PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

https://quariety.com/2018/07/20/peertube-the-decentralized-youtube-succeeds-in-crowdfunding/

by Roccan • 8 years ago

576 298 8 years ago

What the people who want decentralized services don't realize is that the content creators want centralized services (whether they realize it or not).

In the old days we needed YouTube because you needed a Flash encoder if you wanted to make video accessible on the web to everyone. Now anyone can host video on anything. You can throw even throw some comments on the bottom if you want.

But what those who create want is an audience. They want a community. There is a cycle of drama on YouTube that everyone feeds off of. Hell, some of the most popular videos people make are videos of people complaining about YouTube. Make a normal video, get a few thousand views. Make a rage video about how your normal video got demonized, get a million views.

How many attempts at decentralized social networks have failed? All of them.

phoe-krk• 8 years ago

Mastodon is going pretty well. I greatly enjoy using it and the conversations I have there.

meesterdude2• 8 years ago

I've heard of it but didn't realize people really used it? How/where should people learn more about mastodon if they're interested? How do you use it?

lylecubed3• 8 years ago

Am I the only one who finds the UI of mastodon nearly unusable? Then again, I also find tweetdeck and the twitter webpage a struggle to use.

not_that_noob2• 8 years ago

This one I think has legs. Quite a few content creators are upset with YouTube policies, and can drive users to PeerTube using other social services. Once you have a core group of users, others see that it’s viable and adoption rises.

bobajeff• 8 years ago

I think getting viewers wouldn't be a problem since videos are shareable and searchable in the all the ActivityPub networks.

elago• 8 years ago

How many centralized social networks have failed too? Most of them.

A lot of successful things have had similarities to previous failures. The first step is to actually try something new instead of sitting around nay-saying everything.

Personally my opinion Youtube can keep the the drama rage videos, or they can fall off the face of the internet. I just want educational videos and music without constant ads, and I don't want to create some entity with absolute power to censor content for the rest of the internet.

dragontamer11• 8 years ago

XMPP / Jabber isn't doing so hot though. I wouldn't call it a "failure", but Facebook / Google, especially with the "hangouts" thing cutting out XMPP support, definitely reduced XMPP's userbase.

Decentralized can certainly fail, or at least shrink over time.

hk__22• 8 years ago

How many centralized social networks have failed too? Most of them.

That’s still infinitely more successful than decentralized social network attempts.

wongarsu• 8 years ago

youtube is great for building an audience, but not nessesarily good for keeping it. A lot of niches have great success with patreon, but great trouble with keeping their videos on youtube (and in some cases keeping them in their subscribers feeds even when they are not taken down). The issues range from youtube's automatic enforcement of content guidelines (which appears more or less random), their ever increasing strictness (explosions are suddenly bad?) to their aweful copyright system that enables serious abuse of false copyright claims.

I suspect most content creators will stay on youtube for the audience, but there is lots of potential for backup channels to move off of youtube to some other, better provider. And as enough content is mirrored (and eventually vanishes from youtube as it gets taken down), the decentralized service becomes gradually more interesting to viewers.

tehduder94• 8 years ago

youtube is great for building an audience, but not nessesarily good for keeping it.

I wouldn't make that youtube's fault. People just grow out of content or like other content.

And the overzealous community guidelines and copyright strikes are a result of hundreds of lawsuits against youtube by the movie industry, and a need to appeal to advertisers for their platform.

Youtube barely makes any real income, just barely.

People seriously seriously underestimate the amount time and tech that has gone into youtube.

PeerTube/alternate youtube will also be subjective to the same things and similar things will happen.

Copyright system has to inspect billions of hours of video in a day, you can't expect people to do all of that. Will the alternative that isn't already a huge company have the assets to deal with all the copyright infringement? To have the enourmous CDN and advanced AI filtering algorithms that is better than youtube?

thevardanian3• 8 years ago

Exactly. Youtube isn't a means to monetize, necessarily, that comes with audience regardless of platform. If a majority of people switched off of youtube, and began doing their content independently the monetization would inevitable have to follow the content creators, regardless of platform. That's the problem here. Youtube is not necessarily good for content creators, but rather gives a centralized platform for ad agencies to sponsor their products.

However the future is in platform being irrelevant, and acting only as a communication protocol for data. This will allow for both building communities, and since it's only a protocol greater freedoms for content creators, and also greater freedoms for companies to sponsor content creators as they won't be restricted by another organization's policies.

Youtube will ultimately just be major news network spam, with reduced diversity. You can already see late night show spam, and news organizations getting preferential treatment on the platforms. These organizations will never be adequate for the internet due to their bureaucratic nature.

themagician8• 8 years ago

Fake news.

dragontamer11• 8 years ago

What the people who want decentralized services don't realize is that the content creators want centralized services (whether they realize it or not).

I agree. The current Youtube creators have built their models on advertisement, clicks, favorites, etc. etc. PeerTube will never be for them. There's simply no money in PeerTube right now.

That's fine however. There's a large section of creators, such as Blender, Education (think OpenCourseWare / MIT), Linux Conference publishers who will benefit from PeerTube.

In these cases, people don't want to make money. They want to publish videos and foster a community. Youtube is no longer compatible with the OSS values, due to advertisements, copyright takedowns and such. You never know when someone's ringtone happens to be a copyright violation which takes down a 60-minute talk about C++ or something stupid.

iknowverylittle3• 8 years ago

There's a large section of creators, such as Blender, Education (think OpenCourseWare / MIT), Linux Conference publishers who will benefit from PeerTube.

