PeerTube: A ‘Censorship’ Resistent YouTube Alternative

https://torrentfreak.com/peertube-a-censorship-resistent-youtube-alternative-180623/

by otini • 8 years ago

259 109 8 years ago

testcross2• 8 years ago

There is a crowdfunding going on. It already reached its goal. But there is a second goal at 45K. 11 days to go. Please help!

https://www.kisskissbankbank.com/en/projects/peertube-a-free...

toomuchtodo4• 8 years ago

Are you involved with the project? Have they explored any EU grants that may be available for open source and creative development?

godzillabrennus• 8 years ago

While not for the EU... If anyone in the USA is looking for grants checkout http://interkn.com to search for them based on keywords.

testcross2• 8 years ago

No, I'm not involved. Can't tell you unfortunately.

tjoff4• 8 years ago

This seems to focus alot on being a youtube alternative.

But for someone looking as something similar to youtube but locked down and only for friends and family it's a bit unclear whether this is appropriate (since so much is focused on sharing the content with other servers).

Also, for such a use case the torrent-functionality seems like a real downside but I can't find out if you can disable it serverside so that clients don't have to bother with it.

PretzelFisch3• 8 years ago

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

ekianjo• 8 years ago

Or Nextcloud as well.

otini9• 8 years ago

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.

tjoff4• 8 years ago

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.

detaro3• 8 years ago

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.

yjftsjthsd-h2• 8 years ago

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

andypants3• 8 years ago

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.

tjoff4• 8 years ago

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).

timonovici• 8 years ago

Use MediaGoblin then?

TomK32• 8 years ago

Anyone with exp using peertube for product videos on a small-ish scale? Is it worth having all those extra features?

I'm soon starting to create videos for my startup and peertube is certainly what I am thinking about, besides just hosting the mp4 files directly.

harlanji• 8 years ago

I built a system for people in similar situations... iSpooge Live, working on first easy release, seeking flexible early adopters.

Self hosted, designed for RasPi/non-cloud DCs w Docker, now running on AWS. Tools are all CLI static gen, to serve from CDN. I self host a “video platforms compared” video and other demos, with VideoJS player. Contact info in profile if you wanna chat more... my goal is hands-off SDK.

Dowwie• 8 years ago

Without advertising revenue, what incentive do many of these content creators have to participate? These alternative systems are unsustainable.

godelski• 8 years ago

Blender and OCW weren't monetizing their channels on YouTube... Some people just want to share their content. Not everyone is in it for the money.

patrickaljord• 8 years ago

Blender receives millions of dollars in donation and OCW is backed my MIT which gets billions of dollars in revenue. How is that comparable to starting creators who want to build a career? Also Blender and OCW don't need peertube as their content is very unlikely to get censored on youtube.

corobo2• 8 years ago

YouTube started without advertising revenue too.

I understand that doesn't help current creators but the problem YouTube competitors have right now seems to be a cycle of trying to match features, run out of money, shut down

My theory is any site with a chance of toppling YouTube needs to avoid trying to topple YouTube directly and rather recreate its rise to the top

SerLava2• 8 years ago

I still hold the opinion that YouTube didn't win because of the social features we think of now - it won because in 2005, it was the only video player that always did something when you hit the Play button. That was it.

detaro3• 8 years ago

Many don't primarily rely on YouTube advertising revenue (especially since YT has become fairly aggressive in excluding videos from monetization anyways). Sponsored content, in-video advertising, Patreon etc. all are revenue sources that don't rely on the platform providing advertising.

ehsankia2• 8 years ago

I thought the majority of the complains on Youtube were more about demonetization rather than content removal. PeerTube is solving the latter, but that doesn't help most people who are upset that they are making less money since the adpocalypse.

pjc50• 8 years ago

Plenty of people will post videos e.g. promoting racial hatred or Islamic State for free, especially on an censorship-resistant service.

Wertyol• 8 years ago

Free speech is a good thing.

Scared of IS propaganda? Deal with the root issues that cause it instead.

Justsignedup• 8 years ago

The problem that peer tube can not solve is the youtube suggestions and stability.

- As a business I will link to a youtube video but not a PT video because I know YT will stay up.

- Most YT's views are from recommendations and related videos.

