PeerTube is recognized as a digital public good by Digital Public Goods Alliance

Posted by fsflover 14 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by RobotToaster 2 minutes ago

Content discovery on it is still difficult, mostly because of the bizarre decision to make federation whitelist based.

I'm also sceptical that activitypub is a good fit for video, IPFS could be a better solution.

It's a shame the US government killed LBRY.

Comment by roughly 13 hours ago

I've been working to get more involved with, eg, mutual aid groups and other forms of local capacity and resiliency building over the last year - one thing that's stuck out to me is how many of these groups' public face is an Instagram site. That might not have been existential a couple years ago, but given what we're seeing now with, for instance, Paramount making a rival bid for Warner based solely on their coziness with the current administration, it doesn't feel like the corporate media ecosystem is going to be an even "squint and you can kind of pretend" neutral territory for organizing and information dissemination going forward.

For all that tools like PeerTube, Mastodon, etc are clunkier and more limited than things like YouTube, Bluesky, etc, I think that argument is increasingly going to be irrelevant to their value - we need to start ensuring our capacity to go from 0-1 on media distribution, not from 10-100 or 100+.

Comment by TulliusCicero 11 hours ago

> For all that tools like PeerTube, Mastodon, etc are clunkier and more limited than things like YouTube, Bluesky, etc, I think that argument is increasingly going to be irrelevant to their value

Their value is going to stay limited if people don't want to actually use them.

Technically proficient people may overlook something being clunky if it suits their needs in other ways, but it's a harder sell for the average user. And really, it shouldn't be an issue. Good UX isn't trivial, but it's not especially complicated or budget-busting either.

Comment by jszymborski 6 hours ago

There are some technical barriers to approaching fediverse platforms, but I personally see the main barriers being cultural.

I'm a big proponent of Mastodon and still love using it, but the culture (especially early on) was exceptionally protectionist and lots of people got bullied off for very silly reasons. I think the attitude is less like a children's secret club and more chill generally.

All this to say, I think this is will get better, but the best way to help the fediverse is to join it, be active, and be chill.

Comment by treyd 11 hours ago

At least for Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse ecosystem it does seem that people actually want to use them, and more people every day.

Comment by jamesbelchamber 10 hours ago

People moved on from Mastodon to Bluesky because it was more responsive to user needs. I encouraged people to move to Mastodon but then watched them move on.

It is what it is - but it's worth being clear-eyed about what it is.

Comment by 7moritz7 8 hours ago

FOSS just does not have the aggressive scaling mindset. Even success stories like Linux' game compatibility and Chromium can be traced to just regular tech companies, as opposed to non profits.

Comment by jmcnulty 9 hours ago

It has actually improved a lot since then. The UI has had changes, search is better, it has quote posts now. More usability enhancements are under active development.

Comment by palata 9 hours ago

Once "normies" have tried and moved away, I think it's too late. Unfortunately such services don't get a second chance.

It was probably hard enough to convince them to try once.

Comment by JoshTriplett 7 hours ago

> search is better

Search is still awful, in part because a few people don't seem to want it. It needs substantial improvement.

Comment by MangoToupe 8 hours ago

> Their value is going to stay limited if people don't want to actually use them

Nobody really wants to use instagram either—there's basically nothing positive to say about the app or service itself—it just has critical mass.

Comment by warkdarrior 7 hours ago

Is this a "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" moment?

Comment by MangoToupe 2 hours ago

Typically crowds don't shove billboards every third person

Comment by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 6 hours ago

More like texting, nobody likes the phone system, but everyone you know is on it

Comment by MiddleEndian 5 hours ago

When texting took off, it was the easiest (only) way to send instant text based messages between friends wherever you were, even if the phone system is now heavily used by spammers and there are better options.

When Facebook took off, every Myspace page was so full of garbage that they barely loaded on most people's computers, and Facebook was slick and shiny and easy. The real name policy made it super easy to connect with people you met IRL. Even if it's now confusingly slow and FB Messenger can't display your recent chats in the correct order for some reason, it was the easiest most obvious option at the time.

I don't really understand why people use Twitter (at its best it just seems like a worse version of RSS), but the site presumably loaded quickly at some point and was easy to use, even if it's presumably worse now.

And so on. They persist through momentum.

Some things continue to persist, some things get beat out and die. But if you start off more confusing than your alternatives, at least compared to when they started, you won't get picked up in the first place.

Comment by MangoToupe 2 hours ago

Instagram makes texting look positively motherly

Comment by api 5 hours ago

To me a fatal flaw in ActivityPub systems is that your identity is tied to a server. Yes you can port it, but it’s a hassle. That means the server ops become these little lords over little fiefdoms and a server just dying takes your identity with it.

