PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube

by doener • 21 days ago

680 352 21 days ago

github.com

ekjhgkejhgk• 20 days ago

Does it allow streaming?

serendipty01• 20 days ago

Docs:

https://docs.joinpeertube.org/use/create-upload-video#publis...

https://docs.joinpeertube.org/admin/configuration#live-strea...

mxuribe• 20 days ago

I'm not affiliated with peertube...but yes it does enable/support streaming: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube#video-streaming-even-...

EGreg• 20 days ago

This does: https://safebots.github.io/Safecloud

I designed it in order to stream videos and get paid without worrying about getting deplatformed

Two weeks ago it was covered in a respected security publication: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/06/19/safecloud-browser...

It's coming out soon, but if you're adventurous, you can try it on GitHub already.

Edit: I posted it on HN right now as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48763565

alashow• 20 days ago

You forgot to say the magic words (shameless plug)

polonbike• 20 days ago

Yes. But a click on the link will provide a more detailed answer.

pocksuppet7• 20 days ago

PeerTube has some interesting technology with the P2P sharing between users who watch at the same time. But with these kind of projects I think there are unfortunately social factors that impact their success as well as technical factors.

It's one thing to put a <video> element on a HTML page (or implement video over webtorrent), it's quite another to make people actually watch it instead of their TikTok feed.

manusartifex123• 20 days ago

yeah video social media is way ahead with algorithms and content. I still think they need to exist and keep pushing for this idea

an0malous• 20 days ago

The P2P stuff will take off once AI slop is done destroying the current web, like a new ecosystem emerging out of the carcass of a dead whale

jjk7• 20 days ago

No, unfortunately P2P's glory days are behind us. Shame, because it was a really cool technology.

BHSPitMonkey• 20 days ago

On the contrary, I worry about the ability of these grassroots user-generated content distribution systems to withstand the barrage of generated slop uploaded by armies of autonomous agents. Fighting it off is an asymmetric battle that makes it increasingly hard to distinguish the legitimate users trying to share their work.

duxup• 20 days ago

It reminds me of the other social media type experiments, I applaud their efforts but the underlying technology just isn’t a huge selling point to viewers compared to the actual content.

orphereus• 20 days ago

Does it have good content? I explored it a bit in the past, but was a bit underwhelmed with content I could find there.

Edit: in the past

Avamander• 20 days ago

If you find those few instances that have those few uploaders that interest you, the content can be good.

However it does certainly suffer from the fact that all federated instances can't pull in videos from other platforms in some reproducible way (so that all instances would be able to serve the same content).

I'm sure some YouTubers would allow mirrors if they didn't have to pick an instance and keep it running.

RobotToaster• 20 days ago

Last time I tried it the federation was whitelist based, that is you could only follow people on instances added by the admin of your instance. This made content discovery difficult.

someonebaggy3• 20 days ago

It's not a platform, it's server-side software for creating a platform.

thinkingtoilet• 20 days ago

My recent experience with PeerTube was to click on the OpenMW released video and the video didn't load. Is that a regular occurrence on PeerTube?

raphinou2• 20 days ago

I am currently recording tutorial videos for an open source project. It's produced fully with Foss software (on Linux, obs, kdenlive) and about an open source project, so I wanted to host it with peertube (though YouTube might be used later on for its network effect, it was easier to publish with peertube as yt required an video of me and my ID). It's going fine until now. I don't host peertube myself though, I use an existing instance, and embed the videos in the website.

It was a really good experience, so I'll continue that way.

If you want to check out the videos: https://www.asfaload.com/videos/

dvngnt_3• 20 days ago

With adblocker enabled: error loading dynamically imported module: https://exquisite.tube/client/standalone/videos/assets/peert...

dvngnt_3• 20 days ago

Toggling ubo allowed the videos the load

CM30• 20 days ago

It's a promising system, and I'd probably use it over a non-federated video hosting system if I wanted to run a video hosting site of some kind.

Yet it's currently hard to find a real usecase for it, since neither the content you want nor audience is there on PeerTube at the moment. If you're interested in open source software or data privacy you might find something here or there, but topics like gaming, music, sports or movies are very much underserved on the platform at the moment, and get almost no attention from viewers.

For example, I recently did a test search and found a let's play for the Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. The videos had something like 3-5 views on PeerTube, and about 10-15 times that on the creator's YouTube channel.

It's the same issue as on Mastodon and Lemmy to be honest, except exaggerated. If the majority of topics aren't well represented on these platforms, then the general public won't use them. And if the general public won't use them, then the creators that would bring the general public over won't use them either.

They need to figure out a way to encourage people outside of the 'hardcore tech nerd raised on Usenet' audience to use these platforms.

karmakurtisaani3• 20 days ago

Lemmy is pretty ok actually. The lack of big user base is more of a feature than a bug.

organsnyder• 20 days ago

I've found the same with Mastadon. It has a pre-eternal-September feel to it.

al_borland• 20 days ago

Has it normalized? When I first tried Lemmy it was mostly communists talking about communism. Then after some Reddit drama it seemed to be a bunch of people complaining about Reddit.

I generally like smaller sites, but those topics weren’t exactly engaging for me.

BeetleB5• 20 days ago

Any communities (subreddit equivalents) you would recommend?

WarmWash7• 20 days ago

Creators get 60% of youtube's ad revenue from youtube.

What does Peertube pay?

There is your answer. If people want good stuff, there needs to be money flowing to the source of it. The internet desperately needs to shed this "everything good is totally free" mindset, because what it actually manifests as is "I love taking without the requirement of giving".

dylan604• 20 days ago

Not really sure how people need to be explained this, but for whatever reason, this most basic of information is seemingly skipped over. Even if peertube wants to pay 65%, that's just a bigger percentage of nothing.

zelphirkalt3• 20 days ago

The matter of compensation or donation can be handled completely separately. Creators can be supported on other platforms like Liberapay, Patreon, Kofi, and many creators are supported that way.

If we are talking about clickbait and making money from getting unwanted ads in people's faces, no thank you we don't need more of that.

paxys3• 20 days ago

Online video sharing doesn't have to exclusively mean professional "creators" who make content with hollywood-like budgets and expect massive returns. There are 100+ million accounts regularly uploading on Youtube and only around 2-3 million of them are in the partner program. The overwhelming majority get nothing.

kulahan3• 20 days ago

I’d prefer 60% of millions and millions of viewers over 200% of the 8 people on peertube. Percentages aren’t that important here.

ndriscoll18• 20 days ago

What an absolutely bizarre thing to write in response to a link to a completely free software project with 541 contributors. Here you have hundreds of people who are exactly giving away highly skilled work for free.

aembleton4• 20 days ago

Peertube pays 100%

bobbob1921• 20 days ago

I agree this is a real issue, however hopefully a solution is that creators will upload their videos to both sites (ie YouTube is their primary but also upload to peertube at the same time) which is pretty easy to do and eventually a site like peer tube might reach that critical mass with enough content

pocksuppet7• 20 days ago

FOSS server software shouldn't be seen as a platform. It should be seen as software that can be used to create a platform. Federation makes it technically a platform but just barely. Mastodon is barely a platform - mastodon.social is, and kolektiva is a different one.

PeerTube is software you could use to make a video streaming website like Nebula.

tastyfreeze• 20 days ago

To me the ideal use of PeerTube would be if studios adopted it as their publishing platform. Publish to their instance, syndicated globally. But, they are so hardcore on licensing that they will never adopt a platform that doesn't have complete control over where their media is distributed. The lack of a method for monetizing videos on PeerTube is also like the black mark for a video platform. But, the maintainers of PeerTube are ideologically opposed to monetization lest the toxin of advertisements taint the platform.