That's what I'm hoping for. Educational and instructional videos are my main use for YouTube, YT happens to be where they are hosted, I care very little about anything else related to the site so for me PeerTube could potentially be perfect for my use.

albertgoeswoof4• 8 years ago

There's no reason you can't build in monetization to peertube, and let the peertube host choose to enable it or not.

castlecrasher2• 8 years ago

Yep this is what I look forward to. Fewer Minecraft videos and more educational series.

willio583• 8 years ago

Podcasts are, for the most part, decentralized and seem to be still booming in popularity. I don’t see why a decentralized video platform couldn’t work too.

gowld2• 8 years ago

Podcasts are lovely but the scale is miniscule compared to video.

And video podcast technology exists but is deeply underused (perhaps in part because people choose podcasts when their eyes are busy)

Suppose I want to use a podcast client app to watch what today is in my YouTube subscriptions. Why not just use YouTube? I'm not obligated to read the comments. There's also a pattern that goes: Post a video to YT, then post a link to reddit.com/r/mychannel (or an alternative, or on several alternatives) where users can watch the video as an embed and then engage in discussion under whatever commenting/moderation system I choose.

Sangermaine• 8 years ago

Podcasts are, for the most part, decentralized

No, they aren’t. Of course anyone can put up a podcast, but the successful ones tend to cluster into podcast networks of like shows or join the big podcast groups like Nerdist, Wondery, or Earwolf. Or be a part of an established media company like NPR or Slate.

It’s easy to start a podcast but very hard to survive and expand alone.

annabellish• 8 years ago

Other than the much smaller scales podcasts operate on, are there any podcasts where the host has turned it into a living? There's a _lot_ of video creators out there who make those videos as their sole source of income now.

Endy4• 8 years ago

Really? I don't agree here.

I've never seen any that weren't being pushed to one of the major podcast apps - and thusly centralized. I mean, the whole term comes from the fact that it was originally downloadable to your iPod through iTunes. None of the podcasts I've ever found could really be considered decentralized - they might have a webpage somewhere, sure, but if they're not in Apple's iTunes/Podcast app, I'm not going to find them. Honestly, I haven't found a decent alternative on Android - I know there are several but none have as robust a catalog. I even use iTunes on Windows for podcast searching.

It's a very centralized market around specific aggregators. Could it weather a transition to a decentralized market structure if Apple were to disown it tomorrow? Maybe, but it would take a lot of energy to get there.

bunderbunder• 8 years ago

But podcast creators all give off frequent signals that they wish podcasting were centralized.

Specifically, I'm thinking of how they all ask you to leave a rating on some centralized podcast aggregation service, usually iTunes. Many also specifically ask that you subscribe through iTunes. That's because rankings and ratings on iTunes are as essential to their monetization strategy as Nielsen ratings were to over-the-air TV.

themagician8• 8 years ago

For the vast majority fo audiences, podcasts are basically centralized under iTunes. The only difference is that the creators have to pay for the bandwidth. So it's like the worst of all worlds.

CompelTechnic• 8 years ago

demonitized -> demonized is a great freudian slip.

themagician8• 8 years ago

Just a typo. I've got one of those shitty apple keyboards.

marsokod• 8 years ago

I believe the people behind peertube know about that. That is why Peertube is so much on federation with ActivityPub. If done properly this would allow anyone with an account on a website using ActivityPub (like Mastodon) to interact with the author of a Peertube video.

Granted this a both a technical problem (that I believe solvable) and a financing problem. It is hard to compete with the GAFAM and their advertising departments.

deevolution• 8 years ago

I think open protocals will really help in shifting people away from centralized services and towards decentralized or federated services. Activity pub, for instance is awesome. I think once we have open social protocals paired with cryptocurrencies, we might finally get to a point where federated/decentralized networks become attractive to an audience and to content creators and to developers. We can have borderless, uncensorable, and resilient social networks.

Anticipating some downvotes here because I mentioned cryptocurrencies.

rspeer• 8 years ago

That sounds like a way to end up with social networks made entirely of people who like cryptocurrencies. Sounds awful to me.

iknowverylittle3• 8 years ago

I'm not sure that 'decentralized' in this case means decentralized in community.

I understand it more as decentralized hosting since it's P2P.

Now, peertube does state something about 'instances', so that might separate content from one accessable website. I don't know.

YouTube's big point initially was video hosting was expensive and YouTube made it cheap (for creators).

It is also is a centralized community so you can find a video on virtually any subject just from the search on the homepage. If peertube is able to do this in a similar fashion would aid it's potential adoption (though again, I don't know if instances hinder that).

PeerTube still needs to be build a user base, attract users and creators from YouTube. Getting creators to use both platforms would help.

Lastly though, since it's P2P I don't know if that means only popular videos would then load at a comparable speed YouTube or not.

dragontamer11• 8 years ago

I'm not sure that 'decentralized' in this case means decentralized in community.

The idea of ActivityPub is to have a federated group of servers. Similar to XMPP and Email.

So you can create an account as Alice@serverAlpha.com, while I can create an account as Bob@serverB.com. When I publish a video at serverB.com, it will notify serverAlpha.com that a new video was published, which eventually tells Alice to check out the new video.

deltron30302• 8 years ago

What the people who want decentralized services don't realize is that the content creators want centralized services (whether they realize it or not).

Ideally you wouldn't decentralize the UI/UX, but the cloud server architecture it runs on. You could still maintain the same centrally accessible experience.

That's the thing people need to understand, the frontend (UI) can be seperated and decoupled from the backend. Where the servers that power those sites are plugins installed on peoples home routers or personal assistants. They scale in performance with each added user and installed plugin.

halflings2• 8 years ago

It's not just about UI/UX. You need a centralized backend to return recommendations in a reasonable time (if you need to query all the decentralized instances each time, it'll be incredibly slow)... which means that you go back to the scenario where a centralized instance is the source of traffic, decides what is recommended and what isn't.