PT can't compete against that. Just can't. Especially since YT will never recommend a PT video. This is why a single source wins. :(

toomuchtodo4• 8 years ago

If PeerTube instances are federated, and video metadata is publicly available, anyone can compete to offer a portal to PeerTube.

As a business, it is shortsighted to prefer link to a YT video that can be removed or deleted just as easily as a PeerTube video. My YT playlists are littered with deleted or otherwise removed videos. The only way to ensure a video you link to never disappears is to rip it and host it yourself.

otini9• 8 years ago

Peertube has other advantages, among which interoperability. A relevant quote from the main developer:

“Where it gets really, really exciting, is that when you respond to a video status on Mastodon, the message will be sent to the instance of PeerTube. Your response will thus be visible beneath the video, in the comment space. And yes, if another person at the other end of the world responds to your comment via their instance of PeerTube or Mastodon, you’ll see it as a response to your status in Mastodon. If tomorrow Diaspora (the Facebook alternative behind Framasphere) implements ActivityPub, it will work in the same way. We’ll have plenty of platforms that are capable of federating comments.

Free alternatives are criticized, often rightly, for not having added value compared to centralized platforms. With ActivityPub, we now have our first big advantage. Because on the centralized platforms, you’ll have a hard time viewing, under your YouTube video, the reactions of people who commented on Facebook, Twitter, etc. ”

source: https://medium.com/@chocobozzz/peertube-a-federated-video-st...

amelius• 8 years ago

Question: how does moderation work in ActivityPub?

codetrotter• 8 years ago

Because on the centralized platforms, you’ll have a hard time viewing, under your YouTube video, the reactions of people who commented on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

I consider it an advantage to not have those comments. Context matters. Signal to noise ratio on Facebook is close to 0 for most things that are open to everyone. Specialized subreddits have a good SNR. HN can too. Probably closed Facebook groups do as well.

And context matters. The discussion about a Blender tutorial will be different if posted to a group of beginners than if a group of professionals were to comment on it. If I want to help people learn Blender I can seek out beginners and help them in their groups, but when I am not looking to spend time helping beginners I’d rather not have every comment by every person wondering about every little detail show up.

s73v3r_2• 8 years ago

Given the general quality of YouTube comments, this is a bug, not a feature.

Canada• 8 years ago

When I feel like some mindless entertainment I'll hit r/documentaries. I prefer YT links because I know it's reliable. I tend not to follow links to other sites because they tend to be spammy. If PT establishes itself as something that will just play the content I asked for without being spammy then I'll give it a click even if its CDN isn't as good as Google.

oxide• 8 years ago

For me it comes down to the content I view on Youtube being available exclusively on Youtube.

Critical analysis of media is my jam, this kind of content is niche compared to the stuff that pulls a billion views on YT.

I'll happily comb through PT but I doubt it can fill my bottomless hunger for this kind of content.

worble• 8 years ago

PT can't compete against that

Good, because it's not a competitor. It's an alternative, and there's plenty of space for alternatives to exist. Not everything has to be a direct competition; It's ok for YouTube to exist, and it's ok for PeerTube to exist too.

Scoundreller• 8 years ago

Iunno, many "businesses" have sudden changes in policy and then decide to delete much of history with no consideration of its impacts.

* Reddit deciding to erase/ban subreddits with any drug theme, among others.

* Newspapers delete their comments sections, not just going forward, but forever in the past.

* Image hosters decide to ban hotlinking or go subscription-only. Since I drive a 200X car, this is a pain when many of the guides posted onto forums are basically useless.

With Youtube demonetizing videos (often useful but low-volume How-to videos that nobody would subscribe to), that's another nail in the coffin for them continuing to host video that can't earn them revenue.

awiesenhofer• 8 years ago

- As a business I will link to a youtube video but not a PT video because I know YT will stay up.

So you never stumbled upon a news or blog post (or playlist) containing an embedded video thats now "no longer available due to copyright issues", "switched to private", "not available for your country", "deleted by the user", ...?