The legal landscape of media publishing is filled with antiquated deals from broadcast days for regional control. That has changed marginally with the adoption of streaming.

https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/1586#issuecomm...

squeegmeister• 20 days ago

I.e, network effects are hard to overcome

ndriscoll18• 20 days ago

You don't need (or likely even want, c.f. "eternal September") the general public. You just need your discussion group. e.g. if you want discussion of mathematics from world renowned experts like Terence Tao or Tim Gowers, you would use Mastodon.

frollogaston2• 20 days ago

Supposedly there's a button to wholesale import your YouTube channel to PeerTube and keep syncing after, wonder if that's easy/reliable enough for people to do it just cause.

BeetleB5• 20 days ago

Yet it's currently hard to find a real usecase for it, since neither the content you want nor audience is there on PeerTube at the moment.

The same use case as Youtube in its early years.

You upload a video, and send your friends a link (or post/embed on your blog).

That's good enough. It's totally OK if search is not useful.

Of course, the elephant in the room is the cost to run one of these servers...

zuzululu• 20 days ago

is it bulletproof ? I don't think peertube has fixed that massive legal liability to the "seeders"

same situation that bitorrent found itself in

blooalien• 20 days ago

If you only seed videos you have full legal rights to (creative commons [as long as you follow the license terms properly], public domain, or videos you personally created yourself, therefore own all rights to outright), then where's the worry? If you choose to seed copyrighted videos, well then that's all on you to handle the legality of (or lack thereof) I'd suppose... :shrug:

Raed667• 20 days ago

It is unfortunate that in french « peer » reads as « pire » which translates to « worse-tube »

gausswho• 20 days ago

Snarky lemma: In French, is the trend of things going worse to worse?

dewey2• 20 days ago

It's developed by a french company, so that confusion can't be that critical.

astrobe_• 20 days ago

Let's go for "PearTube" then.

mywittyname5• 20 days ago

PèreTube. Just videos about golf, lawn care, cars, and Fox News clips.

PearTube (PoireTube) would just have the Fox News clips.

bigfishrunning• 20 days ago

Pierre-tube

jesse_dot_id6• 20 days ago

I like the idea of all of these federated services but why does the UX always feel like an afterthought when it is the most important factor for adoption?

cosmic_cheese• 20 days ago

Same reason why the Linux desktop often suffers on the UX/UX front: people naturally drawn to these projects tend to lean heavily technical, and highly technical circles have a bad habit of driving out less technical contributors through devaluation of their work and lack of agency within the project among other issues.

That sort of work also tends to be less well-compensated than that of SWEs which makes it more important to be paid for work (which most FOSS project cannot do).

StableAlkyne• 20 days ago

UX work is often also a lot heavier and more subjective than the plumbing.

I might open a pull request to support some new video code, and that might only require a few dozen lines over a few files. That's easy to review, and it either works or it doesn't. Worst case they say "our convention is to register codecs as a subclass of X class, but you subclassed Y class" or something equally straightforward.

Let's say instead I wanted to change the workflow to register an account. Now I'm changing a bunch of JavaScript, CSS, templates, I'm adding pages, and I also need to update the backend. Even if someone is that into frontend work, it might take forever to even get reviewed by the maintainers because it's a massive PR.

Plus, now we've moved into subjectivity land: "I'm used to the old workflow," (because they designed it) "The last one was really easy" (for an engineer), "I think we should focus on the backend before we work on the UI," "I don't like this font because the license isn't free as in freedom" etc.

Even if you just mockup something on Figma or whatever, unless you're a maintainer it's probably going to just get ignored as a feature request. Because there's also the psychological aspect of basically being told that the UI you wrote is implicitly bad, if you're the maintainer reviewing the mockup.

jollymonATX• 20 days ago

Maybe some devs in OSS are married to their horrid idea of how things should work?

palata• 20 days ago

Not that I disagree, but I find it a bit harsh.

I know many developers who make at least some open source contributions, be it to an existing project or by open sourcing their own.

It has never, ever happened to me that a UI/UX person opened a PR saying "here, I made a logo for your project because I know how".

I think that there is a cultural thing, where UI/UX people don't consider that they have to work for free on the Internet, and software developers have a tendency to believe they should, "for their CV" or something.

account427• 20 days ago

Or maybe there is no universally better UX and people who work for free want to create what works for themselves and not some top down designers vision. After all most mainstream software completely ignores the needs of power users.

flaburgan• 20 days ago

Do you have precise suggestion of what to improve? I'm genuinely interested.

Jtarii• 20 days ago

Is it possible to just vaguely gesture at everything?

The spacing of every component feels wrong, the font choices are off, the text is too small, there is way too much white space, the "other video" section looks like its just jammed off to the side. The overall feel of the website is very amateurish.

jesse_dot_id6• 20 days ago

Yeah, it's pretty simple. When I go to YouTube.com, I have access to all of the videos on that platform, sorted based on what I'm subscribed to and other things like what I watch. The first thing I see are videos. I'm off to the races.

When I go to https://joinpeertube.org, I'm met with a double hero section that tells me about PeerTube, which is ultimately meaningless to 99% of the population.

When I get to actual content on that page, it's not an aggregate of all of the most popular videos across the federation, it's a description of the types of videos you can find on federated sites with links to the sites and not video embeds. You're telling me on the front page that I have to do legwork to find the videos I want to watch. You're already not competitive. You already lose.

Creators go where users go. If you don't build the platform to attract users, you will not get the volume of content that is required to hold people's attention. There's a reason why people come to YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News, Reels, etc. There are almost no clicks between the user and the content, and the content is plentiful.

Every time I try to use PeerTube, I have to try to find where to find the videos. As someone who's been chronically online since 1995, it's not that big of a deal. I can find them eventually. But that UX sucks, even for me, so it's probably utterly untenable for the vast majority of casual users.

You are trying to compete with slot machines by inventing a machine that makes the user read a bunch of stuff between each pull of the lever. It's not super difficult to see why that is a competitive disadvantage.

underlipton2• 20 days ago

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48764717

You say that you're genuinely interested, but chances are that any given maintainer is not. Willingness to actually listen to UI/UX critique is what separates the Blenders from the GIMPs.

bmn__• 19 days ago

Look at the installation instructions. <https://docs.joinpeertube.org/install/any-os> They are very onerous. Yes, I've seen worse, but the ratio between manual labour in service of non-essential complexity and the provided value is still quite bad.

Peertube covers the enterprise use case, but makes unreasonable demands from hobbyists, single users, tinkerers. Kids, gather around and learn from the Peertube design mistakes that an experienced and well-meaning software designer would refuse to subject his users/operators to. Why is this important? Because the number of hobbyist operators is much greater than the number of enterprise operators, given the intended target audience of people who are interested in decentralisation and federation. Peertube engineers and product managers should sit down with the intention to make a smart market move, and expend the next half month of effort to optimise for the majority of operators who make up the long tail, not the minority, so that hurdles to entry are demolished and the stated goal shown on the homepage of "community-owned" becomes attainable for many more people than is the case right now. The resulting network effect would be tremendous.

1. Packaging. Peertube is not packaged by the major players. <https://repology.org/project/peertube/versions> Real-life experience shows that this is almost always because of a circumstance which frustrates a distro packager. Other NPM-conformant libraries and software are packaged nearly automatically, there is good support in the distros to create specfile/RPM package, control file/Deb package, etc. from an Nodejs library tarball with just one command. Peertube must investigate why it is so exceptional and difficult to package and demolish the hurdles.

