Or ‘What is PeerTube lacking that you simply cannot do without?’
I believe it’s a safe assumption that fediverse users want to move away from the monopolies and closed gardens so often associated with video streaming, and yet it’s not a task that’s ever been made easy. Maybe an ounce of inspiration is the cue we need, and so my question to you is; What’s Stopping you from using PeerTube?
Mostly lack of interesting content. Which translates to enticing quality creators to post there. Some of them already do, like Veronica Explains and The Linux Experiment, but they are exceptions.
I don’t know what that would take, since I’m not a creator, but probably monetization, managing spam, etc would be key points.
Ctrl-alt-rese is there too. But that’s another issue. The content there is often very niche focused. The two big issues are going to be discovery (getting better) and setup.
Unlike a lot of the rest of the fediverse. Video chews through resources fast. So you don’t tend to have generally wide open registrations and large content libraries. I’ve seen a few offering 5GB space with semi open signup. But outside short clips that’s going to be useless to well produced content.
I’m thinking of setting up my own at some point. But I’m not exactly the normal kind of person or even the person that tends to produce a lot of content. A lot of those people aren’t nearly as techy or into running home servers for fun. I think honestly one of the biggest things for something like peer tube to take off. Is to build up the network of nodes and content. Make it so people can set up a server of their own with just a few clicks on any operating system. Allow for NAT traversal etc.
Then larger fedi operations like World Etc. Could set up something like cache only nodes. Individuals as well. Even with a gigabit connection and a 250 GB hard drive. You could serve many many people. Speeding up access for people in your area.
I think it will all come in time. I mean me installing Slackware on my Pentium in 96 would have never predicted what has happened. And what is happening.
Slackware '90s gang representing:)
Anyway, I mostly agree with you. I think all those areas can be improved. Where I slightly disagree is the idea that most of them want to self host. The irony of the thing is that it probably will take a large central entity (or two) to take it mainstream. Someone to handle all the faffing about that comes with hosting. Time spent that big-time creators would rather spend on production.
Or maybe it’s fine the way it is. Maybe YouTube etc is where the big-time players remain and Peertube becomes the Geocities for video. I’m fine with that. I want my old web back with small sites and niche interests hosted by enthusiasts. I really don’t know.
I also have late 90s Red Hat, Suse, and FreeBSD official media stashed as well lol.
You’re not going to get any of that happening while the AI bullshit bubble is ongoing. Bandwidth hasn’t skyrocked of course. But storage space has. I don’t see any large central entities stepping forward to do this without some well-defined means of support. The kind that have never existed for such fediverse endeavors so far. And not just for storage space and bandwidth. But for the lawyers as well. You better believe the IP police will be all over them.
If it is to be Well decentralized. Well inoculated from legal challenges and financial constraints. Blind caching proxies Would be the most sensible option. Caching proxies are vital to every streaming service including YouTube. Which peertube is imitating and not just a name.
If you want to know why you have to buffer longer and more often than services like YouTube. Even for things just like rewinding or skipping ahead. Proxies. Your peer tube request may have to traverse mountains and oceans. Your YouTube Netflix or Hulu stream usually is from a town or two over.
Technically we have webRTC and the other Technologies behind peer tube to do similar things when there’s a large group all watching a single stream. But the Swarm has to get set up again over and over every time the group drops. Which wouldn’t be a big issue on a well-established service with people constantly using it. But right now. It means that you are generally the person caching and streaming to others if any. But no one streaming to you. (But the source) Hence lots of buffering and slow streams.
If I could as a user run a small program to cache for my favorite content creators. I’d be there for it.
All very good points. There are a lot of first and second order effects people don’t consider about hosting, and especially hosting at scale. I have some experience from back in the day hosting higher volume sites, and that changes everything you thought you knew about hosting. Every little thing starts to count. And that’s just the technical part of things. Things are even more complicated nowadays.
I hope distributed and federated content is the future, but I also think it’s fighting an uphill battle right now with powerful forces wanting to control access. I will take a small, but free, network over a popular but restricted one.