The YouTube Alternative Nobody's Talking About ! Peertube

The main value of youtube for many of us is the enormous video collection, which is impractical for anyone else to duplicate. Need to fix an old washing machine (I did, recently)? Type in the make and model and there's an instructional vid. It's unfortunate that Google has exclusive control over such a resource, but here we are.
- I think it’s running it at a loss too. But there’s no reason these platforms couldn’t be publicly owned.
  
  It was, but monetization has been so aggressively everywhere that I think they finally are in the black at least since 2018.
  
  Publicly owned by which government? Because I don't think YouTube's home of the US is really a good choice right now.
- I wonder what would happen if Google decided to "turn off" YouTube.
  
  I would be free from relying on a single google server for anything.
  
  some random mfs with 400TB of hoarded YouTube videos will emerge out of hiding
- And sadly now I have to watch a video. Wouldn't step by step instructions be quicker and more effective? Yes. They were. Now it's some video wasting my time.
  Not sure that is a great example.
  
  I hate that this has become so commonplace. Yes for some - mostly physical - things it’s much better if you can see someone do it. But finding an obscure setting in an app shouldn’t be a video.
  Stuck on a 20 step installation process? Here’s a 10 minute video showing all the steps you already know before the phase you’re stuck. Sure you can scrub through it, but it’s still faster to skim and scroll through a text with images.
- Maybe a silly idea, but what about a P2P-based video hosting! Hear me out:
  We have more computing power and bandwith in our homes than ever before. We know that sharing data and files via P2P works, is resiliant against attacks, and scales really well.
  No server costs mean that people could support creators by seeding the content to other peers. One cool thing about that would be seeing how you are making a difference, in real time.
  
  The difficult part is not the software or even the hosting. It's more about the network effects and the ability to let users monetize uploads, which in turn creates vast potential for abuse and fraud, which in turn has to be addressed by burning stupendous resources. At a certain point people stop wanting exposure or "making a difference" for their own sake, and instead want to get paid in genuine coin of the realm.

The fact that you posted a link to this video from YouTube not peer tube says a lot.
- The point is outreach to the other platform. Sending engagement to this video on YouTube will boost it due to YouTube's algorithm. More exposure on YouTube = more potential new PeerTube users. Publishing this on PeerTube is preaching to the choir. As an alternative platform, you always need to maintain a presence on the main platform so you can encourage people looking to leave.
  
  Publishing this on PeerTube is also a problem. I mentioned this in another post, but to expand, I really, really, want to like PeerTube. But:
  Many running servers don't fully grasp the bandwidth requirements. The video I tried to watch in that post got "popular" (800 views) and it took 2 minutes to even get the progress bar to load. People will leave.
  The federated nature is even more disjointed than Lemmy. It feels like a bunch of different sites still, which makes it feel like less content.
  IMO PeerTube could be great, but it has a lot of shortcomings that aren't solved by adding features and fixing bugs.
  
  It would better to make peer tube super easy to use without needing to do more than cluck once on. A button and get going
  The thing holding open source back is the gatekeeping. Developers could spend more time actually working with u.i experts to make things easy, but no. Rather make everyone think it's some magic that requires 50 steps.
  Make it easy to do business and give them a great product. That's all that needs to be done. Do that foss community, and you'll win.
  
  Or at least publishing links to both would look better.
- Maybe, not what you think it does, though
- Peer tube is dead

I just can't get into using Peertube. I love the idea, but in my experience, it just doesn't work the way it should. Slow, low video quality, hard to get the federation working properly, and most importantly, a general lack of content creators I care to follow.
I stick with Odysee for this, and several other reasons.
- Dude.. you had my upvote indtil odysee!
  
  I don't know if I need to ask, but what's wrong with Odysee?
  
  So in other words you're bragging about how stupid you are ?? Did Odysee trigger something in you ? Do you have a special kind of PTSD ?
- Consider using Grayjay, you can combine creators from various sources to one app. Including YouTube, Peertube, Dailymotion, Odysee and lots of others.
  I subscribe to some people on PeerTube and Dailymotion (only news orgs) alongside my Youtube subs, so that I am not only relying on YouTube
  
  I do, but the desktop version is still barebones compared to FreeTube or the Odysee webpage. It's great on mobile, though!
  And as for Peertube, I guess part of the problem is that it doesn't feel as connected as other Fediverse services seem to feel. Not sure why, it just feels really disjointed to me.