2. Configuration. Peertube must as the installation step make effective an usable configuration that has some sensible defaults, or perhaps auto-configure at install time or run time. A user should be able to install the software (from a distro package, or a git checkout/unpacked tarball and build step), run it, and immediately use it. It is okay when some features are not working until configured. It is not okay for a software to refuse to work altogether until each and every operator spends time and brain power to figure out what are essential configuration options and what are not, and make decisions about them. The reason why I say it is not okay is because this is a clear abdication of responsibility from the Peertube software devs and an externalising of mental burdens onto the many Peertube operators.

3. Database. Peertube should work with Sqlite by default. An enterprise user can configure PostgreSQL additionally when the need arises.

4. Web server. Peertube should work with the Node.js Web server (possibly express.js or a work-alike) by default. An enterprise user can configure Nginx additionally when the need arises.

5. Cache. Peertube should work with a simple file system cache or no cache at all by default. An enterprise user can configure Redis additionally when the need arises.

BeetleB5• 20 days ago

It'd help if you explain the problems you see in the UX.

I picked a random instance and played a video - did not see any problems.

And Youtube: I've hated their UX since they launched. It shouldn't be hard to make something with better UX than Youtube.

timbit42• 17 days ago

Yeah, form is the most important factor. Function isn't necessary./s

matt_lo• 20 days ago

Random idea…

1. Chunk one inside a YT video 2. Chunk two inside a TikTok video 3. Chunk three on an X thread

And then just post the manifest somewhere that can be read by a client, that then pulls the data in (video, doc, anything)

Obv, not meant for speed or good UX, but if we’re going down the route of decentralization, we can probably leverage social platforms to host chunks of data.

hungryhobbit• 20 days ago

Stupid question: when people inevitably use this for pirate content, and the feds try to shut the service down ... what's the plan?

dewey2• 20 days ago

Someone is still hosting the content and paying for resources just like with every other service distributed or not so it doesn't really add anything new to the equation.

rpgbr2• 20 days ago

The feds will go after the instance admin that is sharing pirate content.

Gigachad3• 20 days ago

Isn't the design of peertube that you can view videos originally uploaded by other instances? So unless you decide to not federate, you are responsible for every video on every instance.

paxys3• 20 days ago

They can't shut down the service because there is no single service. They can go after individual servers, and that is fine. The admin is responsible for what happens on their server.

dymk5• 20 days ago

Why would an admin run a server if they might have the feds knocking at their door? Sure, people might run nodes that host only their content, but they sure are disincentivized from running any sort of shared service.

This is the same problem as TOR exit nodes and why 3 letter agencies run most of them.

treyd• 20 days ago

The plan is the same as it always has been. It's no different than running an open FTP server.

busymom0• 20 days ago

I am gonna guess it's similar to torrenting and seeding?

GodelNumbering• 20 days ago

Youtube has been incredibly frustrating for many many reasons and is evidently evil in many axes now. We really need competition in video hosting.

WarmWash7• 20 days ago

Then start loading ads.

Youtube's biggest threat ever died in the cradle because they foolishly thought users would volunteer money to them.

No one with capital and capability looks at youtube, looks at youtube's audience, and says "Yeah, 30-40% ad-blocking and 4.5% paying for premium, these are the people I want to build services for!".

mywittyname5• 20 days ago

Those ad-blocked viewers are important, which is why YT doesn't actually crack down on them.

Those are the people who will happily go to an alternative product. And while that product might start as a pirate YouTube, the one that nabs 30% of YT's traffic can certainly make a pivot to legit. If you're a content creator whose audience is mostly in that group, you're likely to start posting content directly on the competitor's site.

I'm guessing OP had their account banned for using a tool like yt-dl too aggressively. Then again, doing that does give a warning.

sleepybrett2• 20 days ago

He was on premium, paid for ad blocker.

xfeeefeee• 20 days ago

I am still a bit upset that I got banned without even a warning. I tried to adhere to policies and figured if anything was wrong, I'd get a warning at least, and then I'd know better what the limits are. Unfortunately there is little recourse and even less feedback.

Even more annoying is that it terminates your YouTube account entirely, so now I can't even login to use it. And I was a premium subscriber, too!

The best thing about YouTube is their agreements with rights holders to allow music and revenue sharing easily, which makes it very simple for creators and remixers etc to not get their stuff removed via DMCA.

pocksuppet7• 20 days ago

The problem is that YouTube isn't just a video hosting platform. We have many of those. The problem is that YouTube is a business platform that lets you makes money from your business, as long as your business is mainly comprised of publishing videos. No amount of open-source software quality can replicate thousands of dollars of ad money flowing into your pocket. It's like making a 3D-printable plan of an Indian restaurant, it can't ever become an actual Indian restaurant.

Small or hobby creators, who aren't making money anyway, could use small platforms - but then they forfeit their chance to ever become big and get that money - at best they could become big and not get that money.

numpad0• 20 days ago

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

djaro13• 20 days ago

As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization.

I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch. This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram. Even a decent 20-minute video can easily take 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor.

I have a pretty small channel (~100K subscribers) with no employees and relatively low upkeep costs (a few hundred dollars a month), and even I could not make this work if I didn't get at least $500-$1,000 per video on average, since it just takes so much time and money.

Most channels with more than a million subscribers are likely founders working 60-80 hour weeks with multiple full-time employees supporting them. You cannot do that in the hopes of viewers donating $5 here and there.

And yes, there are people who make content for free - most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video. And the difference between a million views and a hundred is 10,000x. You cannot create a platform without big users.

I think any real competitor to YouTube nowadays would have to be backed by a big corporation that can pay big creators million-dollar deals to make the switch. Otherwise it's just dead in the water.

ktallett2• 20 days ago

Your issue is assuming that this is trying to replace YouTube for those who wish to try and make money from this. I suspect this is much more closer to a Google videos or YouTube back in the day which was pretty much just random videos, plus lots of conferences on there (which don't get enough views to monetize). This can easily replace that and is something I would support. YouTube hasn't always been monetising and it is good if we have a competitor against it.

djaro13• 20 days ago

It's not about people "trying to make money", it's about viewers wanting to see high quality videos.

High quality videos just cost a lot of money and labor to produce. There is simply no way around this. Any platform which doesn't let creators monetize effectively will be stuck with what people produce in their free time. Which will essentially always be worse, because the competitors will have creators with actual budgets and time to work.

infamia5• 20 days ago

You can publish to both and even better your own domain that simply points to your video hosting provider. Long term you want to own your distribution channel as much as possible, while using YouTube as your lead generation tool to drive true believers to your site and premium distribution channel not owned by YouTube. Otherwise, you will always be subject to platform risk via YouTube's whims which has destroyed many content creators. That's the long term winning play IMO and it doesn't preclude tools like FreeTube.

mywittyname5• 20 days ago

Realistically, how many viewers will be retained should YT shut the OP down? Right now, that number rounds to 0. Practically speaking, YT is free internet video streaming for long-form videos on the US market.

Nobody is going to go to OP's personal site to watch videos. They are going to fire up YT and eat what the algorithm feeds them.

The reason PeerTube and Nebula are important is it provides the potential for a true alternative destination for people looking for videos. Once these platforms have an enough content to draw an audience naturally, then content creators will be able to survive a post-YT world.

For people like the OP, it's probably best to follow the model video games do with DRM. Post on YT first, to get the ad revenue, then repost on other platforms after some time to build up an alternative subscriber base. Presumably, in-video sponsorships will pay for these views as well, even if there's no direct ad-sense like revenue model.

dymk5• 20 days ago

Alright, you're hosting on FreeTube (paying for hosting & bandwidth costs) - how are you making money? Most YouTubers don't want to run their own ad network or sell a physical product. Sponsors make deals conditional on YouTube engagement metrics.

squarefoot• 20 days ago

You can publish to both and even better your own domain that simply points to your video hosting provider.