I guess there's still one advantage in that scenario: somebody can build a competing recommendation service while using the same underlying videos.

tejtm2• 8 years ago

No,that is most definitely not what I want as a content creator. I do not want just any audience (that is the realm of people who require attention for validation or exploitation). By the time I have created something I have already gotten what I am going to get out of it, sharing it is just a courtesy and I would rather just share with people who care enough to make the effort to search for something relevant to their interests rather than a horde of mindlessly clicking eyeballs

s73v3r_10• 8 years ago

I think most of the content creators also want to be paid for creating the content. I've not seen how PeerTube intends to help with that.

jklinger410• 8 years ago

You left yourself open here by not elaborating on how centralized services benefit from profiting companies with marketing campaigns who draw users.

Decentralized platforms will force these content creators to market their own platform.

If they do a good enough job at that (which I doubt, compared to Google) then they may stand a chance to reach "viral momentum."

posting2fast3• 8 years ago

https://framatube.org/

Am I wrong, or does this list videos across instances? As long as there is one search interface for many instances, and only one account needed to follow whatever instance they are on, what more centralization do you need?

I remember when Google Video still existed, and I wanted to try it out. I don't really make video, but I had random boring clips made with my digicam, and I uploaded one where slowly dropped a sugar cube into a cup of steaming, red fruit tea (the cube it absorbed the tea and fell apart). Just because in those days, signing up for free things and trying them out was something I liked to do.

Then I forgot about the video, and after a while I got an email saying it got removed because it violated the terms. Maybe they thought it was blood, heh. At any rate, I don't even make videos and I already know 100% that I don't want centralized hosting, to be at the mercy of some faceless entity that might click the wrong button and then be difficult about it. It was funny in my case, but it could have been something important or something that required a lot of effort.

Make a rage video about how your normal video got demonized, get a million views.

Yeah, which means people actually do care more than you think. Those videos would also get more views on decentralized hosting, compared to bland ones. It doesn't mean people actually secretly enjoy being mistreated because talking about that gives them views.

s73v3r_10• 8 years ago

You're not making videos, though. Thus, you don't really can't speak to what content creators want. And just because people complain about YouTube at times doesn't mean they want a decentralized service.

And when they complain about demonetization, I'm not sure how decentralized services are supposed to help there, because I've not seen much in how decentralized services are supposed to help monetize videos. I'm pretty sure they're not going to be serving ads.

ReverseCold4• 8 years ago

The biggest thing holding back p2p/"truly decentralized" networks (in my opinion) are NAT/Firewalls. You cannot reliably get past them on the inside without manual configuration. There's no way you can convince millions of people to try to port forward, and UPnP is very hit or miss.

If that was solved, lightweight applications like 1:1 messaging could easily be fully peer to peer/decentralized/trustless.

lylecubed3• 8 years ago

How does bittorrent get around this? It isn't particularly troubled by nats or firewalls unless you live on a college campus.

WJW• 8 years ago

That is definitely a thing hindering adoption, but if there was really a big demand for decentralization, they would have been gone already. There are many more things holding back decentralized networks like the difficulty in filtering spam without easy coordinated effort, fixing network wide search and efficient monetization of content for creators.

AndrewUnmuted• 8 years ago

This is an interesting thought. Even more interesting was what I learned recently while trying to circumvent this issue.

Last week I encountered a similar concern in a project I am working on for UWP. I wasn't sure how to help the user open up the necessary ports. Then I discovered that one can submit in the UWP application manifest the port ranges that the app needs to function properly.

Whenever a user installs the app, the Windows Firewall tool opens a dialog asking if it should open the port ranges.

As someone who typically works in Unix derived environments, this was a delightful surprise.

bufferoverflow• 8 years ago

Youtube started banning politically inconvenient youtubers. And it's their right. That alone is a good enough reason for an alternative, centralized or not.

The end user doesn't care about the underlying technology, as long as it works.

halflings2• 8 years ago

Yup, but it has to work as in: provide good video recommendations, allow for low latency 720p streaming at the very least.

MR4D2• 8 years ago

I think you're confuning centralization with a walled garden. Because if what you said were true, then why would Disney be buying Hulu?

The larger of a content creator I am, the more I want to control distribution.

Having my content on a site with someone else's rules sucks, because I am at their mercy.

For example, with Disney owning Hulu, they can tell Google to go F-off, and never worry about their content being accidentally censored, deleted, etc.

For a smaller content producer, the value might even be more significant, even if the dollars are less.

marcusf• 8 years ago

Huge difference between a brand likey Disney able to pull off a streaming service and smaller producers. Smaller producers need demand, and for video demand = youtube.

nerdponx2• 8 years ago

What the people who want decentralized services don't realize is that the content creators want centralized services (whether they realize it or not).

You need a centralized discovery service (this is where Tor, I2P, Freenet, IPFS, etc. all fail). Centralized content hosting is different.

lylecubed3• 8 years ago

Why couldn't you make the discovery service decentralized as well?

golem14• 8 years ago

And arguably, since discovery is a gatekeeper, it is where the money is.

Hosting is perhaps harder to monetize and definitely more expensive.

gwbas1c• 8 years ago

I think you're on to something.

How many attempts at decentralized social networks have failed? All of them.

When I've tried to build decentralized code, it's 10x harder.

IMO, the real problem with creating a decentralized replacement for a centralized service is multi-fold: You have to really understand the use case that you're trying to replace, and the nuances that drive the general public to that particular service. Then, things like search and quality control become much harder.

On top of that, "decentralized" isn't a feature that most people really care about, so your decentralized replacement has to have tangible improvements above and beyond the original service.

Remember: The web is decentralized, but we rely on a few search engines. Email is decentralized, but most of us get email from a few providers. The web and email had tangible improvements over AOL, Compuserve, ect.

qop4• 8 years ago

IRC, gnusocial, xmpp, sms to some degree, ham radio, etc.

