a hermit and have no contact with society, the videos are so bad. I think the money side of YouTube has totally corrupted it.
As a PeerTube creator, I make videos as a way to teach/inform/entertain, not to make money. One way to make PeerTube work is to find a way to fund the hosts/instances that transcode and store the video files.
It would be interesting to create a crypto coin and have PeerTube users, both creators and viewers, to buy a small amount of the coin (a few dollars worth) when they register, then each video that they watch costs a small fraction of a coin paid to the instance hosting the video, and the viewer could add a tip to the creator if they liked the video. The amount paid to the instance might be an approximation of the cost to host the video. Accumulating the coin might be a game not an income source for the creators, but there might be enough money to fund the instances with this scheme.
There certainly is value in quality video that people are willing to pay for. It would be nice to find an alternative to advertising based video.
Another side of video that YouTube is not doing a good job at is creating community. The comment section is hard to follow, impossible to search, and it is transient, as new videos are created, comments on old videos disappear. I don’t know how to do it, but creating a forum or a lemmy group for each creator or each video interest group with multiple creators involved would be extremely powerful.
I think the money side of YouTube has totally corrupted it.
It would be interesting to create a crypto coin and have PeerTube users, both creators and viewers, to buy a small amount of the coin […]
Yeah… No, thanks.
I quite listening to a podcast that went hard into streaming crypto coin as a way to boost income. I think I like the idea in principle. But there is something that smells funny to me about cryptocurrency. And I don’t think it actually works that well in principle. Funding open source and open access content is tough.
Yeah. Maybe call it microtransactions. Or maybe make it a game where you get “stickers” you can post on videos you like. “Stickers” being the equivalent of a like with your avatar posted somewhere on the video page.
I’m currently on nebula, 7.2€ a month seems fair. A lot of their videos are high quality. AND THE BITRATE. Oh don’t get me started… It’s way higher than whatever YouTube offers
I’ve found better stuff by asking around for good channels, or learning that folks I follow have made a peertube channel, than I have by trying to use the interface. The discovery isn’t especially good.
There are only a couple decent channels I’ve watched but I get the honest impression there are more, they’re just burried in stuff. Also depends what you’re looking for. There are far more Foss youtubers who mirror over there and make decently high quality stuff than is available for a a lot of other genres of video
There definitely isn’t much, but I think there’s potentially more than is immediately obvious
@Cris_Color discovery is of the main features the federated apps have to improve. Urgently HoHOhoHO
While I agree, I also think in the case of peertube part of it might also be that there aren’t enough people watching for viewership to clearly highlight quality videos
It’s definitely part of it but also there is no way to natively feature specific channels, and the algorithms they have are completely borked. If I go to “trending” and the first video is 3 years old, that’s a problem. Also an extraordinary percentage of the content is in other languages, with no way to filter them. You can select a specific language and it just does nothing. These are just a few things that seem fairly easy to implement and would go a long way to improving the experience.
No good content??? My man!!! Have you not heard of Nicole??? The fediverse chick!!! Watch as she mindlessly smokes a cigerette as she stares blankly at her monitor.
Or you could try Veronica, as she uploads several videos every minute. All about Linux. Nobody knows how she does it…
I have some favorites
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https://makertube.net/accounts/michellemay about stichong, sewing etc
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https://subscribeto.me/accounts/gbryant technology and videogames
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https://video.canadiancivil.com/accounts/shifter active mobility and biking
Wait! Shifter is on peertube? Cool! Love that guy.
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In all honesty I don’t understand how PeerTube is supposed to scale with users once it gets content. Hosting, transcoding and streaming video is super expensive. There’s also a matter of making money from videos and without financial incentive it’ll be hard to compete with commercial solutions (in a capitalist hellholes that most of us live in). Community funding can keep up with hosting text but can barely keep up with hosting pictures, let alone something more, unless you’re an internet archive or something.
People who are on Nebula already made it in Youtube and they’re so big that they just want to make more money. They provide nice service for the money but I don’t think they will come support your revolution for free.
Peertube allegedly uses p2p networking that runs in your browser to serve videos. It’s open source but when I tried to actually read up on the protocol large parts of the docs were in french
It uses P2P when multiple users is watching the same video. A PeerTube server can also mirror another PeerTube server’s videos and function as a peer.
You can see it this screenshot, that I’ve downloaded most of the video data from other peers.
PeerTube is build on ActivityPub, just like Lemmy. Right now federation is broken between Lemmy and PeerTube. When it’s fixed, you’ll be able to subscribe to PeerTube channels from here and comment as well.
Fix for the federation is here https://lemm.ee/comment/18936804
I think it’s basically just bittorrent.
I feel like PeerTube only makes sense in the case of “I have the technical knowledge to host my own instance”
As indeed, I find it difficult to believe that any single “community”-instance will survive once it starts getting some traction. Hosting, maintaining and moderating such a platform would be extremely expensive if you have to do it for not only your own content.