That one is likely the best use case while one monetizes on YT waiting for FreeTube to gain more popularity. Worth also for keeping a safer online accessible backup in case things go south with the YT channel being taken down for any reason, be it bogus copyright claims or else. What I'm not sure of though is how long until Google changes YT rules to disallow linking or even mentioning competing, or perceived as such, services. Companies always do that: I'm a Ebay user since 2008, 100% feedback both as seller and customer, hundreds of positives not a single negative or neutral in 18 years, but a while ago Ebay in their infinite wisdom blocked a listing of mine because I added the links of the documentation needed to use the device I was selling; no way to appeal successfully or have it restored, they evidently either used a monkey or AI to detect what they identified as an attempt to contact the customer outside of Ebay, for a €30 item nonetheless. Years ago they didn't enforce such idiotic limitations, so I wouldn't put any trust on YT to remain consistent with their current rules.

kulahan3• 20 days ago

People don’t really want another step in the already arduous process of making videos - especially when the return on investment will be $0. This website will die off in a couple years and everyone who wastes time on it will be worse off for it.

You need to build a product so good that my statement above sounds INSANE. Not just “I think he’s wrong” but “dude absolutely no way. Everyone will want this. Are you stupid?”

And this is not that product.

Edit: yeah. I was curious so I went searching for ASMR videos. The default search brought some (terrible-looking) ones up, but half of them were in French? I sorted by views instead, and even though I literally only searched for “ASMR”, there were no longer any ASMR videos near the top of the results. For something trying to compete with YouTube, this is a very mid experience. Nobody is going to waste time migrating.

lanthissa4• 20 days ago

long term he doesn't want his own distribution though. youtube offers you new viewers constantly. peertube only makes sense if it has a viewerbase and an ad network, and at hte point we're back to google but they're going to pay more since they have a larger user base and more ads which means their monetization rate is going to be much higher.

disrupting youtube is super hard, you basically need to bring your own audience from something else to do it, or have a platform already existing that you expand into the us.

ElProlactin2• 20 days ago

Long term you want to own your distribution channel as much as possible, while using YouTube as your lead generation tool to drive true believers to your site and premium distribution channel not owned by YouTube.

This reads like MBA advice but the reality is not that simple. For a variety of reasons, relatively few people have the ability to produce durable revenue over the long term by pushing their YouTube audience to owned platforms.

The most successful YouTubers get a lot of attention but the reality is that outside of the 1%, there is no "long term winning play" for most of these people. The average YouTuber who finds some success building an audience tries to milk it for as long as they can before they're supplanted by new faces, they burn out, their category loses appeal, algorithms change, etc.

newsomix9xl2• 19 days ago

Well said. So do prepublish to peer tube post it to my domain and then post to YouTube and link back to my domain ?

Does the order matter as long as I hit both?

Would having bonus content on the peertube version make sense ?

Or even more extreme do I want the YouTube bid to be a teaser to the peertube version?

the_cat_kittles• 20 days ago

its fine for the genre of video thats just someone narrating while filming with there phone and almost no editing. if someone is doing something interesting, i prefer this to something well produced, its more candid and relatable, and lacks the artifice most projects designed for youtube have

deepsun• 20 days ago

Honestly I found that the videos I come to Youtube to watch are either personal, non-monetized hobby video, or just a head talking to camera.

dymk5• 20 days ago

That's great, but you represent 1% of viewing patterns.

paxys3• 20 days ago

There are 100M+ channels uploading on YouTube regularly and only 2-3M of them are monetized. Not everyone wants to upload videos on the internet with the explicit goal of making money. Professional creators are a very tiny minority, and a platform like YouTube will always be better suited for them (your "small" channel with 100K subscribers is actually in the top 0.5-0.1% of YouTube). There is no reason for Peertube to go after this specific demographic.

dinkleberg2• 20 days ago

Yet those 2-3M channels get the lions share of the views. It is a two-sided system. And if you want to attract viewers, you need what they want to watch. Looking on the front page of peertube the most viewed video I see has 29 views. If I sort by hot, the "hottest" video has 692 in a month. If the intent is to publish videos to have people watch it, PeerTube is clearly not the place to do that.

djaro13• 20 days ago

The problem is that big creators have many subscribers, because they're the only ones making videos people want to watch.

If a channel has 100 subscribers - (except if it's a brand new channel) - it's because people saw the videos and decided, no, I don't want to see this, I'm not going to subscribe.

Put all of those people on a platform together, you will just end up with a platform with more creators than viewers.

satvikpendem4• 20 days ago

Then there's even less reason to host outside of YouTube, why would I want to host a server that costs money if I'm not making any money from the videos? It works for those who want to own their content and verify its safety, or for ideological reasons such as supporting OSS but I'm not sure why the average user would care about PeerTube.

ndriscoll18• 20 days ago

It doesn't have to be for your use-case. e.g. KDE has their own instance, as does Blender. It would perhaps be a good fit for MIT to host their OCW videos, or for Khan Academy to host their material, or people sharing conference talks, or governments, or quick home DIY videos, or vlogs and idle musings, or hobbyists showing/discussing their thing they like, etc. Videos that are meant to help people to better themselves or collaborate fit better on a platform that doesn't try to be a constant sales funnel.

treesknees• 20 days ago

There are many people who believe everything must be a grind to get rich. I wish more people stepped back and did things online because they were fun or educational, not because it was monetized.

mvdtnz3• 20 days ago

Virtually all of the content I watch on youtube does not fall into this category. The content I watch is a mixture of raw footage, a guy speaking to a camera with minimal editing for 10 minutes (think Rick Beato, for those who know him), edited down footage of people working (pool cleaning guys, chefs, etc) or people playing music.

Frankly I wouldn't care at all if all of your over-produced thumbnail-bait disappeared overnight.

djaro13• 20 days ago

This is just a great example of people who aren't in content creation fundamentally not understanding the ecosystem.

This isn't about "over-produced thumbnail-bait". This is about all high-quality media.

You mention Rick Beato. Do you really think Rick Beato sits down behind his laptop to edit his own videos? He has nearly 6 million subscribers and produces around 10 long-form videos per month. He has at the very least an editor (probably full-time) and a thumbnail designer (part-time), and I assume also a manager who sets up brand deals and contacts musicians for his interviews. He also records his videos on expensive cameras inside his well-lit studio, which also isn't cheap. It's very difficult to tell how much YouTube channels generate but I wouldn't be surprised if the Rick Beato channel is at this point a >$20K/month operation.

Edit: Also, do you really think Rick Beato making "The Secret Weapon Behind Dr Dre" or "The Real Reason Music is Getting Worse" is not clickbait? It's just clickbait, but for people like you. Part of good advertising is making people feel like they're not even being sold anything.

slg3• 20 days ago

You say your target is $500-$1000 per video and let's assume you do videos weekly. That would mean your optimistic goal is $4500 a month. Let's say you create a voluntary donation subscription at $5 per month for people willing to support your work. That means you would need 900 true fans, patrons, or whatever other label you want to give them to hit your $4500 goal. That's a 0.9% conversion rate from subscribers to donators. Doesn't seem that impractical when looked at in those terms. This is often the default monetization model for small podcasts because RSS feeds don't have built in ad revenue the way YouTube does.

satvikpendem4• 20 days ago

At that point I'd just make a Patreon (that offers various benefits including exclusive videos not on YouTube) while also monetizing via YouTube ads and sponshorships.

Auracle2• 20 days ago

Voluntary donations are practically impossible. Sure, you get the odd straggler, but it’s so, so rare.