The absence of censorship I think will prove to be tangible enough to make products like peertube successful.

jabbadabbadooba2• 8 years ago

I'd argue that the web is actually centralized but can host decentralized services.

flatline• 8 years ago

Usenet is still a thing, going on 40 years now. It may not be uber popular but it's far from a failure.

hk__22• 8 years ago

Usenet is still a thing, going on 40 years now. It may not be uber popular but it's far from a failure.

Well, it’s not a failure, but it’s not far from abandon.

Quoting from Wikipedia [1]:

"AOL discontinued Usenet access in 2005. In May 2010, Duke University, whose implementation had kicked off Usenet more than 30 years earlier, decommissioned its Usenet server, citing low usage and rising costs. After 32 years, the Usenet news service link at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (news.unc.edu) was retired on February 4, 2011."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Decline

jMyles• 8 years ago

How many attempts at decentralized social networks have failed? All of them.

This seems like a very, very premature assessment. Come back in 50 years and see if this is still true.

rhizome3• 8 years ago

What the people who want decentralized services don't realize is that the content creators want centralized services (whether they realize it or not).

Where do you draw the line? Social networks are already decentralized, so creators have to crosspost to reach their audience on all platforms. Seems to be working, at least for some.

CM30• 8 years ago

Nothing about any of that couldn't happen on a decentralised/federated network. The drama could obviously happen, though likely about different issues to those on YouTube. The discoverability could happen on a decentralised system, as could ad money/subscription payments, recommendations or anything else.

Nothing about what makes someone successful on a site like YouTube needs it to be centralised to be possible.

boron1006• 8 years ago

It's not impossible, but I think it's way, way less likely. The thing with YouTube alternatives is that they have to be at least as good as YouTube. Creators will only go where their audiences will go, so a site that doesn't offer a good user experience will immediately be off the table.

Discoverability is way harder on decentralized systems, as is providing recommendations, stability, etc.

Sometimes HN/reddit gets so starry eyed when anything about decentralized/distributed/open-source systems comes up that any sort of critique of the product becomes like a personal attack. A few months ago someone posted a decentralized "facebook alternative", where you had to download a bunch of stuff, and connect with an FTP client just in order to make a post. My grandma's on facebook, but she's not going to understand how to connect to a MySQL database.

People think that defending decentralized/distributed systems at any cost makes them better, but I think it just makes them untenable in the long term. If you enjoy using a product, then prosthelytize all you want for it, but if you like the idea more than the product, then the product probably should change or evolve.

bengarrr• 8 years ago

Exactly just think about the current platform this comment is hosted on. There's no reason hacker news couldn't function as a decentralized platform. In fact it pretty much does considering the only things that are really hosted/centralized are hyperlinks, comments on those hyperlinks and a little metadata. The core of the product is already distributed among the users who themselves curate the content. The real issue is how fast you get to see the content, and for a video service that should offer 4K video I think centralized services are the only solution that are performant, right now, that doesn't mean decentralized services couldn't be just as performant if not more so. But for all intents and purposes it should be easier to build an audience on a decentralized service, specifically a niche audience that is more likely to engage and support your content. There also isn't a reason why centralized services couldn't step in and build infrastructure to support certain aspects of an otherwise decentralized network, after all that is the internet in and of itself haha!

pmichaud• 8 years ago

IF you wanted to, how would you implement decentralized discovery?

jordigh• 8 years ago

It's really grinding when the top comments of any sort of alternative thing to come out are always so negative. Long list of reasons why this will never work out.

It's easy to be negative. It's more difficult but more fun to be inventive and industrious.

To the peertube devs: don't let negative comments like this grind you down. Peertube has some great ideas and I think it can succeed.

yroc92• 8 years ago

The top comment of almost any post on HN is negative.

tehduder94• 8 years ago

It's really grinding when any criticism isn't addressed but complained about for being pointed out.

Kalium3• 8 years ago

You're right! It's incredibly depressing and deflating when the most popular comments are always, always so negative. So down.

Yet, is it perhaps possible that there might be something to be learned from the comments? Each is an exciting new opportunity for readers and developers to learn and perhaps even improve!

themagician8• 8 years ago

I mean, it does have some great ideas. They just aren't ideas that YouTube's audience or content creators care about.

resters2• 8 years ago

Your assumptions are completely wrong. Content creators simply want a platform for gathering an audience. Youtube wants to play as many ads as possible. Let's not pretend that somehow those interests align perfectly in the product we know as youtube.

The audience generation mechanics are an important ingredient for replacing youtube, but youtube has gone from being a free service that had little user generated content and focused on gray area "Napster model" hosting of copyrighted content.. and then gradually found content creators and introduced interruption advertising (full screen commercials).

There are a lot of holes in youtube's profit model. Imagine what youtube could be if it didn't have the dark patterns everywhere (young kids get served algorithmically generated disturbing content!).

It's so refreshing that an alternative model is getting some traction. Also, it would be fairly easy to just slurp up the best content from Youtube since most is in the public domain.

themagician8• 8 years ago

I'm not wrong.

We have moved towards a world of centralized services because that's what people want. To many people it's the centralized services that "are" the Internet: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—that's it. YouTube is the lowest common denominator of video. You aren't going to "fix" its problems with a more complex decentralized network.

If you want to solve the problems with YouTube you have to do it with another YouTube. Build another centralized service that fixes the problems that YouTube has, because that's what people want. Not a federated network. Creators want do less work for a larger more consistent paycheck.

Have we learned nothing from literally every single project the that has tried to "free" us from the evils of the centralized services? Here ya go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_pro... Slowly they all go from Active to Dead or Stalled.