People who are on Nebula already made it in Youtube and they’re so big that they just want to make more money.
Nebula is a gated community for YouTubers who have already made it. They have no avenue for adding more users, like the wealth of good indie YouTubers that are up and coming, and they don’t even seem to want to add to their own curated list themselves. Their community has been stagnated for years. All they have done is forced their current membership to constantly advertise for them on YouTube.
Nebula is not the answer and never will be. I don’t even see a point in going there, because I already have these same channels on YouTube.
I didn’t mean Nebula would be the answer but many Nebulas that would do better or worse based on their own decisions rather than everyone being beholden to a single corporate overlord.
PeerTube scales by increasing the amount of instances available. But you are pretty much correct. The two things that’s expensive is: Storage and transcoding. The biggest expense is storage. It gets more and more expensive as videos is uploaded. Transcoding can become more expensive, if you have to keep up with new videos getting added all the time.
I would like to see individual content creators create their own PeerTube servers and thereby serving their content to the rest of the PeerTube servers and the Fediverse. I imagine a lot of content creators keep some kind of backup of their videos, so why not attach a PeerTube server to it? PeerTube allows you to keep the original file.
Regarding financial incentive, the “only” thing creators would miss out on, on Peertube is ad revenue. If we disregard the low amount of viewers on PeerTube compared to YouTube, a creator can still use sponsors, patreon, donations, affiliate links etc. on their videos.
I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that all money on YouTube comes from ads. IIRC nearly half comes from subscriptions and each Premium watcher is basically worth much more than ad-supported ones. My thinking is similar to yours - creators need to host things themselves and the next step would be creating coops that optimise infrastructure costs and deal with stuff like payment processing for subs. Nebula is one, Floatplane is another but with LTT yuck. We need more, especially non-US based. And people need to sub those too.
You are thinking about channel membership, right? This is something that could also be implemented in PeerTube, either by Framasoft themselves (devs of PeerTube) or as a plugin by anyone.
You mentioned LTT. They have their own video platform. It would have been cool if they had actually used PeerTube and build upon that instead of creating yet another “walled” video platform.
As long as artists need to support themselves in a capitalist environment it’s not reasonable for us to expect them to share their content freely. If we increase the amount of those small walled gardens then big corporations are no longer in control and we can rethink how we can compensate their work but it’s not fair to skip this step.
I know nebula creators aren’t supporting any kind of revolution but they are creating their own coop and I commend them for that. All workers should. Maybe just an oss tool to get communities like them started for groups that want to form coops.
In that idea what we need is a built in interface for sponsorship, tipping, and paid subscriptions, built into PeerTube. They could have subscriptions on the instance itself or the channel.
I think it has more potential for shorts, if they do that, shorts get hella compressed on tiktok, ig, etc. itd be nice to self host and deal with your own compression, and just pay to serve content how you want it.
Maybe blender animators, vfx makers, edm visuals, etc. those type of artists would benefit most from something like peertube, dont get much visibility in youtube and peertube could be a return to artists and less whatever contents become
Do some searching. There are lots of great channels. I’ve posted them the last 3 or 4 times this question was asked.
without ad revenue or subscription revenue I don’t know how quality content can come to PeerTube
AdSense makes up a relatively small portion of revenue for most creators. Their profit comes much more from:
- Sponsor spots
- Direct contributions
- Merch/personal products
Good point about the other funding methods.
yeah this is a bit like musicians or authors complaining that nobody buys their CDs and hardcovers anymore.
YouTube can kick you to the curb just for saying fuck and demonetizing you
I mean, your preferred PeerTube instance can do the same. The major difference is there would probably be a human doing it.
totally, but nothing is stopping you from moving to another one while still having access to the protocol. or if you can afford it, starting your own
Moving to another one that lacks the exposure of the one you were on. You could start your own but it wouldn’t have the same traffic. It’s the same problem, just on a smaller scale.
that’s totally valid. I don’t really use peertube and so my question is, since the program doesn’t have that many users anyways, how many creators are relying on getting views from their own instance? I thought they just advertise their channel to outside platforms
I haven’t checked it out yet, but the same could be said about the early days of YouTube. Professional cameras weren’t that common for the first years of it.
Yeah but that’s not the case for almost any other brand new video sharing platform. Because now people know how to content create. But they need to make money.
I know of at least one. The channel is called The Linux Experiment.
@thelinuxexperiment_channel@tilvids.com
I enjoy his content a lot and really appreciate the fact that hés putting his content on peertube.
I hope people enjoying Peertube are supporting the project and creators financially. Otherwise it won’t have any future sadly.
Well, like all of the fediverse. It’s a bunch of volunteers who run the instances out of pocket. They need donations to keep going.