This also means your reach and what you see depends on your choice of server. I very much don’t want that.

It’s also confusing to non-technical people. Join Mastodon! But which one? How do I pick one?

Technically speaking, Nostr is better. Your identity is a key. Servers are just dumb relays.

Unfortunately it seems to be nothing but crypto bros talking about crypto, or was last time I checked. Nobody uses it.

Comment by ezst 2 hours ago

> That means the server ops become these little lords over little fiefdoms and a server just dying takes your identity with it.

Or that means that everyone can be their own little lord reigning over their own little server, to the point that it doesn't matter, because effectively, network nodes don't need to be "big" to be relevant in a federated ecosystem. I'm not so much into ActivityPub, but I run an XMPP server for my family. I'm not saying that this is for everyone, but close-enough.

Comment by RobotToaster 11 minutes ago

>everyone can be their own little lord reigning over their own little serve

Only if it's simple for the average person

And only until an admin of a big sever dislikes something you say and adds your server to the censorship list on fediseer.

Comment by __MatrixMan__ 2 hours ago

Agreed, nostr makes a lot of sense when you read about it and then you go there... Once.

Comment by immibis 12 hours ago

The problem is that everyone is reading Instagram.

I don't understand why. I made an account recently in order to access a specific thing. I can confirm the app is 100% pure garbage. The home feed is garbage and navigation is awful (to keep you on the home feed). I uninstalled it after they were caught bypassing the permission system to spy on you, by binding localhost ports that web ads would access. The web app is no better garbage-wise (but it can't bind ports).

And it's the subcultures that you'd expect to be the most untied from corporate shackles, that are the ones most on Instagram. I don't get it.

Comment by roughly 11 hours ago

I think it's two aspects - one is that Insta started out as the "not-facebook" platform and Meta's somehow managed not to fuck that up, and the other is there's a massive network effect - every tattoo artist, venue, and band are on instagram now, and it all becomes very self-reinforcing.

Comment by stephen_g 4 hours ago

They're trying... They finally released a native iPad version of the app this year (after so many years), and its default pane is not the one that includes people you actually follow (like the phone app) - it's just reels, and you have to go looking for the right page in the menu to see anything from people you care about.

It's very revealing about where they wish they could have taken the app already, where you don't follow anyone, just trust the algorithm to force-feed you content. Doing that too quickly would instantly kill it, so it's been years of boiling the frog.

The 'Snooze suggested content in feed for 30 days' thing is already bad enough, if they stopped letting you do that Instagram would be insufferable to use.

Comment by 8 hours ago

Comment by timeon 9 hours ago

> Meta's somehow managed not to fuck that up

But then they fucked up. Several years ago.

Comment by ipaddr 11 hours ago

Instagram is useless unless their are people you want to follow or get people to follow you.

Comment by MichaelZuo 12 hours ago

By definition someone’s actions, if repeated sufficiently often, define their real character.

You don’t have to take claimed pretenses seriously.

Comment by roughly 11 hours ago

This is a bit of a harsh take. These same groups use Signal for all their internal messaging - by and large the will is there, but they're not tech savvy and we haven't given them viable alternatives.

Comment by alisonatwork 7 hours ago

This situation is so frustrating to me, and despite my attempts, nobody seems to get why it's problematic. I still have a Facebook account from over a decade ago that I use occasionally to access stuff that is only visible on Facebook, but by the time Insta kicked off I had already decided social media was bad, so I never got one, and it didn't seem like a great loss because I wasn't that interested in looking at other people's photos anyway.

Except now, apparently - and I'm still not exactly sure how - business owners and activist groups and event promoters communicate everything about what is going on via... photos?! I suppose it's the digital version of flyers, except you could see flyers posted up all over town, in all the record stores or cafes you already frequented, friends could hand you them when they saw you out and about, you'd get bombarded with them when you left related events... And none of those situations forced you to enter a heavily-surveilled gated community owned by a spectacularly wealthy foreign company notorious for enabling genocide, live streaming murder etc.

I was at some event a couple weekends ago and an organizer came up to me saying that there was going to be an after and just check the Insta for the address, and I'm like... But I don't have that? Can't you tell me now? And because the site is login-walled even when at some point later in the day the thumbnail did appear, trying to click on it to see the details resulted in the login block and so I missed out.