YouTube's audience doesn't care about anything at decentralized network has to offer. It's just entertainment for them. They just want to watch videos and shitpost in the comments.

notatoad2• 8 years ago

Content creators simply want a platform for gathering an audience

content creators want to get paid. If all the content creators wanted was a platform to gather an audience, being demonetized wouldn't be the end of the world that they all seem to claim it is.

those ads youtube plays don't just fund youtube, they fund the content creators too. the interests of the platform and the producer are pretty closely aligned there.

Jyaif• 8 years ago

Your axioms are completely wrong.

Content creators wants as much money as possible, and Youtube wants as much money as possible.

onion2k• 8 years ago

How many attempts at decentralized social networks have failed? All of them.

Practically every social network has failed in some way or another , decentralised or not. Very few of them have failed due to the tech though - tech seems to be the easy part in comparison to building a large enough audience to keep the network active.

s73v3r_10• 8 years ago

But for most decentralized social networks, the selling point, the focus, has been that it's decentralized. Which tends to point to the idea that most people don't care about decentralization.

mirimir• 8 years ago

... content creators want centralized services ...

Sure they do. Until their content gets nuked, with no recourse.

grahamburger• 8 years ago

But what those who create want is an audience. They want a community.

PeerTube seems to be aiming to provide exactly those things.

syrrim• 8 years ago

This is a very silly way of looking at the world. The reason people prefer centralized services is because:

- they have greater capacity to add features

- they have more ability to have search and other discovery

Neither of these are inherent to a centralized service. All you need is a centralized website on top of a decentralized video host. Different websites can compete on features like search, while providing access to the same database of videos.

The fact that no one has succeeded yet is not proof that this is impossible. Moreover, this would be to ignore protocols like email and the web, which are decentralized, and which are very popular. Centralization has been preferred because we are in a period of very rapid change, where centralized services can pivot ten times before a decentralized service even gets started. People are beginning to realize the downsides of centralized services, change is starting to slow down, and decentralized services are now able to make headway.

sperm• 8 years ago

This is a very silly way of looking at the world. The reason people prefer centralized services is because:

- they have a monetization layer directly linked to their users' bank accounts.

At the end of the day people need to pay bills in order to produce content for a living. Without that, you can't compete. With that, and you're not decentralized.

ekianjo• 8 years ago

How many attempts at decentralized social networks have failed? All of them.

Looks like you never heard of Mastodon. It's thriving.

znpy• 8 years ago

How many attempts at decentralized social networks have failed? All of them.

This is why we have to keep trying :)

adreamingsoul• 8 years ago

As a content creator, I disagree. Not all of us are driven to market our content on social platforms. I have my own peertube (as an experiment) instance running that allows me to control the entire viewing experience and that’s more important to me then views, likes, or subs.

tinus_hn• 8 years ago

There are more use cases for hosting video than monetized videos.

A few weeks ago Blender was having issues with YouTube trying to twist their arm. They would do fine an another network as long as it’s reasonably easy to use.

8bitsrule• 8 years ago

What the people who want Stanley-steamers don't realize is, what they really want is better buggy-whips.

Cites are centralized services. Communities can actually thrive outside of cities.

Fnoord• 8 years ago

How many attempts at decentralized social networks have failed? All of them.

PeerTube is to YouTube what Mastodon is to Facebook/Twitter. Could you explain how exactly -in your opinion- Mastodon has failed?

NedIsakoff• 8 years ago

What happened to the Decentralized Facebook that everyone was so excited about a few years ago?

dragontamer11• 8 years ago

"What happened" to it? You're LOOKING at it, right now!

PeerTube builds on top of the Mastodon / ActivityPub network, which is Decentralized Facebook.

In effect, this is showing the network effect of the new open-source / federated protocol. It can be extended to host videos over Bittorrent over WebRTC through the Web Browser (all port 80, no configuration, Javascript clients only), while publishing over the Mastodon / ActivityPub federation.

----------

I think there are some legitimate privacy issues with regards to Bittorrent over WebRTC (public publishing of IP Addresses and such), but as long as its a configurable flag that individual servers can turn off, then the federation can grow.

synchronise• 8 years ago

Mastodon is a decentralised Twitter, Hubzilla would be the decentralised Facebook.

cam3ham• 8 years ago

they successfully raised crowdfunding..

monocasa• 8 years ago

If you're talking about Diaspora, it more or less failed because of some technical decisions made early on, but there was a lot to be learned from their effort.

What you're seeing here is the second wave of stabs at the same concept, after internalising some of Diaspora's lessons.

dredmorbius3• 8 years ago

Which tech decisions? Link is fine if you happen to have one.

s73v3r_10• 8 years ago

Nobody moved to it, cause nobody knew anyone on it.

tCfD5• 8 years ago

'decentralisation' should not be a design goal, or at least should not be advertised as one, because it is fundamentally unsustainable.

It is best understood as a transitional phase between centralized regimes, not an end in and of itself.

not_that_noob2• 8 years ago

I don’t know man - the Internet is distributed and last I checked it was doing great.

zajd• 8 years ago

Distributed =/= decentralized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_root_zone

tCfD5• 8 years ago

Distributed and decentralized mean different things. distributed implies a distributor, which is itself a centralized function and in fact the internet has several of these centers of decentralisation that make sure that the grand partitions of high value 'land' assets such as IP address blocks and domain names are apportioned in an explicitly centralized manner.

'Decentralized' as it is commonly understood is about eliminating such central control points and devolving those powers to the edge of the network graph - to individual nodes, or more exactly to individual people.. This never works long-term, and always collapses right back into a centralized hierarchical system.