Happens about once a week to me. Thats why I started to "backup" my playlists with youtube-dl.

rainbowmverse• 8 years ago

I routinely find linked YouTube videos that have been removed, sometimes with no indication as to why.

tomcooks• 8 years ago

Of all YouTube feats you pick suggestions? On my side they tend to be terrible

PretzelFisch3• 8 years ago

In the article PeerTube is presented as a YouTube alternative. I don't see how this can be the case if I have host the videos and pay all the costs that come with it.

otini9• 8 years ago

Only if you want to be in control of your videos and don't want to use your audience's personal data as a payment to Youtube.

You can also host them on a PeerTube instance run by someone you trust (several non-profits already maintain one).

PretzelFisch3• 8 years ago

Where can I find a list of them?

andypants3• 8 years ago

You have to do that anyways, when you want to host content. Uploading something to youtube is the opposite of 'hosting content'.

tyfon2• 8 years ago

Any peertubers here doing let's plays?

I have some on youtube, but it's just a hobby and I don't monetise it, but because of that I have a feeling that it's being scored lower in the youtube ranks.

However I have not seen any dedicated let's play peertube hubs and most only have a tiny allotment of upload space. There is one with unlimited, https://peertube.social/, however I'm not confident that it will stay that way and I'm not sure how happy they would be if I started uploading terrabytes of video.

Does anyone know of hubs specifically for this sort of content?

rigelk3• 8 years ago

There is https://videos.lecygnenoir.info/about - you can contact him on https://miaou.drycat.fr/@lecygnenoirgame

Not sure he still has slots open though

tyfon2• 8 years ago

I'll check it out.

Seems to be a bit french though for the moment and I'm not that well spoken in french :)

That brings another thing to mind, I tend to output stuff from Kdenlive with CRF 12 which results in quite high bitrate for 1080p (~25 mbit). Youtube just eats up the video files and transcodes them to all kinds of resolutions, but it also trashes the quality.

I wonder how peertube deals with that. Guess I can set up a local instance and test a bit first :)

jameslk2• 8 years ago

PeerTube exposes the IPs of all viewers who watch videos[0]. This is a privacy issue that's baked into its design. For example, this allows for anyone to track the content viewing history of IPs. I see this being a big hurdle for any mainstream adoption.

0. https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/316

otini9• 8 years ago

We could discuss the possible workarounds for this, but let's not forget that in terms of privacy, Youtube has its own by-design flaws as well. The company gathers much precise data about viewers than Peertube does.

JoshMnem• 8 years ago

Exposing your IP address to the public is much more risky than exposing it to Google.

rolandog2• 8 years ago

Would a VPN help in that regard?

otini9• 8 years ago

Sure, or Tor. Anything that hides your IP.

buovjaga• 8 years ago

See also https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/685 for discussion on implementing webtorrent over i2p

rigelk3• 8 years ago

Technically it's to provide an opt-out switch in the interface. It's being developped and will land in the stable.

rigelk3• 8 years ago

You can also deactivate WebRTC and get a direct HTTP streaming fallback.

aik• 8 years ago

There's an up-and-coming decentralized project called Force Network that has a method to obfuscate the ip of both the consumer and the host, and a mechanism to make it extremely censorship-resistant.

arpa2• 8 years ago

From the lightpaper presented, it seems to me, it's just tor with cryptocurrency. Am I misreading it and would you be so kind as to provide an executive summary why would one choose Force over good ole Tor?

cup-of-tea• 8 years ago

this allows for anyone to track the content viewing history of IPs

Is that worse than only Google being able to do it?

otini9• 8 years ago

Also tracking the viewing history of an IP is not that easy. People trying to do this can be easily spotted by the trackers.

bmelton• 8 years ago

Considering that Google is a subset of anyone, I have to assume that it is.

If you consider Google being able to track something as a negative, then Google+n would be at last +n negative.

Sir_Cmpwn2• 8 years ago

Without this it's hard to imagine PeerTube being able to scale to a fraction of YouTube's level. Video streaming is just too expensive. Being able to offload it to viewers during high traffic is a killer feature.

kyrra2• 8 years ago

Google handles this in the same way as Netflix by living in your ISP's data centers. Google has an edge global cache that can live at ISPs to reduce bandwidth usage.

https://peering.google.com/#/options/google-global-cache

Bulat-Ziganshin• 8 years ago

I heard that BitTorrent is 40% traffic of today Internet

andyidsinga2• 8 years ago

I've been digging around peer tube for a few days - a lot of cool stuff there.