I have the most popular NSFW LoRA (actually a LoKR but whatever) for at least one major text to image model on CivitAI.

Once it blew up I made a Patreon, maybe 6 months ago? I get $50 a month from it. I doubt that even covers my electricity costs for training.

Podcasts and videos do have the advantage of being able to ask for people to donate with every podcast/video, but people just aren’t inclined to give their money away when they don’t have to. It’s a rare trait.

add-sub-mul-div• 20 days ago

Maybe the purpose of Youtube going forward is to be a quarantine for content whose purpose is to be monetized.

djaro13• 20 days ago

If YouTube becomes a quarantine for high-quality content, then it will also become a quarantine for viewers.

the fundamental issue a lot of people here don't seem to get is that high quality videos that people want to watch are expensive to create. Besides the huge amount of high-skill labor, there's also just production costs, software, equipment, upkeep, etc.

At the very least, ignoring all other costs, a single person making good videos somewhat regularly is a full-time job. People who make entertainment also need to eat and pay rent, the money has to come from somewhere.

forgotaccount3• 20 days ago

most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video.

I get your point, but many of them fail to hit some hundreds of views due in large part to all of the large, professional channels that are spending hundreds of man hours as week producing content.

If the production was less professional do you think total viewership hours would drop significantly, or would it be distributed across more channels?

no-name-here2• 20 days ago

Is the argument that such a world is possible to create, where the audience does not have the choice of the ‘professional’ looking content so can't choose it?

j45• 20 days ago

Having your own distribution has it's benefits as a fall back or alternatives, in addition to publishing elsewhere like youtube.

The cost of creating and editing videos going to come way down, there's already ways to do it in the past few years.

fsddfsdfssdf2• 20 days ago

As a professional YouTuber

Well, there's your problem.

You want the numbers that come from mass consumption, which means catering to the lowest common denominator thus producing shit with gold plating while then complain the gold plating is bloody expensive.

Some people just are knowledgeable and want to share with the rest of us mortals like say someone like Terrence Tao. Putting someone like him on "YouTube" is a goddamn travesty. We need an alternative and yes, you won't make money and no, it's not for you then.

aembleton4• 20 days ago

which means catering to the lowest common denominator

At some point that becomes saturated, and you're better off catering to a niche that is poorly served.

butz3• 20 days ago

I heard that main source of income for some professional YouTubers are Patreon and sponsorships. Ad revenue is dead last and very unstable. Also, if you are building your business on single platform, which one day might decide that your content does not adhere to their rules - that's a high risk to take.

djaro13• 20 days ago

Sponsorships are definitely the highest if a youtuber actively engages in them, ad revenue vs patreon depends highly on if you have i.e. a small but highly active fanbase of core fans, versus a wider more general audience that you entertain a bit.

I think people should be more aware of the perverse incentive of YouTubers saying, "my guaranteed source of income is very little and unstable guys, I need you to also subscribe to my patreon" where - could YouTubers perhaps have a reason to act like their ad revenue is very little? In my experience, while ad revenue isn't great, for any decent-size YouTuber its still enough to live on and in any case it always stays a significant income stream.

izacus2• 20 days ago

Do you think those creators pay YouTube for bandwidth, storage and transcode servers? Where do you think money for that comes from?

Streaming video is very expensive, even in 2026 and ignoring that someone is paying the main business expense of those creators is not very honest.

whatever1• 20 days ago

This is exactly why TikTok won. It is so much cheaper to iterate ideas on 10” videos.

You make non interesting 20’ YT video? Well too bad your 80 labor hours & equipment time are lost.

boca_honey• 20 days ago

TikTok won? YouTube is significantly larger, with over 2.7 billion monthly active users compared to TikTok's 1.6 billion.

Even if you count TikTok's higher average watch time per user, YouTube's broader demographic more than makes up for it.

touristtam2• 19 days ago

As a side note 10-12 min is the ideal length for a non full feature documentary. I am growing tired of those 20+ minutes repeating and stretching the same topic without going into more depth.

bitwize2• 20 days ago

YouTubers are now blurring out women's cleavage.

Not bare breasts. Cleavage. Nearly all of Pamela Anderson's notable body of work would need to be censored to avoid risking loss of that precious, precious monetization. It's like fucking Iran.

And of course you can't say "die", "kill", "suicide", etc. You have to talk like a parody of 80s cartoon censorship—literally. (The neologism "unalive" came from Deadpool in an animated series called Ultimate Spider-Man, who realized he was in an animated show but thought it was 80s Saturday morning fare and constantly minced his intent to kill by saying he was going to "unalive" his target.)

Monetization has had a chilling effect on the kind of content people put on YouTube. I do not mourn its lack, at least on alternative video platforms.

signatoremo• 20 days ago

Where are you located? I'm looking as we speak at a bunch of YT videos of women with cleavage, or promoting fashion that involve stripping down to their underwear.

BrenBarn5• 20 days ago

As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization.

As a video watcher, the main issue I have with YouTube is the presence of monetization.

ShinyLeftPad15• 20 days ago

Because people are expected to spend their time, effort and money to provide content for you for free, of course. Seems like the only explanation.

nonameiguess• 20 days ago

Big corporations that pay big creators millions per production are just normal studios like Disney and Paramount and nowadays Netflix and Prime. YouTube is the competitor to that. No matter how professional you think of your operation, you're not Christopher Nolan or even BBC Earth and neither is anyone else whose primary distribution channel is YouTube.

Good examples of more or less "free" content that fits PeerTube are cited in other comments, though. Conference footage, MIT OCW, archival footage of any kind of live event. Productions where the work is in putting on the event in the first place. Holding the conference, creating a course, putting on some kind of skateboarding competition, whatever it might be. Incidentally filming it and uploading the footage costs next to nothing in comparison, isn't expected to drive revenue compared to the live attendance, and it doesn't make much difference to the viewers if the footage is terrible. Shitty quality Feynman lectures is still watching Feynman lecture. It was really cool, for a recent example, that somebody found and uploaded phone footage of Caitlin Clark's fabled scrimmage against the Iowa men's team from however many years ago. Nobody cares about the quality of the video or who filmed it. Likely nobody subscribed to whatever channel it first ended up on, but how cares? People who wanted to see a rare real world event would still have been able to find it and it cost nothing to the person who pulled out a phone and turned it on while that event was happening.

jonshariat• 20 days ago

Yeah reminds me of how Kick seems to be winning over the Twitch creators. Now Kick isn't a shining beacon by any means, its got gambling issues for one, but I do think this is one area the big companies are vulnerable in: Rev share.

If a new incumbent can raise some money, offer creators some money and a path to a higher cut than their competitors, they can win big.

djaro13• 20 days ago

I think this is the only way for new platforms to ever rise in this space.

A video sharing website is not a social media platform, it's a streaming platform. The real competitors to YouTube are not PeerTube or whatever, it's Netflix and HBO.

This is why Nebula also managed to find a niche and be relatively successful: the issue is not ads or a monthly subscription or something, the only problem is: people want to watch high-quality content. Find a way to get them high-quality content. If you cannot do that, everything else is meaningless. In Nebula's case, even a few high-profile YouTubers in the same niche uploading exclusives on a platform is better than a thousand nobodies uploading low effort content.

dotwack• 20 days ago

Really? Thats the main issue? What about when they upload child porn and some of it ends up on your computer and they break down your door and you spend the rest of your life getting bungholed by Darnel. I would rate that higher than monetary rewards.

Decentralized system rely heavily on how much you trust other humans, I do not, so I hear them.say Decentralized and I run.

sajithdilshan• 20 days ago

I was gonna say the same. Also copyrighted content like movies. In Germany you can easily get sued for hosting and distributing. That's why torrenting is quite unpopular there

fwip• 20 days ago

Darnel? Am I missing a reference?