Information wants to be free, but value wants to be centralized.

airstrike• 8 years ago

These days, the Internet is more akin to infrastructure than a product per se.

s73v3r_10• 8 years ago

Nobody visits "the internet," though. People visit sites and services on the internet. People aren't going to go to PeerTube because it's decentralized. Viewers will go if there's content they want to watch, and creators will go if they can make money or they can have an audience.

dredmorbius3• 8 years ago

Paul Baran's original spec, 1964

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420.html

deckar014• 8 years ago

Peering video content with a web seed fallback is actually a very sustainable and scalable solution. Content availability scales automatically with its popularity without increasing the cost to the host by using the upload bandwidth of users (which they generally have a surplus of).

tCfD5• 8 years ago

The part that doesn't scale is not delivery (which can be parallelized independently among nodes), it is the custodial directory function -the tracking, location, identification and availability of high quality seeds and hosts. This is the function that will start out optimistically decentralized by hobbyists and enthusiasts and eventually succumb to opportunistic centralization as anything close to serious scale begins to kick in.

YouTube as a service has very different performance expectations than something like bittorrent. for one thing the directory function is built in and not externalized to another set of directory services, which are notoriously unreliable in the case of BitTorrent anyway.

And unlike BitTorrent or Mastodon I don't only want to know where I can find a given file, I want to know where I can find it delivered immediately, consistently, smoothly, without hesitation, in a variety of cross encoded formats I'm almost certain to have supported on my device, and with some sort of consensus mechanism to establish a better than chance confidence that the file I start streaming is the file I expected to stream and not something else with the same filename.

smolsky• 8 years ago

So a cross between bittorrent and porntube?

dragontamer11• 8 years ago

Its closer to a cross between Twitter, Email, and Bittorrent. People create accounts like Email, on the servers they like. You can publish new videos to your followers, like Twitter, using ActivityPub. Followers on other servers are notified via ActivityPub that a new video was made.

When followers click on the video, its shared with Bittorrent over WebRTC over everyone's Web Browser (with the PeerTube server as the permanent seed).

Personally, I don't like the idea of the Bittorrent bit, due to the publishing of IP addresses. But I really like the idea of federated video sharing through ActivityPub.

---------

I guess ActivityPub might be the new RSS, if RSS lists were hosted on servers and had concepts about users. And PeerTube is mostly about notifying ActivityPub members that new videos are available.

meesterdude2• 8 years ago

Good, we need decentralized services, especially as content creators. Youtube will flag seeming anything as violating some copyright, no matter how fair it's use may be. It's getting to be excessive now.

Fanmade music Video's i watched two weeks ago are taken down and gone from the internet. There's a real cultural loss with that, the culmination of human creativity snuffed over servitude to corporations who blanket flag content because they can.

The web is decentralized, and I think something so critical to our records as a species should not be under the control of any one corporate entity.

izzydata• 8 years ago

What would process of taking down an obviously illegal video be on PeerTube?

albertgoeswoof4• 8 years ago

Contact the peertube host. If they choose to leave it up, you can contact law enforcement / a court who can make a genuine judgement as to the legality of the content and take up approrpriate enforcement.

alttab• 8 years ago

No mention of TRX in the thread? Shocker...

deadalus• 8 years ago

Bitchute, DTube, Minds and now PeerTube. Great products but how long can they survive?

nkkollaw• 8 years ago

Without taking away any of the merit of succeeding in crowdfunding anything:

people go to YouTube because there are awesome content creators that produce content you want to watch.

Content creators make money via Patron, but mostly via ads. If PeerTube became successful enough to get a lot of content creators, they would eventually want to monetize their videos.

PeerTube would now have to introduce things like "censorship" to make sure advertisers stayed on the platform, etc. etc. and eventually you would have YouTube again.

Personally, I really enjoy YouTube. I have an ad blocker and never see any ad whatsoever (although I did support a few content creators via Patreon in the past), the interface is great, none of the channels I subscribe to have ever experienced censorship or bad interference from Google--although they do play by the rules.

I really welcome alternatives, but the community on YouTube is absolutely great, and I really enjoy the platform. It won't be easy to make a lot of people change their mind, unless you offer something different (for instance, Vimeo with really good quality videos mostly, and short professional movies).

pschon• 8 years ago

I wonder how this is different than usenet. I can recall our sysadmin complaining about having to manage usenet.

dragontamer11• 8 years ago

Socially, its not too different. A good netizen will have to manage the servers, just as usenet required good administrators to thrive in the 90s and early 2000s.

Technologically, PeerTube / ActivityPub is built on top of modern protocols which are more fashionable right now. WebRTC, ActivityPub, etc. etc. are all web browser technologies that can be implemented in PHP and Javascript alone.

dredmorbius3• 8 years ago

Readier access to feeds, perhaps.

hughes• 8 years ago

How does a creator monetize a video with PeerTube?

deckar014• 8 years ago

a simple “support” button allows videographers to direct their viewers to Tipee, Patreon, Paypal and other donation tools.

Fej• 8 years ago

They don't.

(for those who write that it directs to donation sites: donation is not monetization. Ads and premium subscriptions are.)

Endy4• 8 years ago

I like the idea of PeerTube, but there are many hurdles.

Anyone whose ISP/firewall/etc blocks all Torrent traffic is going to have a major challenge - which means that while part of what PeerTube has been so far is educational videos, they're not accessible in most school environments. That's a big challenge to overcome.

The other is pretty simple, and a reason I have not used PeerTube to watch a single video. If you're using my machine and my bandwidth to host or transfer your video to another person, you're going to pay me for it - upfront and at a rate I agree to. You're slowing down my connection and your website is causing me send data to someone I do not know. You're going to be liable for anything malicious that gets sent back; and if you're MitM'ing it to scan it properly, why are you wasting my bandwidth and storage?

onli• 8 years ago

If you're using my machine and my bandwidth to host or transfer your video to another person, you're going to pay me for it

That's a bit ridiculous. No one is ever gonna pay you for that. You get something for free, the video you want to watch, and the deal here is that your unused upload bandwidth gets used to help transfer it to others. It's a social contract thing, and thinking you might get a better deal magically by refusing it won't make that deal appear.

