from Hacker News

PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

by Roccan on 7/20/18, 6:07 PM with 298 comments

• by themagician on 7/20/18, 6:42 PM

  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.

• by amitkgupta84 on 7/20/18, 11:10 PM

  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.

• by ryrobes on 7/21/18, 1:13 AM

  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.

• by Endy on 7/20/18, 7:34 PM

  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?

• by usaphp on 7/20/18, 8:59 PM

  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

• by meesterdude on 7/20/18, 6:56 PM

  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.

• by anderspitman on 7/20/18, 11:30 PM

  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?

• by lxe on 7/21/18, 2:09 AM

  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.

• by deadalus on 7/20/18, 7:23 PM

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

• by amitkgupta84 on 7/20/18, 10:56 PM

  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/

• by wetpaws on 7/20/18, 9:59 PM

  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.

• by NedIsakoff on 7/20/18, 6:44 PM

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

• by empath75 on 7/20/18, 8:47 PM

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

• by sergiotapia on 7/20/18, 10:22 PM

  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!

• by pschon on 7/20/18, 7:26 PM

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

• by FrozenVoid on 7/21/18, 3:50 AM

  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.

• by hughes on 7/20/18, 7:32 PM

  How does a creator monetize a video with PeerTube?

• by godzillabrennus on 7/21/18, 6:37 AM

  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.

• by tCfD on 7/20/18, 6:52 PM

  '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.

• by stevefan1999 on 7/21/18, 8:15 AM

  Is there any regulations in PeerTube?

• by smolsky on 7/20/18, 6:56 PM

  So a cross between bittorrent and porntube?

• by twerpy_d on 7/20/18, 8:25 PM

  what about dtube?

• by alttab on 7/20/18, 7:16 PM

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

• by nkkollaw on 7/20/18, 7:24 PM

  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).