I think we should discuss about what is holding PeerTube back. For starters a monetization system
- afaik most YT creators get their money from sponsor blocks rather than ads these days, so nothing really changes there… i think the combination of sponsors and some patreon-style system is plenty, so i’m not sure monetisation is the issue
  
  Most ?
- Server costs and disk limitations.

It's a nice thought but even this guy did not continue his Peertube instance. More of a thought experiment.

I think Peertube is more of a Vimeo alternative. YouTube is built around advertising.
- Really? And here I thought they were all video platforms. Youtube advertising is just an added layer of enshittification.
  
  I'm guessing maybe they meant that the people uploading to YouTube more often than not are hoping to make money from it. Or even if that's not what they meant, it is definitely a big difference between platforms.

Joined PeerTube last month and have had great success with it in terms of as a platform and place to share art / content, though of course the views have been low.
I'm sure there is a megathread elsewhere but would love to see an acceleration of folks adopting the Fediverse. My talking point has been to sort of sell Fediverse alternatives (Lemmy, Pixelfed, Mastodon) as superior to other big tech alternatives out there (such as BlueSky and Flashes). We are either at the vanguard of a mass migration or just migrating while no one else is intending to, which I guess amounts to the same thing!
- Linux is finally becoming mainstream. I love it.
  
  That's kinda true, but what does that have to do with the comment you replied to?
- If any of the top 500 youtube channels joined peertube, things would surely change. Unfortunately a few of those have started their own video platforms e.g Mr Beast has his own.
  I'm sure if a few of the top youtube channels of the biggest countries joined peertube that would also give an important push to peertube.
- There was a lot of energy around strategy when I joined in January (can you guess why? Lol). The limiting factor seems to be chosen participation. Lots of people have opinions, not many people want to organize their thoughts into, eg. an effective advertising campaign, a github pull request, or basically anything other than meaningless musing.
  Here were some threads in my message history I found insightful: https://lemmy.world/post/25512565 https://lemmy.world/post/25553607 https://lemmy.world/post/27824597
  I'm not really skilled in anything relevant, so my strategy has been:
  On mainstream social platforms, point out any hint of enshittification and follow up with a recommendation toward a specific Fediverse alternative.
  Link directly to discussions or articles I found on Lemmy that I thought were worth sharing
  Building partnerships in my existing communities with the corresponding Lemmy communities to encourage user flow
  
  Lots of people have opinions, not many people want to organize their thoughts into, eg. an effective advertising campaign, a github pull request, or basically anything other than meaningless musing.
  This is the nature of free work. Any donation of time is sparse and intermittent. People have bills to pay. The best and brightest want to be paid well for their time. This requires a business model of some kind, and monetising that work. This is antithetical to FOSS projects, and is the reason they will almost always be inferior to projects with large budgets with teams of UX designers. /obligatory COME AT ME BRO

A lot of people, despite using a federated reddit alternative, will think of any reason to discourage the use of peertube I've noticed. It doesn't need to REPLACE youtube, that's basically impossible. You can use Peertube WITH YouTube. "Does it do anything different than youtube?" You can control what gets deleted and what stays up. "That's the only thing? It needs to do more." You can livrestream with it, and why would it need to do more than youtube? It gives you fucking CONTROL back in your hands! This is all about putting the people, back in control of the internet! The p2p aspect of peertube makes this the best competitor a community has to these giant companies with their world burning server farms. Why is this so hard for people to not be fascinated with having an option you can run with old PC hardware?
- It gives you fucking CONTROL back in your hands! This is all about putting the people, back in control of the internet!
  So do I2P, HyphaNet (formerly FreeNet) and ZeroNet. They're all P2P networks and can run on old hardware, with the drawback being that you can't access normal internet sites while connected to them
  
  that sounds less like "a drawback" and more like "fucking unusable"
- hey I don't have time to watch this so I'll ask here since you're arguing in favor of it: how is storage handled? is it a concern? wouldn't any reasonable amount of storage have the risk of being almost immediately run out of space if the instance is even modestly popular?