You're slowing down my connection

In which way? It is using your upload while you download a video. That does not harm you.

causing me send data to someone I do not know

You never seeded a torrent? You never connected to an internet site you did not know the owner of? It's pretty much the same thing.

You're going to be liable for anything malicious that gets sent back

Who is the you here? A Peertube instance won't be liable for malicious data, how would that even work anyway. Even if it were possible: The websites spreading malware with their ads were not liable either. This won't happen.

if you're MitM'ing it to scan it properly, why are you wasting my bandwidth and storage?

Right, that would be a bad idea.

wild_preference• 8 years ago

Just because you’re downloading something doesn’t mean uploads don’t affect it. In fact, upload often cripples bandwidth.

https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/Introduction...

mikewhy• 8 years ago

It is using your upload while you download a video. That does not harm you.

An outbound connection is one of the very first things that happens when requesting anything over a network. Not to mention if you're doing any video chatting or gaming.

shittyadmin• 8 years ago

thinking you might get a better deal magically by refusing it won't make that deal appear.

I mean, actually he trivially could get that deal by modifying the client a bit - but as long as the majority of people don't go out of their way to do that it doesn't really matter if there are leechers.

As long as there are a handful of people like myself who have big pipes and rarely use them to their fullest, who seed public torrents to 200x because why the hell not, you're not going to have a serious issue.

Honestly, if PeerTube wants to catch on, all it has to do is be easy to use and full of pirated content.

drexlspivey• 8 years ago

That's a bit ridiculous. No one is ever gonna pay you for that.

There is a p2p network that does exactly that using cryptocurrency tokens. https://substratum.net/

contravariant• 8 years ago

I think you should be able to limit the upload rate though, although maybe the browser should be responsible for that.

mintplant3• 8 years ago

Anyone whose ISP/firewall/etc blocks all Torrent traffic is going to have a major challenge - which means that while part of what PeerTube has been so far is educational videos, they're not accessible in most school environments.

Are you sure? PeerTube uses the WebTorrent protocol, which operates over WebRTC and consequently doesn't look like most torrent traffic. And the player can fall back to a plain HTTP download from the host server.

dragontamer11• 8 years ago

Anyone whose ISP/firewall/etc blocks all Torrent traffic is going to have a major challenge

WebRTC is over port 5004, which is common for telecommunications like VOIP providers. VOIP isn't as common as port 80 (www), but I'd imagine that there's a good risk of outrage if ISPs start blocking the VOIP port.

You're slowing down my connection and your website is causing me send data to someone I do not know.

This is a legitimate concern IMO. So the PeerTube federation needs to be clear and allow users to opt-out (or even opt-out default / opt-in for benefits) to stay on the moral high ground.

andypants2• 8 years ago

If you can't access the video via webrtc, it gets served as a regular video directly downloaded from the server.

twerpy_d• 8 years ago

what about dtube?

yontherubicon• 8 years ago

Doesn't d.tube only run on one main server, but transmit over ipfs?

empath75• 8 years ago

So how does this not end up being all porn and nazis?

deckar014• 8 years ago

There is a "Self-managed moderation" section at the end of this article.

If you host your own instance, you can serve that kind of content. Since instance discovery is also decentralized, you can only subject your content to users who you convince to visit your instance in the first place.

If you are trying to expose the masses to perverse/extremist content and you don't have your own popular instance, you are limited by the moderation of the instance you are trying to publish to.

usaphp• 8 years ago

So I have a friend who has a pretty popular YouTube channel and one of the things he complains about is that some users are stealing and them uploading his videos in bulk and moneytise them. The benefit of having a central authority is that you can at least complain about your stolen copyright, with a decentralized network it will seem like a very difficult task since there is no regulation, unless I am missing something

dwild• 8 years ago

uploading his videos in bulk and moneytise them

As far as I know, there's no plan to monetize videos over PeerTube, that pretty much remove that possibility then.

that you can at least complain about your stolen copyright

Torrent exist, PeerTube won't create much more possibility to stole content. Considering it's free content too, there's not much incentive to get it anywhere else than it's original source.

deckar014• 8 years ago

a simple “support” button allows videographers to direct their viewers to Tipee, Patreon, Paypal and other donation tools. But in the future, Framasoft hopes that ” people will be able to code their own monetization system “.

This article suggests that it already does have monetization support.

natural219• 8 years ago

Visit a Peertube site in Brave and donate via BAT. Easy.

Complete copyright control is something content creators (and humanity) will just have to get over. Donation/patronage-based models are simply the future of intellectual property compensation.

corbpie• 8 years ago

Has your friend looked at watermarking?

wetpaws2• 8 years ago

I am concerned that federated service is being presented as distributed. Email is federated and it is precisely the reason why nobody is hosting their mail server and using Gmail instead.

albertgoeswoof4• 8 years ago

Nobody except literally every sizeable corporation, the hundreds of gmail competitors and the millions that host their own server.

wetpaws2• 8 years ago

Just for the sake of curiousity, where do you store your mail?

sergiotapia• 8 years ago

I hope this explode in popularity. I remember torrent streaming was in it's infancy at one point and nobody really used it. Now popular content is so heavily trafficked you can easily watch in full 1080p with no loading times.

I think once peertube hits it's mass effect it'll blow up. No stopping it, by design.

This is really awesome!

amitkgupta842• 8 years ago

I started working on a Helm [1] chart for PeerTube if someone wants to try out running PeerTube on a Kubernetes [2] cluster (I've only tried this on GKE [3]).

