I feel like it would be best to proxy YouTube, or subscribe to paid indie channels like nebula, but without a user base and without ad revenue or subscription revenue I don’t know how quality content can come to PeerTube. Maybe I’m just missing the content but when I’ve checked it’s all very low quality, just random unedited webcam vblogs mostly.
In all honesty I don’t understand how PeerTube is supposed to scale with users once it gets content. Hosting, transcoding and streaming video is super expensive. There’s also a matter of making money from videos and without financial incentive it’ll be hard to compete with commercial solutions (in a capitalist hellholes that most of us live in). Community funding can keep up with hosting text but can barely keep up with hosting pictures, let alone something more, unless you’re an internet archive or something.
People who are on Nebula already made it in Youtube and they’re so big that they just want to make more money. They provide nice service for the money but I don’t think they will come support your revolution for free.
Nebula is a gated community for YouTubers who have already made it. They have no avenue for adding more users, like the wealth of good indie YouTubers that are up and coming, and they don’t even seem to want to add to their own curated list themselves. Their community has been stagnated for years. All they have done is forced their current membership to constantly advertise for them on YouTube.
Nebula is not the answer and never will be. I don’t even see a point in going there, because I already have these same channels on YouTube.
I didn’t mean Nebula would be the answer but many Nebulas that would do better or worse based on their own decisions rather than everyone being beholden to a single corporate overlord.
Peertube allegedly uses p2p networking that runs in your browser to serve videos. It’s open source but when I tried to actually read up on the protocol large parts of the docs were in french
I think it’s basically just bittorrent.
It uses P2P when multiple users is watching the same video. A PeerTube server can also mirror another PeerTube server’s videos and function as a peer.
You can see it this screenshot, that I’ve downloaded most of the video data from other peers.
PeerTube is build on ActivityPub, just like Lemmy. Right now federation is broken between Lemmy and PeerTube. When it’s fixed, you’ll be able to subscribe to PeerTube channels from here and comment as well.
Fix for the federation is here https://lemm.ee/comment/18936804
PeerTube scales by increasing the amount of instances available. But you are pretty much correct. The two things that’s expensive is: Storage and transcoding. The biggest expense is storage. It gets more and more expensive as videos is uploaded. Transcoding can become more expensive, if you have to keep up with new videos getting added all the time.
I would like to see individual content creators create their own PeerTube servers and thereby serving their content to the rest of the PeerTube servers and the Fediverse. I imagine a lot of content creators keep some kind of backup of their videos, so why not attach a PeerTube server to it? PeerTube allows you to keep the original file.
Regarding financial incentive, the “only” thing creators would miss out on, on Peertube is ad revenue. If we disregard the low amount of viewers on PeerTube compared to YouTube, a creator can still use sponsors, patreon, donations, affiliate links etc. on their videos.
I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that all money on YouTube comes from ads. IIRC nearly half comes from subscriptions and each Premium watcher is basically worth much more than ad-supported ones. My thinking is similar to yours - creators need to host things themselves and the next step would be creating coops that optimise infrastructure costs and deal with stuff like payment processing for subs. Nebula is one, Floatplane is another but with LTT yuck. We need more, especially non-US based. And people need to sub those too.
You are thinking about channel membership, right? This is something that could also be implemented in PeerTube, either by Framasoft themselves (devs of PeerTube) or as a plugin by anyone.
You mentioned LTT. They have their own video platform. It would have been cool if they had actually used PeerTube and build upon that instead of creating yet another “walled” video platform.
As long as artists need to support themselves in a capitalist environment it’s not reasonable for us to expect them to share their content freely. If we increase the amount of those small walled gardens then big corporations are no longer in control and we can rethink how we can compensate their work but it’s not fair to skip this step.
I think it has more potential for shorts, if they do that, shorts get hella compressed on tiktok, ig, etc. itd be nice to self host and deal with your own compression, and just pay to serve content how you want it.
Maybe blender animators, vfx makers, edm visuals, etc. those type of artists would benefit most from something like peertube, dont get much visibility in youtube and peertube could be a return to artists and less whatever contents become
I feel like PeerTube only makes sense in the case of “I have the technical knowledge to host my own instance”
As indeed, I find it difficult to believe that any single “community”-instance will survive once it starts getting some traction. Hosting, maintaining and moderating such a platform would be extremely expensive if you have to do it for not only your own content.
I know nebula creators aren’t supporting any kind of revolution but they are creating their own coop and I commend them for that. All workers should. Maybe just an oss tool to get communities like them started for groups that want to form coops.
In that idea what we need is a built in interface for sponsorship, tipping, and paid subscriptions, built into PeerTube. They could have subscriptions on the instance itself or the channel.