But I am well aware that I am a teeny tiny minority of people involved in this boycot and so I'm only really hurting myself. The way I've heard it described by activists is that using Insta (or X or YouTube) is like tacitly accepting that we already live in a panopticon and thus all resistance has to take place within full view of the authorities, it just needs to be smart and present itself as something that isn't actually resistance, or that works around censorship using codewords, or this, or that, "just like how it's done in China". And it's like, great, the new generation of western activists who actually still live in a society which grants them some civil liberties have decided they're all doomed to exist under the totalitarian jackboot and practice their resistance accordingly. After all, you can't build a movement out there on the actually free fediverse or the small web where there's only a smattering of nerds.

I don't know if I should be depressed or just suck it up and get that stupid Insta account.

Comment by Dusseldorf 6 hours ago

I'm on the same boat as you. Trying to find word about where the good local popup restaurants are, and apparently the only way to do it is to follow a bunch of random Instagram accounts. I finally tried to relent and make an account just to be able to read that stuff, but they wanted me to take a video of myself holding my government ID in order to prove my... identity, I guess? Not sure why that's necessary for an account I never even plan to post with, but it was enough of a barrier for me that I said nevermind. Now I just mention it whenever I'm chatting with organizers/proprietors, but I'm never exactly sure what to suggest as an alternative.

Comment by alex1138 6 hours ago

Facebook simultaneously makes it hard for you to access anything without an account (connecting the world?) while also having been known to change people's privacy settings from Friends to Friends of Friends or Public

Zuck, you do not deserve to be spoken of in the same breath as actual internet pioneers

Comment by toomuchtodo 14 hours ago

https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/

https://framagit.org/framasoft/peertube/

https://joinpeertube.org/

Comment by prmoustache 13 hours ago

peertube is in that weird space where the software is good technically but is overkill for home users and small entities[1] and moderation, bandwith and storage cost makes it a bit difficult and expensive to host large public shared instances unless you find a way to monetize it.

I guess it is more an alternative for Microsoft Stream than youtube really as it is more likely to be used as an internal video communication platform for a company than a public video streaming platform.

[1] if the audience is small, you are just fine sharing vids using the html video tags

Comment by corndoge 10 hours ago

From hosting a peertube instance solely for my own stuff for several years, I've come to appreciate just how difficult self hosting a streaming video platform is. As you say, bandwidth and storage requirements are significant; another less obvious one is transcoding. When a user uploads an HD video file, it needs to be transcoded into lower resolutions if you want there to be a hope of people streaming it. While Peertube itself is perfectly happy running on 2-4 vcpu cores on a cheap cloud vm, if you use those cores to handle transcode jobs it can take huge amounts of time (like 20+ hours) to transcode even medium length 1080p videos. So you really need either a lot of CPU that sits mostly idle, or hardware acceleration, both of which are expensive when purchased from cloud providers. Or you can use remote transcoding to offload transcode jobs onto your home gaming pc or whatever, which works well, but can be complicated and a bit touchy to set up properly, and now you have a point of failure dependent on your home network...

And then, people watching videos are used to the YouTube experience with its world class CDN infra enabling subsecond first frame latencies even for 4k videos. They go on Peertube and first frame takes like 5 seconds for a 1080p video...realistically, with today's attention spans most of them are going to bounce before it ever plays.

Comment by catapart 4 hours ago

Since you seem like you have practical knowledge here, I hope you don't mind me asking:

Would it change the equation, meaningfully, if you didn't offer any transcoding on the server and required users to run any transcoding they needed on their own hardware? I'm thinking of a wasm implementation of ffmpeg on the instance website, rather than requiring users to use a separate application, for instance.

Would you think a general user couldn't handle the workload (mobile processing, battery, etc), or would that be fairly reasonable for a modern device and only onerous in the high traffic server environment?

Comment by Dylan16807 4 hours ago

I shove 1080p mp4s onto a very cheap server and I get 2 seconds of load time there versus somewhere between 1 and 2 seconds on youtube. And looking at network requests, the first chunk of the file loads in well under a second so I'd expect something with the metadata preloaded could start playing at that point. So if peertube takes 5 seconds, I really wonder why.

Is it inconvenient to transcode before/during upload?

Comment by alisonatwork 7 hours ago

The funny thing is that YouTube has now enshittified to the point where people routinely DO wait well over 5 seconds to watch the video they actually wanted to watch while interstitials and other commercials are jammed in. Even with adblock enabled, the latest YouTube code won't unlock the first frame of the actual video till some period of ad time has passed so you just sit there looking at a black screen. This on its own definitely isn't enough to get people to leave the platform, but it's still notable how much worse the experience has gotten compared to a few years ago.

