cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/9483559
PeerTube is a decentralized and federated alternative to YouTube. The goal of PeerTube is not to replace YouTube but to offer a viable alternative using the strength of ActivityPub and P2P protocols.
Being built on ActivityPub means PeerTube is able to be part of a bigger social network, the Fediverse (the Federated Universe). On the other hand, P2P technologies help PeerTube to solve the issue of money, inbound with all streaming platform : With PeerTube, you don’t need to have a lot of bandwidth available on your server to host a PeerTube platform because all users (which didn’t disable the feature) watching a video on PeerTube will be able to share this same video to other viewers.
If you are curious about PeerTube, I can’t recommend you enough to check the official website to learn more about the project. If after that you want to try to use PeerTube as a content creator, you can try to find a platform available there to register or host yourself your own PeerTube platform on your own server.
The development of PeerTube is actually sponsored by Framasoft, a french non-for-profit popular educational organization, a group of friends convinced that an emancipating digital world is possible, convinced that it will arise through actual actions on real world and online with and for you!
Framasoft is also involved in the development of Mobilizon, a decentralized and federated alternative to Facebook Events and Meetup.
If you want to contribute to PeerTube, feel free to:
- report bugs and give your feedback on Github or on our forums
- submit your brillant ideas on our Feedback platform
- Help to translate the software, following the contributing guide
- Make a donation to help to pay bills inbound in the development of PeerTube.
Framasoft is good at coding but not so good at marketing, usability testing or philosophy.
I want Peertube to be a thing but Its just not build on a study organization. It would be better if piped or invidious started federating like peertube.
I mean, they can start federating, nothing but time and money is stopping them most likely. Maybe you could drive an effort in their respective developer communities to get the ball rolling?
Screw Google. I made a little donation, hope your project really takes off in 2024!
I really hope you guys succeed, I plan to make a small donation when I have extra to give.
I want to use it but I don’t fully understand how it works. Does it use my device a storage for videos? Or does it only use it as a sharing device without storing the video on it? Does it only use the bandwidth on my device? Could someone please explain? I already read about it, but I’m still lost
I’ve been running my PeerTube instance for more than a year now so hopefully I can help :
- if you only watch, it doesn’t use your device for storage, only some of your bandwidth if P2P is enabled. If you want to host content, e.g a video of yourself explaining how to design your own smart speaker using only FOSS, then you should setup a server which will need storage for your videos.
Happy to clarify more if you need. Overall you can watch content from https://video.benetou.fr and most likely all bandwidth will come from my server. You can not upload your videos there though (unless if I accept making an account for you, which I won’t). There are other servers though, public ones, which allow registration and where you can thus upload your content too.
Thank you. I just want to watch, no more no less and I’m ok with using my bandwidth to push the video around if that helps, since my ISP doesn’t have that bullshit cap. And by bandwidth we are talking Internet, right?
It is part od the Fediverse, so commenting, likes, following, etc. should regarless of what ActivityPub-enabled service you use for interactions (for example can comment from Mastodon account).
The “Peer” part of “PeerTube” means that the video player itself is based on torrent technology. It is not saved on your device (unless you decide to), just when you watch you also send the video to cut off some of the server’s bandwidth. Videos are not shared between servers, only the information that they exists, only on uploader’s server and between user’s devices.
It is not to preserve videos online, for that we have other tools like proper torrents, this is ment to be alternative to YouTube. TLDR Here ActivityPub is for statuses, Torrent is for helping the servers.
So, my device/bandwidth is basically a tunnel so to speak that helps push the video (that is saved on the uploader’s server" to others? So peertube only uses my Internet and my device’s CPU?
It uses just the same as other video sites plus some upload bandwidth that is usually unused anyway. Also there is an option to download the video purely by HTTP without torrenting if someone wants to.