[1] https://www.helm.sh/ [2] https://kubernetes.io/ [3] https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/

amitkgupta842• 8 years ago

As a content creator, once you've recorded and edited your content, you have to solve for a few kinds of things:

1) hosting, content delivery, authentication and access control, styling and UI, etc. 2) discoverability, which requires things like a search engine, recommendation engine, a community/social network, links, etc. 3) some degree of independence, and the freedom to decide what content to show, what content to monetize, etc. free from whatever agenda/motives a company like YouTube/Alphabet might have.

One way to look at it is that PeerTube starts to make (1) a lot more accessible without something like YouTube. (2) is where YouTube shines, but is possible via existing structures in the Internet if you're just using PeerTube (plus PeerTube has some sort of federation, though I haven't looked into it much). (3) is where PeerTube shines.

There doesn't have to be one answer for the entire market. YouTube is probably better for smaller creators looking to build their audience and be discovered, but once you reach a sufficient size, and don't need to rely on the YouTube recommendation engine for people to find you, something that offers greater independence and self-determination would seem desirable. Of course, I'm only talking about tendencies, a very small content creator may have a strong desire for independence, and a a very large content creator may be perfectly fine coloring inside whatever lines YouTube draws.

notatoad2• 8 years ago

2 and 3 are inherently linked. If you want somebody else to recommend your videos, you're automatically under their control. Expecting a third party to promote your content without caring what content you produce is not realistic.

You could definitely build a recommendation system on top of PeerTube, but content creators will be just as beholden to the peertube discovery algorithm, and the assumptions and preferences it is built on, as YouTube's content creators are to the preferences and assumptions of the YouTube algorithm.

lapinot• 8 years ago

Even if your reasoning is strictly speaking right, the issue is very different in peertube and in youtube (or at least could be, i don't think they have a good recommendation system yet): peertube is a federation and not a monopole. Distributed systems allow to have a clean separation between the an exploration algorithm, its actual policy and the instance hosts. The policy can be very much user-specific, easily with a federated-instance granularity and could be run on an instance which has no link with the content it's searching.

MarkMc• 8 years ago

Many content creators also want (4) a way to maximize revenue for each ad displayed. That's certainly where YouTube shines

gkya• 8 years ago

What are the disadvantages of uploading to multiple hosts? Thus you can say benefit from YouTube's funding and discovery and use say Patreon for stable funding, and PeerTube (or Vimeo, &c) for alternative storage. Add to that a website with a nice RSS feed of your videos, and some social media; shouldn't you be ready to go as a professional video artist / content creator with a nice, redundant distribution structure?

anderspitman• 8 years ago

If PeerTube accomplishes nothing but making it easy for a person to host their own videos in a way that can be streamed scalably, in my opinion it will be a very valuable piece of software. I wonder how many seed boxes you'd need in order to guarantee video availability. I'm assuming after you get enough people watching at one time that webtorrents become self-sustaining, correct?

ryrobes• 8 years ago

People want viable services not "tech".

Red flag: both their concept as well as name have YT's brand name in it. The equivalent of calling your company "Uber for X". I'm all for decentralization where it makes sense - but this seems like they might be shooting themselves in the foot everywhere EXCEPT the tech (which, ultimately won't matter if they fail).

From the article: "Online since March 2018 in a beta version, the project should definitely take off by October, based on the money raised."

Beta + $60k + 6 more months time = Success? Against a practical content monopoly.

As a guy currently doing the start-up dance - this kind of optimistic naivety almost offends me.

noitsnot• 8 years ago

$60k is mind-blowingly low. I wouldn't expect much, if anything from this site.

KaoruAoiShiho2• 8 years ago

It got to the top of HN. That speaks to a tremendous demand. Most startups fail not because of money raised but because they don't have product market fit. People want this product to exist, but... the question is, will they actually use it. lol.

franciscop• 8 years ago

That would be a very good 1 year salary for Spain. In most parts of Spain (except the big cities) you can easily live 2 years with that. I expect France to be similar price-wise.

andypants2• 8 years ago

They're not raising 60k to defeat youtube. They're raising 60k to complete a piece of software that does some of what youtube does in a different way. That's it. It's an open source project, they're not running on official peertube instance with the goal of being anything more than a demo of the software they're writing.

lxe• 8 years ago

Remember Peerflix? It was a great interface to a time-tested platform enabling modern streaming, searching, and overall great user experience.

Unfortunately decentralized tech always ends up harboring illegal or immoral content and then becomes a pariah if a sort.

themodelplumber• 8 years ago

decentralized tech

It seems to me that the problem you rightly pointed out could be approached and possibly solved by zooming in a bit and breaking the term "decentralized" into component parts. For example, at least two parts: 1) Those components of decentralization which do not lead to this problem and 2) those components which may lead to this problem.

This simple typology could then, with a bit of nudging, probably yield some new leverage points.

A question like, "what is the _most decentralized_ platform which does _not seem to have this problem_ and what are its characteristics" could also probably help.

We are just getting started with decentralization in many ways, so there may also be analogs in e.g. economics or even games/sports that could be overlaid to improve our optics.

(It'd be neat if we could be really persistent with our decentralization aims as a community and make visible, helpful progress against previous conceptions of the pitfalls)

FrozenVoid• 8 years ago

You all miss one important advantage small sites have over the media giants: Attention economy for giant sites allocates zero to nothing share for new content creators, smaller content creators occupy proportionally more space because the userbase is smaller. Its much easier to get to top 1000 or top 10k when there much less users, regardless of quality or talent. This means more representation in search results, categories, related videos,etc.

godzillabrennus• 8 years ago

They raised 53,100 Euro.

The article says: “Online since March 2018 in a beta version, the project should definitely take off by October, based on the money raised.”

Quite the confidence being exhibited with such little funding.

stevefan1999• 8 years ago

Is there any regulations in PeerTube?

PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

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