Comment by llbbdd 5 hours ago

On what setup? All YouTube videos load and start playing instantly for me. Every time I've experienced otherwise in the last couple years, it's been my first indication that e.g. AWS is exploding that day

Comment by alisonatwork 5 hours ago

I wonder if it depends what country you are in. I only notice it occasionally when the video won't play in FreeTube or PipePipe (which always has the pause at the start since the last few months) and I'm forced to open an incognito browser tab to watch, and then I realize just how many ads other people are being subjected to before they can even watch the video.

Comment by MobiusHorizons 5 hours ago

You likely pay for YouTube premium if you aren’t noticing adds

Comment by hsbauauvhabzb 9 hours ago

What value do you get in transcoding your own stuff? I have plex transcoding disabled on all local network devices that stream it and run into minimal issues (codecs on TV devices, mostly).

Comment by graemep 13 hours ago

> if the audience is small, you are just fine sharing vids using the html video tags

Yet people do not do that.

Comment by zamadatix 12 hours ago

I think that's more a measurement of demand volume than anything. It's a VERY tight squeeze between "I'll just send this file directly to the few people I want to show it" and "I want to show this to anyone" to the point no matter what is done by those people it'll seem like nobody does that unless it's also done in the other categories.

Comment by giancarlostoro 13 hours ago

> find a way to monetize it

If only there were a smart way to build a cryptocoin without the environmental mess of miners, but where you earn coinage from seeding videos. I feel like you'd want people to have a desktop client to let you seed in the background then award some sort of virtual currency that can be sold later. I hate to sound like a crypto-bro but I can't think of anything else more fitting for something already decentralized.

Comment by rapnie 8 hours ago

GNU Taler [0] perhaps. They are funded by EU grants, and have a funding program [1] going to stimulate the ecosystem.

> We are building an anonymous, taxable payment system using modern cryptography. Customers will use traditional money transfers to send money to a digital Exchange and in return receive (anonymized) digital cash. Customers can use this digital cash to anonymously pay Merchants. Merchants can redeem the digital cash for traditional money at the digital Exchange. As Merchants are not anonymous, they can be taxed, enabling income or sales taxes to be withheld by the state while providing anonymity for Customers.

[0] https://docs.taler.net/

[1] https://www.taler.net/en/ngi-taler.html

Comment by IncreasePosts 12 hours ago

What value would this virtual currency have? Okay, someone seeded some videos and got a token - why should I go and pay them for that token?

Comment by BigGreenJorts 8 hours ago

Maybe the tokens are how you access the content? Seed to get tokens, spend tokens to get new content. If you don't want to seed, you buy from users who did seed (or resellers).there are many token based comic apps, I wonder how feasible this would be on a small scale like that.

Comment by immibis 12 hours ago

I seed videos to my other computer all day and I'm a trillionaire.

Comment by cyberax 13 hours ago

I actually run my own PeerTube instance. I'm mirroring videos in my RSS feeds from Patreon and Youtube there. And I also have a handful of my own family videos.

Comment by Imustaskforhelp 13 hours ago

Can someone please tldr me what digital public goods alliance means and how peertube can benefit from being recognized as a digital public good.

From what I can tell, it is UN affiliated/related project where basically it tries to make countries integrate these digital public goods in their country's ecosystem/ work on these (products?)

Is there any amount of sponsorship money that come with this classification or more tax benefits?

Or does UN (thus countries who fund UN) itself fund DPGA?

I find this idea fascinating now thinking about it if that can be the case, for these countries a few millions or even billions collectively might not mean much but it can mean a lot towards open source and digital soveriegnity in my opinion too.

Comment by yanokwa 5 hours ago

I run [ODK](https://getodk.org). It's a offline mobile data collection platform that has been an DPG since 2022.

In practice, being a DPG makes your project slightly easier to choose in UN and government procurements. In most cases, they're choosing your platform because it's free, so it's unlikely that money or code contributions will come your way. It can even be a downside, because your software may end up deployed on an under-provisioned government server that generates a flood of support requests. Ask me how I know...

You may also get a bit more visibility and become eligible for some DPG-related funding calls. But in my experience, funding ultimately depends on demonstrated impact, donor relationships, alignment with national digital strategies, and the ability to deliver at scale.

Comment by yunwal 12 hours ago

Looks like it qualifies you for UNICEF grants

https://www.unicef.org/innovation/growth-funding#:~:text=Gro...

Comment by pogue 13 hours ago

I would also like to know what this means

Comment by ekjhgkejhgk 13 hours ago

Anyone wanna share some cool channels?