ChuckMcM4• 20 days ago

Do you ever think about the fact that if you're making $500 - $1000 per video on average that means Google is making $5000 - $10,000 on each of your videos on average? I mean its working for you, and that's great. I am a student of information asymmetric markets and the whole 'Ad supported' business that Google runs on all of its properties is perhaps the largest one in the current time frame.

The point being that building a production company to produce videos is a known thing, Peertube is a distribution network, and historically this is a remarkable mirror of 'independent' theaters and 'studio owned' theaters. It was a characteristic of that time that the big studios would use their monoply power to force small studios to give them their work at a discount that allowed the studio to get most of the income. They made it just enough that the small studios didn't feel motivated to build a competitive system.

When I read your comment it struck me that perhaps "$500 - $1000 average per video" was the number Google has determined to be 'just enough'.

ShinyLeftPad15• 20 days ago

It says "at least"... on many channels there's videos with just a few views and videos with tons of views with much more than 10x difference

TechSquidTV• 20 days ago

Google splits with the creator 50-50. If you got paid $1000, so did Google. And given their hosting infrastructure, network, and other tools, I would say it's a miracle they don't charge to upload.

IncreasePosts2• 20 days ago

What Google makes is irrelevant to the content prouducer. What matters to them is what they could make on alternate platforms, and the answer is no where near that amount. The slice Google keeps is only relevant to Google and potential competitors who may try to move into the space.

rixed• 20 days ago

Understood your situation, but personnaly I'm not watching so much professional content on YT; actually, I'm not watching YT as much as I used to when the service was young and unprofessional.

What I want from such a platform is authenticity... and curation.

Scoundreller6• 20 days ago

That’s what I find silly about YouTube.

Through effective search, Google enabled mass deportalization. The best link would win. Your crappy but good blog about how to fix an issue could become top in the results.

Now YouTube favours entertainer-mechanic making subscribeable but generic videos instead of… the one specific to your vehicle by some gruff but knowledgeable mechanic.

Like, c’mon buddy, the bolt only comes off like that in the studio after 3 practice runs.

1vuio0pswjnm73• 20 days ago

"As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is lack of monetization."

As a computer user I see that as the main advantage

No third party intermediary

No advertising

Computer users need peer-to-peer options for sharing video with each other that do not use third party advertising companies, e.g., posing as "search engine" or "social media", to transfer the bits

Whether PeerTube works well, I do not know. I know that overlay networks I have tested work well enough

lanthissa4• 20 days ago

the 3rd party isn't an intermediary, youtube content is fantastic because it found a way to pay people to produce something for every niche, and reward the ones doing well with more viewers and more money.

ofc you would prefer high quality content delivered directly to you for free, because you're ignore the producers perspective.

djaro13• 20 days ago

The problem with this is that creating the content you watch costs a lot of money and labor.

As a user I would see a grocery store where everything is free as an advantage... utill the products inevitably run out and no food supplier is willing to stock the shelves for free.

1vuio0pswjnm73• 20 days ago

If YouTube was not an intermediary then it could not claim Section 230 immunity

https://compliancehub.wiki/section-230-the-backbone-of-the-i...

1vuio0pswjnm73• 20 days ago

I made a video today. It cost me nothing

There are some people to whom I'd like to send it

But I'm not uploading it to YouTube's servers

stonogo2• 20 days ago

this is the strongest endorsement of peertube I've seen so far

djaro13• 20 days ago

The strongest endorsement for PeerTube is that it cannot sustain creators and thus will only either 1) freeboot off of platforms that do or 2) be flooded by low effort slop?

cyberax• 20 days ago

Would you mirror your videos to something like Peertube if it included automated pay-per-view (via something like x402 API)?

lanthissa4• 20 days ago

this is exactly right, people dont realize that they're getting a great deal on youtube. if you want to disrupt youtube you need to do it by winning over the creators which is a difficult thing to do since no new platform can subsidize to the scale of what youtube offers already due to its size, the only ones who really could are meta since they have the ad network and users already to funnel to it, or another company willing to eat a loss for a long time. The issue with eating hte loss, is video is a pretty painful loss to eat compared to text, so why not go into every text market first for places like meta.

alex11382• 20 days ago

Great deal except when you get demonetized for partisan reasons

dvngnt_3• 20 days ago

I use adblocker for youtube but will still subscribe via pateron

anticorporate2• 20 days ago

I understand where you are coming from, and if monetization is your primary reason for being on a platform, it's likely that PeerTube is not for you, unless your videos help you move your own product or service.

That said, I'm also okay with there being platforms out there where monetization is difficult or impossible. I want there to be places where creators can get paid, but I am also nostalgic for a less commercial internet.

dharmatech• 20 days ago

As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization.

That's a feature, not a bug.

BeetleB5• 20 days ago

Here's my dilemma:

The Youtube experience has always sucked for me - right from the first year Youtube launched. I just don't like the interface, web site, layout, etc. It's why I didn't have a Youtube account until I needed to share a video with someone, and even then, I never log into it (so I don't follow[1], rate, etc).

And then over the last few years, the ad situation has gotten astronomically worse. I'm not exaggerating when I say that old school cable TV with its ads was a significantly better experience.

I do a search for something specific. I start clicking videos to see if it has the content I want. But very often, on my Roku or similar device, I won't be able to see anything of the video unless I watch 15-60s of ads.

Only to find out the video is not useful for me. Click next video. Repeat the pain.

I think this is what leads a lot of people to just plain hate Youtube. It's what leads me not to care if suddenly no one can make money on Youtube (even the folks I like). It's why I want Youtube to just die.

If they made the site much more pleasing, and found a way to allow 3rd party interfaces (while still serving ads), and weren't anywhere near as annoying with the ads, I'd like the platform.

Regarding monetization: For the folks who have well established viewers, and who make most of their money via embedded ads in the video, I don't think they'll lose anything by switching to Peertube - as long as the Peertube infrastructure can handle the load. The major fans will know where to find the content.[2]

The real problem with Peertube is discovery. How can a new content creator be noticed? And then how can they show accurate viewership numbers to get those sponsors?

[1] Well, I may follow via other means: Manually, or via RSS, etc.

[2] Incidentally, some of the "popular" content I watch on Youtube exclusively gets monetized via embedded ads. Youtube demonetized that whole category a while ago. So embedded ads is totally viable.

pojzon• 20 days ago

And there is Asmongold doing a video of him watching someone else making a video with commentary like “absolutely”, “outrageous”, “bold” and having it all monetized with literally ZERO effort.

So yea.. it takes a lot of effort -> if you are nobody.

For eatablished streamers just slapping something from stream on ytb is enough.

doublerabbit• 20 days ago

Why couldn't you post it after it's got its money worth?

Or is that the clause of YouTube "you must not post elsewhere"?

gneuron• 20 days ago

Easy solve; PeerTube should launch ads and the rev share with creators is 99% (platform take 1% fee to keep platform up)

doginasuit2• 20 days ago

This is a feature. The golden age of YouTube ended roughly around the time they made monetization more available.

doginasuit2• 19 days ago

To put a finer point on it, I recognize there are a lot of good creators on YouTube and I'm glad it can support their work. But the overall trend has been for the worse, at least for the target audience I belong to. The change in the average title card tells a story. I believe it would be fantastic if there was a competitor that captured the original motivation.

samrus• 20 days ago

You cannot do that in the hopes of viewers donating $5 here and there.

But then how does twitch work? Genuinely asking, whats the difference?

