I read many comments on how PeerTube isn’t sustainable as a YouTube alternative and, while it’s certainly true right now, are we sure it will be the same in the near future?
The platform is growing and the new mobile app is making great progress; I can certainly see some people investing in a major instance some day, accelerating the platform adoption.
Hosting video requires a lot more resources than hosting text, hyperlinks, or even pictures. It might be too much for individuals to self host video on a scale that could even distantly resemble how we use youtube today.
Then again, maybe there are ways to make that burden smaller. IIRC Peertube does do some p2p stuff to try and share the burden a bit but I’ve also heard that it’s not really feasible to rely on that to scale.
I have a server with less than 100gb that’s running it for a year so far. No issues and even has a channel with 100 or so subscribers (literally my dog).
It’s p2p capabilities make it pretty easy to distribute videos. And the server admins have the ability to toggle if they want to host other videos from other instances or not. They even have the ability to host specific individual videos if they want to support certain creators. Its a very intelligent system.
If anyone wants to take a look, we have a couple different communities/channels/videos over on !peertube@lemmy.world
For small-scale stuff like that it will surely work. It’s unclear if it scales to youtube volumes. Maybe it doesn’t have to though, small scale stuff is valuable too.
Also to be fair I feel like YouTube has a large amount of deadish Internet content or just content that can’t exist in a landscape that doesn’t reward getting clicks (think Mr. Beast and similar).
Yep no reason to scale until you need to scale.
Everyone wants it to be YouTube. With ads and algorithms and…
Just let it be peertube. It works now.
I think P2P has stood the test of time. Torrents scale extremely well, any large scale video would have so many peers the server wouldn’t have to participate at all. These days most torrents easily saturate my gigabit connection no problem with just a handful of peers. Torrents tends to spread like wildfire.
The main issue would be storage space, but I think a lot of YouTubers would be perfectly okay with spending $5-10 a month to pay for the storage costs with all the benefits you get from not being tied to YouTube’s ToS and policies. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the earnings from sponsor spots.
And? Now scale up to YouTube size allow more creators
100 subscriber is NBD. Let’s talk when you have thousands or even millions of active users. At some point you’re going to hit a wall if you were to hypothetically scale up. Costs of service would need to be covered somehow.
I’m not sure peertube HAS thousands of viewers
It does but that’s beside the point. We’re discussing a hypothetical future.
Yes: encode on lower resolutions.
Most of the videos on Youtube don’t ever need to be 4K. They don’t even need to be 1080p. Heck, most don’t even need 720p! Things like music videos, where what’s important is the music, orthings like old TV broadcasts or play rips of old consoles, where the source barely gets to 360p, can be encoded to 360p or even 244p without any suffering (I played Monster Hunter on the 3DS for years and I can attest 244p can do great works of magic).
This mixes wonderfully with Peertube’s idea about hosting your own instance. If you are hosting your own video storage, you’ll want to maximize the amount of stuff you can throw into it. If someone complains that your videos aren’t 1080p, tell them to go to
/donate.phpand do their part.How does the p2p work? I thought there was a bittorrent-like aspect to it but what you’re describing sounds different.
If multiple people are watching the same video, at the same resolution, it uses WebRTC (HLS P2P) to share data between them, saving bandwidth from the PeerTube instance.
A PeerTube instance can also function as a peer (seed) for another PeerTube instance.
As far as I know the p2p only potentially applies when >1 global users are watching a video simultaneously.
edit: am I wrong? I thought they had bittorrent-like swarming.
You are right, but the users also need to be watching the video at the same resolution. A PeerTube instance can also function as a peer.