Comment by wrxd 12 hours ago

https://tinkerbetter.tube/c/veronicaexplains/videos she’s also on YouTube but it doesn’t hurt to use PeerTube and get out of Google’s reach

Comment by ekjhgkejhgk 10 hours ago

I was watching the rsync video and she mentions the scenario where you run rsync with the remote as source, and the remote drive isn't mounted correctly and you end up deleting local. LOL

Comment by ikesau 13 hours ago

My brother's got an instance for canadian urbanism and fediverse engineering: https://video.canadiancivil.com

Comment by soundworlds 10 hours ago

Self-promotion, but the music I release here is totally free to use in your own projects. It's all CC0

https://makertube.net/a/johnoestmannmusic/video-channels

Comment by Animats 12 hours ago

I put up metaverse rendering tests on Hardlimit.

https://video.hardlimit.com/c/aninats/videos

(It's discouraging having put in so much effort on trying to make the Metaverse work, and then having the entire sector die.)

Comment by ekjhgkejhgk 11 hours ago

I'm happy that it did. It was a trick to get people to spend more time online so that facebook can make even more money off people's time and attention.

Comment by proactivesvcs 7 hours ago

ursinewave@tv.gravitons.org : https://tv.gravitons.org/a/ursinewave/video-channels "Roberta Fidora is a genre-bender from the Isle of Wight, UK, hopping between field recordings in space, industrial-tinged electroclash, guerrilla puppeteering and wildly maximalist, mildly-anarchic pop music."

meljoann@tv.gravitons.org : https://tv.gravitons.org/c/meljoann/ "Meljoann is an extremely physically attractive Irish multidisciplinary artist. They’ve been supported by Pitchfork, Beats Per Minute, XLR8, KEXP, Dan Hegarty, Cian Ó Cíobháin, Jenny Greene and Tara Stewart of RTÉ radio, Irish Times, Nialler9, Hot Press, BBC’s Gemma Bradley, Dummy Mag, HMUK and the Arts Council of England. She’s currently releasing a series of self-directed video singles. ‘HR’, their anti-capital concept album, is out now. Their third album, ‘Status’, releases in 2025"

Comment by butz 12 hours ago

Makers @ https://makertube.net/

Comment by ekjhgkejhgk 11 hours ago

Are these many users actually uploading their stuff there, or is this downloading from youtube and re-uploading?

Comment by butz 10 hours ago

I assume content creators are uploading their own content to their peertube channels.

Comment by ekianjo 9 hours ago

Our channel here https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/c/boilingsteam/videos

Comment by liplia 59 minutes ago

[dead]

Comment by utopiah 10 hours ago

Yeay, checkout my instance, been running it for 5 years now! https://video.benetou.fr

Comment by glenstein 8 hours ago

I've been wondering about angles to get interesting content on there. I wonder, for instance, if one could reach out to a bunch of bands and get permission for mirroring live show recordings on peertube and be off to the races.

Comment by mfkp 8 hours ago

I host a simpler youtube alternative based on https://www.mediacms.io/

It's not a perfect platform, but generally does well enough from my home server and a gigabit fiber connection.

Comment by BLKNSLVR 4 hours ago

That's now on my to-do list, thanks for pointing it out. It looks clean and simple but with some nice features.

Comment by pstuart 8 hours ago

These are good alternatives to have, but a solid chunk of the "youtube economy" is about selling ad time so creators can make a living creating content. I hate ads as much as the next person but we need to recognize that the issue is not purely technical.

Comment by mfkp 8 hours ago

Definitely, hard to compete with YouTube as a revenue source. That being said, my instance is mainly for digitizing and hosting old VHS tapes from my family so they don't get lost over the years. No need for advertising there :)

Comment by BLKNSLVR 4 hours ago

You're not thinking fourth dimensionally!

Comment by cantalopes 5 hours ago

Youtube used to have quality content (dare i say, content of much higher originality and quality) in times when there was no monetization yet

Comment by jancsika 7 hours ago

So what are the top 10 (or top 100) videos in terms of being actively replicated across the largest number of Peertube peers? I can't find this anywhere.

Prisoner's Dilemma Bonus: I'll upvote all responses if no responses attempt to explain Peertube's philosophy to me.

Comment by crtasm 13 hours ago

and v8.0 released today

Comment by mpingu 8 hours ago

Good news! good Non Profits are always amazing!

Comment by renewiltord 11 hours ago

Is this the J D Power award for open source?

Comment by gnatman 11 hours ago

the J D Great Responsibility award

Comment by vvladi 11 hours ago

Video.edu.nl

Comment by ekjhgkejhgk 9 hours ago

Is this run by the NL gov? I wish all govs would have something like this. Unfortunately gov are usually about 1 generation behind the state of the art in terms of understanding technology at any point in time.