These apps need ulterior uses.
Most know Matrix as an alternative to Discord.
has it replaced Discord? No, and it isn't likely to, buuuut Matrix is still a swiss-army-knife for other chat protocols via bridges, so it has its own use beyond Discord.
It's still useful, even alone.
What problem does Peertube solve beyond not being Youtube?
- What problem does Peertube solve beyond not being Youtube?
  Content creators can be in total control of their content and the platform, while still being able to reach the wider audience on the Fediverse.
  There’s also features such as being able to replace an already uploaded video and for some, they would be happy not having to play the “algorithm game”.
- A place to keep your videos in case of YouTube taking it off their site.
  
  Right now, this is the only use.

Same issue as Lemmy. Not enough people see centralized media as an issue and thus the status quo will continue.
- Ehhh, I feel it's not just that.
  Yeah, people don't think centralized media is an issue, and thus don't join Fediverse, causing it to be a little dead and discourages others from using it as an alternative.
  However, YT is a job for the thousands that create content on there, and reasonably so, they need money to make said content and pay bills. Which means ads, cause be real, most people (including me) don't wanna join a Patreon to see their content. I just can't think of many creators who I love enough to drop consistent money on them, never mind several at once.
  Lemmy doesn't need to be monetized to entice people, because Reddit wasn't built on that (karmaremoved gets you no money). Even pixelfed could make it as an alternative, because creators aren't paid by ads or Insta themselves, they get money from sponsorships and promoting their shops.
  But YT? It's built to make money from putting in ads. So unless creators lived off of sponsors alone and the few who subscribe to Patreon, they're shit outta luck if they join Peertube.
  EDIT: Completely forgot the server side of it, but was reminded of that fact by this comment on the Degoogle community about YT:
  YouTube is expensive as all fuck to run. This is why alternatives will never take off unless they have a solid monetization model (e.g. floatplane). Sorry, but people on home internet with 100 down and 30 up aren't going to be able to host peertube nodes and stream 4k video to more than a couple people. Text and music work well decentralized, but people start to become a lot less able to contribute when hosting costs become hundreds per month and their home internet is saturated and barely usable instead of single digits with light traffic. This isn't even mentioning content creators' monetization.
  
  That is a very good point and is something that needs to be sorted out. There is or at least was a video platform that paid crypto that I think had the right ideas, but was not well executed and frankly even if it was great, most crypto projects were scams.
  I do suspect that as we make our way more into the AI and robotics era, that how we measure value will shift and suddenly decentralized platforms will generate some form of income of it will even be called that. Until then, you are right, there is little incentive for creators to move to a platform that makes them no money and people are ok with their privacy and data being shared so the status quo it is.
  
  YT became popular before monatization existed. It was a hobby and a form of socialization for many people. I'd rather see Peertube be that than what YT has become. Monatization is what ruined it, imo.
- Like with fucking, friction is the difference between pleasure and pain. If I click a YT link and the video starts playing, no lag, no buffering, just plays, I will come back.
  I tried to watch the French dude describing Texas, hosted on Peertube. It took 17 minutes, 3 attempts, 2 error messages, lag while playing.
  Can't change the paradigm with thrift.
  
  That's weird, I watch it every day and have never had an issue like that.
  
  Interesting. I’ve watched some videos without issue, though not many since there aren’t that many to watch.
  
  Sounds like a personal issue TBH
- To me it's a feature and not a problem to have less people. I had more online human interaction in lemmy than I had anywhere else (except maybe facebook in early times). Look at Reddit now, good luck interacting with real genuine people. Everyone is shilling something and nobody is honest, plus the low quality posts count growing.
  I saw some studies a few years ago on how people are less interested in traditional social media and more interested in instant messaging 1to1 and small group chats. Also something about how group chats become dead after they exceed a couple hundred members.
  Just to say, I am more happy with the way things are in lemmy. I appreciate all aspects of Lemmy really.

Sometimes, I think that peertube would work better as simply being a different section of a personal/private website. You know how some sites hosted their own videos back before youtube became "the only place to post videos"? Gametrailers, Machinima, ThatGuyWithTheGlasses, etc.
Federation helps with discovery, but not much beyond that, I think.

Wow, someone should make a bot for awareness or something.

This was an interesting watch:
https://diode.zone/w/qNaoh69x1B6J9CsSsXvqUK
- And this one too!
  https://tube-arts-lettres-sciences-humaines.apps.education.fr/w/kSeDTThEFpsWenUogE2AzJ

just peertube recommendation algorithm browser extension. Working pretty well and ik discovering channels that make/reupload well produced content

Video hosted on YouTube. You answered your own question.
- I think posting it on Peertube would maybe be preaching to the choir.