I wonder if the barriers will largely be the costs of using it relative to existing centralized systems:

- uptime/accessibility over time of content : what how do users find content bookmarked two years ago if nodes are coming and going. Assuming there is a way to keep an updated bookmark list, what are the costs (effort, emotional etc) to the user to do that?

- costs of maintaining a node in the decentralized system. if my node maintains a catalog of 1000 or more videos what will be the operational costs (not just the storage and compute costs) to me of keeping this running.

These things are great to think of in context of of the recent HN post that discusses decentralized systems https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17361199

PS. I'm not saying that it's impossible to overcome those points - just that they're difficult and worth working through.

nodja2• 8 years ago

People pay for seedboxes all the time. If libtorrent adds webtorrent support I can see these seedboxes being repurposed to host webtorrent videos. As a seedbox owner you would just add your favorite channel's rss feed to the auto download.

ddingus• 8 years ago

I don't care. Amd people can VPN.

AsyncAwait• 8 years ago

It uses BitTorrent to scale, so it must do so. This is so that your instance wouldn't go down if your video blows up. I consider this a tradeoff worth making, do you have a better solution?

acover• 8 years ago

Seed torrents you haven't watched to obscure what you are actually watching.

trumped• 8 years ago

They used to make you pay extra for a static IP, but Comcast basically gives me a static IP for free now... I have to spoof my router's MAC address to get a new IP... I guess if you do that weekly, it is not such a huge privacy issue...

rolandog2• 8 years ago

I've been using it for a couple of days, and I've gotta say I'm impressed at the high quality of the service, and the integration with Activity Feeds (e.g. Mastodon) elsewhere.

bufferoverflow2• 8 years ago

What happens when someone uploads child porn?

otini9• 8 years ago

The uploader will be banned and their content removed, and hopefully will have to deal with the police. If a PeerTube instance is too laxist about its moderation policy, other instances will stop federating (federation is opt-in and decided by the admins).

bufferoverflow2• 8 years ago

So how can they call it "censorship resistant" if you can just ban users and delete their content?

Sir_Cmpwn2• 8 years ago

The person responsible for that PeerTube instance would have to remove it, and hopefully ban the user and report them to the authorities.

mikec3010• 8 years ago

or copyrighted material. this could open up peers to civil infringement suits from the MAFIAA which could have a chilling effect on new participants.

zaarn2• 8 years ago

If the country the instance is hosted in has illegalized child porn (japan for example allows some forms of child porn and it's normal to consume those), then the instance will likely take it down fairly quickly. If they don't they might be unfederated by other instances that definitely don't want this.

It's censorship resistant because each instance is an island and yet every island is connected. As long as someone is willing to host your content, people on the fediverse can consume it one way or another.

tssva• 8 years ago

Not showing your videos because you don't want to contribute financially to the for profit platform you chose to host them on is not censorship.

sverige• 8 years ago

Of course you're right, but it's also right to say that it's shitty when the for profit platform has more money than many small countries and insists that everyone must show their ads all the time. The money that the for profit platform makes comes from taking an obscene amount of data from its users and selling it to the companies that want to advertise.

We haven't even discussed whether the money that the for profit platform pays the content creators that drive traffic to its advertising engine is proportionate or fair. There's no discussion of this anywhere, really, since the for profit platform is so powerful that some people are literally afraid to criticize them in public. And let's not even broach the subject of whether the for profit platform might be using its users' data for things other than advertising. That would be really beyond the pale conspiracy theory type paranoia.

But you're right. It's not censorship. Only the government can do that.

lsc• 8 years ago

How do they solve the torrent liability problem?

My understanding is that if you download something via torrent, you are also uploading/distributing, and as I understand it, that makes your liability rather higher if the content happens to be illegal - you are not just in trouble for downloading/possessing said content, but you are also in trouble for distribution of said content.

I thought this was a big part of the rise of 'tube sites' for questionable content.

isaachier• 8 years ago

Resistant

Reply

polski-g• 8 years ago

How is this better than bitchute?

Reply

andrewchambers• 8 years ago

I can't see how this could be a youtube alternative without ads. Ads are how youtubers survive and make videos full time.

Reply

PeerTube: A ‘Censorship’ Resistent YouTube Alternative

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