King-Aaron• 20 days ago

I miss old, grass-roots youtube. I used to be a 'youtuber' back in the very very early days where it was just a case of sharing yourself doing dumb things.

I completely get that it's your job now... But the fact it's become a job for people is probably why I don't like it so much anymore. With all the ads and such too, it's now just television. But worse.

trimethylpurine• 20 days ago

I guess you never used YouTube in the early days. It was a site for posting and watching random home made videos and recorded broadcasts. Just for fun. Revenue streams for creators came after Google bought it, I think. Along with the ads.

This might simply revive a platform that no longer exists. It might not be about paying creators or collecting ad revenue. It's peer to peer, after all.

PacificSpecific• 20 days ago

Thanks for the insight. Do you think something like nebula could ever be feasible?

vfclists• 20 days ago

Not everyone is a "professional Youtuber" like you, and that includes a lot of Youtube who upload videos without any expectation of income, for who Youtube is mainly a free video hosting service that also allows them to reach a wider viewership.

Abishek_Muthian• 20 days ago

Interesting, I thought the major issue with PeerTube was the high latency due the decentralized nature and that they don't have the backing of Google infrastructure.

What you state sounds more like a chicken and egg problem. You'll publish content only when there are enough viewers but there can be viewers only when you publish content.

Like others have said, There's not much effort to publish in both platforms; good way to hedge against the algorithmic risks.

nullbio• 20 days ago

Why can't they build an advertiser network into this?

jeffalyanak• 20 days ago

Monetization is the easy part, a plugin that adds advertisements, paid subscriptions, or some other form of monetization could easily be made if there was a demand for it.

The real barrier issue is that of network effect. There's simply (almost) no audience, which means there are (almost) no creators, which means there is (almost) no audience.

I've been publishing my videos on my own peertube instance for a while and I really do appreciate it as a platform, but I don't think that the technical aspects of it alone will ever be the key to its potential success.

sevenzero• 20 days ago

I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch.

This is something I always thought to be extremely funny. Producing videos is a hobby. If you made it your job, go figure out how to monetize your material yourself. Nobody prevents you from taking sponsorships.

customguy• 20 days ago

It would still be a great alternative for the original YouTube. The one with video replies and all that, that was basically just people video blogging at each other or into the ether.

And yes, there are people who make content for free - most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video.

Where is the "fail" though? Some of those videos take exactly as long to make is it does to watch them. If they don't get monetized (maybe for speaking normal English instead of saying "unalive" and "to grape"), then someone else doesn't make a lot of money from even the little effort it took them by showing ads [0] to people. If all you want to do is talk at a camera and maybe with some people, then all that is a plus.

[0] Speaking of ads, some of the stuff on youtube is wild. Like, honestly gross and disturbing to me.

If you are looking to make money of it, sure, starting with peertube only would be nonsense. If you just wanna make videos, do it! Upload the best ones to youtube and mention peertube, so you maybe get some audience. Then if you really get into it, and make better stuff, spend more effort than just "start record, say things, upload as is", you can upload everything to youtube, too. After having livestreamed the whole thing on Twitch, just to use every part of the buffalo.

protocolture• 20 days ago

As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization.

That's the main benefit. Monetised content, and the people who make it, is despicable.

and even I could not make this work if I didn't get at least $500-$1,000 per video on average, since it just takes so much time and money.

Have you considered getting a real job?

Most channels with more than a million subscribers are likely founders working 60-80 hour weeks with multiple full-time employees supporting them.

Putting them out of business would be a fantastic turn of events.

And yes, there are people who make content for free - most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video.

Cool and good.

I think any real competitor to YouTube nowadays would have to be backed by a big corporation that can pay big creators million-dollar deals to make the switch.

That would be like paying a malware company to move from windows to apple.

Induane• 20 days ago

That's the thing; not everything has to be or should be monetized. The thing I miss the most are the funny dumb amateur videos.

There are several YouTube channels I love; Folding Ideas, hbomberguy, Kurtis Conner, Contrapoints, etc... but I see those essentially as semi professional / professional variations on television. Once I got into their content via YouTube, YouTube of course drove me away with horrid vile ads, and I moved on to supporting those creators on Patreon.

And that's all good - the digital medium needs places like YouTube. But that doesn't mean there isn't a huge amount of value in the amateur unmonitized video landscape. Pairing those with some niche phpbb style forums was, for me, the last time I truly enjoyed the experience of actually being on the internet.

gloosx• 20 days ago

You cannot do that in the hopes of viewers donating $5 here and there.

But you can do that in hopes of youtube sharing a percentage of fluctuating ad revenue? Certain things can get you de-monetized, you can get strike-bombed, falsely accused of copyright infringement via automated systems, etc, and unless you are a very big channel owner, you will receive a minimal droplet of support likely involving no humans in the loop.

There are sustainable creators getting much more revenue by collecting direct subscription money from their patrons while providing exclusive or first-hand content to them which is then re-uploaded to youtube for reaching a wider audience. They can run their own integrated ad-campaings without google deciding what they are advertising or which content they can or cannot produce.

mariusor• 20 days ago

lack of monetization

I mean, when you spin your own instance, because frankly, that's what the best option if you're a content creator, you can put whatever ads and monetization strategies you want. So basically the full income that gets generated gets to you, instead of splitting it with some third party that invests minimal effort. Yes, you'll have to pay someone to maintain and upkeep the server, but assumedly the people that can make the change will take that cost into account.

a big corporation that can pay big creators million-dollar deals to make the switch.

I'm surprised by this. Isn't controlling your full production/distribution/revenue a good enough payback?

reorder9695• 20 days ago

Thr one solution I see to that is sponsorships, the number I've heard is they typically pay 10x the ad revenue of a video, and this wouldn't be affected by the platform, just the viewership numbers.

account427• 20 days ago

As a professional watcher, I consider the lack of monetization a feature. I'd much rather see genuine videos from amateurs than commercialized crap with sponsored segments and undisclosed sponsorships and product placement and filler to keep up release schedules and please like and subscribe and whatever other dark patterns commercially motivated video producers come up with on "free" platforms. And of course also without the ads the video platform adds on top of all that. Not everything needs to be a viable job.

touristtam2• 19 days ago

This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram

Low key shitting on other content creators? Some of IG content creator easily match professionalism you are describing. I know you are probably partially venting your frustration, but that doesn't paint you in a nice light.

FloatArtifact• 19 days ago

It's simple. If I want to support you, I buy your merchandise.

ksec• 19 days ago

this is the lack of monetization.

By charging it for content. Since HN doesn't like any form of Ads. /s

Sorry I have to write this out. But I am somewhat glad in the past 2 years HN has returned back to discussing monetization, money, business in a sane way.

nielsbot• 19 days ago

Seems advertising could be a third-party service on top of the video streaming service. Just like there are ad platforms that plugin to web pages. If that grows, you get your monetization.

kelvinjps10• 17 days ago

But isn't know most of the money they make from direct sponsors instead of adsense? I have seen a few creators putting their income sources and most of the money comes from direct sponsors instead of adsense. So if these sponsors would continue to sponsor them in other platforms, it can take YouTube monopoly away. The problem now is that those others video platform don't have the eyeballs as YouTube

pajtai• 20 days ago

The first thing I noticed is that clicking on "browse" does not allow browsing but requires search: https://joinpeertube.org/browse-content

butz3• 20 days ago

Personally, I find the lack of videos to watch on PeerTube a huge plus. I tremendously reduced my weekly video watching time and I don't feel like missing out on something important. My favorite instance is makertube.net, but I visit few others too.

aembleton4• 20 days ago

Thank you, I'd not come across makertube.net. Is there some website that collects all of these instances together? I thought peertube.tv would do that, but there are loads more content on makertube.net so clearly not.

butz3• 19 days ago

I think https://peerseek.video is sort of aggregator website, not sure how much instances it covers, though.

gargola_• 20 days ago

Is there any moderation? how long until it's filled to the top with nsfw stuff?

aembleton4• 20 days ago

I guess each instance does its own moderation. Peertube has been around for years and still no one watches it.

rbbydotdev• 20 days ago

Would be pretty incredible to see decentralized federated media individual accounts and aggregators implement the x402 payment protocol (https://x402.org) as a way for creators to get paid, and thus continue to create.

