With the mass migrations of Reddit users to Lemmy/Kbin, and Twitter now speedrunning its own mass extinction, it seems me that the eventual future of social media is de-centralized. I like how Lemmy is slowing turning out, even if it still has some work to do and growing pains to fix up. It’s still able to inform me of all of the current events I want and has a large enough community that it doesn’t feel empty.
I think a similar path will present itself for a de-centralized video media platform like PeerTube, since YouTube will eventually piss off enough of its users to cause a similar kind of exodus. Wanting to jump in on the concept at an early stage, I signed up for a channel on spectra.video and uploaded my video collection there.
But, I don’t really see the same kind of community and usefulness on PeerTube. I check out the Discover and Trending pages, and it just seems like the same set of videos, really. There’s not enough content to keep PeerTube from looking like a small indie project. I can click on Recently Added and it is usually other people just dumping their channel collections, instead of recent adds of new videos. It’s very easy to scroll down and find videos from months ago.
After poking around on various other PeerTube sites, I think I found the real problem with the platform: Federation.
For example, let’s look at how federated Lemmy’s community is:
All interconnected with hundreds and hundreds (if not thousands) of other instances. If you sign up for one Lemmy account, you have little risk in not being able to access a remote community elsewhere. It feels like a federated community, where everything is de-centralized, but communication is linked everywhere. I can even link to my own video channel from Lemmy.
Now, look at PeerTube’s instance lists, based on what I’ve seen on the Join PeerTube site:
- Spectra.video
- TILvids (basically non-existent)
- Neat.tube
- Video.blender.org
- BassPistol
- Diode.zone
- FTV
- PeerTube.io
- Review.PeerTube.biz
It’s all so bare. At most, 80-90 instances for some sites. I can’t see a lot of other instances’ videos, and they can’t see mine. Not from here or here or here or here or here or here or here or here.
It makes PeerTube a large collection of small silos, instead of a real federated community. People want to be able to sign on to an instance and find the content they want without having to jump through all of these different instances. Subscription feeds rely on having a unified list from many different instances. The technology has a lot of potential, but the PeerTube community is not nearly as organized as the rest of the Fediverse.
This sounds like a somewhat simple problem to solve, but I’m not sure what other kind of technological hurdles exist. How did the Lemmy community solve it?
I dunno. I think trying to treat peertube the same as lemmy is going to be impossible. Video hosting and sharing is a massive data hog. It’s going to take a dedicated non-profit organization to make it viable. Without a backbone like mastodon has, I don’t see it ever being anything useful.
Not to mention monetization. A big reason Youtube is what it is is because it pays its creators.
YouTube pays its creators in peanuts. That’s why almost every YouTube video has a sponsor, or is thanking its Patreons, or both.
I have a full-paying job, so I don’t bother with monetization. I feel like monetization is a boat anchor designed to shackle creators with arcane unspoken rules and unfair copyright claims. (My Babylon 5 video is still technically marked as ineligible because I criticized TNT when talking about Crusade.) I specifically signed up for Google AdSense to turn off ads on my YouTube videos.
I think what PeerTube is doing by having a Support section is good enough. Donate to your instance or donate to your creators directly. It’s a helluva lot more money than YouTube would be paying.
I dunno dude, your average uploader might not be making a ton off AdSense, but the large creators that bring in the majority of users are making bank. The sponsers and Patreons are there to diversify income streams, as Google is notororiously prone to mashing the demonetization button. There are billions of dollars flowing through YouTube, and I don’t think that a decentralized platform running on volunteers and donations is going to be able to compete with that.
Overall I think you’re being unrealistic with the Fediverses place in social media, and overly optimistic about the future of it. I doubt the platform will ever have true mass appeal, which is fine.
Both YouTube and Twitch are very top-heavy organizations. Something like the Top 5000 channels make up 75% of Twitch. The rest are picking up the loose pennies on the ground. If PeerTube becomes a platform for the other hundreds of thousands of channels that don’t get paid millions of dollars, so be it.
It’ll be a slow burn, that’s for sure. But, platforms like phpBB, MySpace, Fark, Digg, and Tumblr didn’t fall in a day. It was a slow descent into bad decisions and inadaptability that caused these platforms to vacate over a period of years.
I mean they get 55% of ad revenue and 70% of subscriptions. Even if youtube started running as nonprofit tomorrow, they could only pay creators a tiny bit more.
True that!
YouTube hasn’t had the same meltdown as Twitter and Reddit, which might explain PeerTube’s relatively small scale.
The meltdowns I mentioned brought a lot of attention to their Fediverse alternatives, but YT hasn’t really had such a meltdown because Google is somewhat smart and knows not to rock the boat too much lest they have a Twitter or Reddit moment.
Google (YouTube) is banning users using AdBlock. They’re also working on installing internet-wide DRM. So yeah, they’re having the same “meltdown”.
Google is definitely at a moment where we are seeing their true intentions; what they’ve always wanted to do: DRM for the the web.
The difference between this and Twitter though is that it isn’t as visible to the average user. The average user probably doesn’t even notice much less care about about what Google is doing because they just want to endlessly scroll Instagram.
That being said, I absolutely hate what Google is doing with this internet DRM proposal and everyone should be outraged.
At least Twitter and Reddit’s meltdown only affects people who use those platforms. Google’s DRM affects the entire web.
YouTube should be a part of the public infrastructure.
I think there needs to be an option to link to a PeerTube instance without having to always host the material. Have some sites where you host videos, but other peers where you don’t because you can’t afford to host all of it. That would at least solve the federation problem. Hopefully, they can have enough “tier 1” peers (seeders) to serve the content from multiple sources.
Also, why can’t videos use torrent technology to serve the data by other viewers?
from what i read, they do.
i think the problem is the kind of distributed systems it was designed to be vs the kind we are talking about.
PT won’t be, at the current state of propagation of content, redundancy and accessibility of content, a replacement for YT or similar.
it could be, but today it cannot.
there is another post mentioning how if certain Lemmy instances keep growing they’ll need economic support.
it smells PT, the way it’s organised today, needs support right now.
there are various ways to optimise data propagation and replication for scalability of content.
I think the discussion needs to be open towards this question
Yeah, I think this might be the best for PeerTube. Instead of federating to the point of copying the actual videos to each server, just copy the metadata/thumbnails. That way all of the videos on all federated servers on the network show in each instance’s list of videos, but when you actually click on a video it requests an embedded player from the original server that the video was hosted on rather than on your local instance.