Im envisioning a spotify replacement. You could pay for your streams directly to artists or platform the artist hosts on. Allowing for a more free market of creators and consumers.

The 'Explore' part, would basically just be like Mastadon or Bluesky

frollogaston2• 20 days ago

I'm giving this an honest try to post some music I made, cause Google randomly banned me yesterday for "bot activity" and wants an appeal. I'm not mad or anything, just thinking they won't let me use YouTube anymore.

utopiah2• 20 days ago

Been running my instance for more than 5 years now, feel free to ask questions.

MiDu16• 20 days ago

How much does it cost you? what is your business model to substain it?

utopiah2• 20 days ago

I didn't estimate the cost but server-wise it's less than 30 EUR/month. What's demanding is transcoding but with the new architecture https://docs.joinpeertube.org/contribute/architecture#remote... there are ways to optimize, e.g. do nightly batch transcoding on a cheaper spot instances.

My business model is showcase and archival of my prototyping work. I'm the only account on my instance so there is no surprise with suddenly someone abusing the instance.

shevy-java• 20 days ago

I used it a few months ago but there was lag and things not working.

I keep on saying we need to eliminate Google for real. I mean it too. But the services NEED TO BE FLAWLESS if you want to have a chance against Google. I don't understand why people don't seem to understand it. Software can often be better. PeerTube's software was disappointing and really poorly implemented compared to Google. There is no way to win here that way against Google. That's not realistic.

someonebaggy3• 20 days ago

It's not possible for FOSS to compete with Google in Google's niche — try it and you'll see why. It's possible to find a different niche and expand there.

Animats2• 20 days ago

There are four functions here:

- Discovery (as in search)

- Monetization (as in ads)

- Hosting (as in storage)

- Playout (as in data distribution)

PeerTube only performs the fourth, and maybe the third. It's not a flooding distribution system like BitTorrent. It's just a way for a large number of people to play the same video without overloading a modest hosting server. Playout load is distributed amongst the watchers browsers.

I put videos in PeerTube, tech demos of various rendering tests. Works fine. No ad insertion, which is why I use PeerTube.

Peak view count is 2.3K.[1] Nobody is expected to discover them there. They're linked from various forums. Some are for a very tiny audience, such as "Second Life sim server EstablishAgentCommunication message bug", with 10 views, mostly from the devs who needed to see this.

Technically it works fine, but it's not going to displace YouTube. Unless, say, Taylor Swift decided to stream her wedding on it to avoid ad insertion.

[1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/7usCE3v2RrWK6nuoSr4NHJ

fortran77• 20 days ago

I've tried a few of these alternative sites, and it's just not a fun place to go find videos from interesting people working on projects, etc. A lot of unpleasant extremist videos, a lot of slop, with no good ability to filter out just what I want to see. Sure, YouTube has these too but I can manage to keep it at bay.

EatBroccoli• 20 days ago

It does have some ability to filter. I am subscribed to a few channels on the Makertube instance and regularly watch some videos there.

You can mute channels or entire federated instances so they don't appear in feeds or search results. It does get tiresome to always have to do this when you see unwanted video's, but they do stay gone, unlike Youtube's system of "Not Interested"/"Don't recomend this channel".

All in all i've been watching less Youtube lately and starting to watch some Peertube videos and finding the grassroots nature of it very refreshing.

rq1• 20 days ago

The main advantage of PeerTube and alike is that they keep the “professional content creators” and their crappy content away.

Because of their unique monetisation feature.

globalnode• 20 days ago

I wonder if peertube could be used as backend infra for a security camera system, the tech seems promising. Also with all these instances hosting their own content, what do they do to combat cgnat? do individuals need to upload to an instance that has a public ip at a bare minimum. And what about directory listings for content, users would expect to be able to browse available videos and then burrow down to instances that host them no?

nirui2• 20 days ago

Hasn't cared about PeerTube for a long time, but this software is getting really impressive. Maybe it's time to move towards the next step: getting publishers on board.

I could totally see myself hooked if I can watch news on it. Can someone from a proper news agency, such as BBC, DW, Reuters, NYT etc test the software and maybe make a pitch? If these agencies are hosting their own PeerTube instances, that would be a major win.

Gigachad3• 20 days ago

Publishers won't get on board until you can work out how to sort out advertising, paid subscriptions, and blocking ad blockers.

nirui2• 19 days ago

No, I mean just let them host the instance themselves, and they can decide to do whatever.

Many of these publishers already got a podcast/video publishing routine anyways and they just put ads directly in the podcast/video. I guess maybe it's not that hard for them to add another publishing channel.

Getting one of the proper news agencies on board is very beneficial for the PeerTube network, because currently there's not much good quality content on it. News videos maybe a good baseline to keep user engaged (as long as they're not too political).

If PeerTube is my software, I'll probably pay my own money to get the agencies on board. I'll even host their site myself if it needs to (at least for the first few years, to demonstrate the value of the software).

ButlerianJihad• 20 days ago

I've been deeply invested in YT and YT Music for about 20 years now. This month I was forced to cancel my subscription. They recently jacked up the price and really ruined the apps. I can't even understand how to operate the apps anymore; nobody will document it; nobody will support them. So I'm unable to monetarily support an unsupported app ecosystem.

Sadly I cannot leave the platform. The network effect is far too strong. PeerTube, and Vimeo, and Spotify are all well and good, like any other, but the network effect means that YouTube is where the channels are. The official channels that I follow and watch every day, for news, for updates, for the most important things in my hobby and my daily life. I cannot simply stop watching those things.

Call me an addict or something; I don't know. I have no TV, no family; I need some kind of time-chewing entertainment that is mostly passive. I wish I could curl up with books and knitting or crafts or something, but my eyes are still glued to these screens.

Help?

rapidaneurism2• 20 days ago

User generated content: check, comment section: check.

How do people running an instance not fall foul of all the protect the children UK legislation? Will peers also be done by the UK regulator, or only hosts?

sirnicolaz• 20 days ago

I spent 10 minutes figuring out how I could just follow a few instances without having to run a docker container on my machine or keeping N tabs open all the time.

Not a chance to figure that out (I am no mastodon user, so hard for me to guess).

These platforms are promising, but they need to remember that the average user will turn away immediately if there is no clear guidance on how to do the basic things.

buggylearning• 19 days ago

The biggest problem I see is that you need to search for videos. If this is going to work you need a YouTube like home page with videos on it and a different webpage talking about the tech. Using a search page to find videos instead of being presented with one is a non starter.

m4rtink• 19 days ago

For an example of a quite vibrant local PeerTube instance, there is https://vhsky.cz/ running in the Czech Republic.

(And no, it is not spelled "VH SKY" - it's a pun on the VHS video format - in Czech to say "multiple VHS casettes - you would say "vhsky", hence the name. :) )

archon810• 19 days ago

Browsing the main page, none of the videos crack even 100 views. Many under 10 views. I don't know if one could call this vibrant.

zftnb666• 18 days ago

PeerTube: we don't recommend cat videos. Also PeerTube: 10 cat videos on the front page

PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

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