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.
It’s not about adoption. It’s about money.
Superfamousguy (a youtube user I just ficticiously created to represent every single big name youtuber) doesn’t make videos in their room talking about whatever, and uploads whenever.
These guys have a strict schedule. They need to shoot today. Edit tonight, upload tomorrow exactly at 11am. Because their users are conditioned to expect those videos at those times. So they get sponsored, and now advertisers are promised an average viewcount on the dominant video platform at a certain time. They’re paying superfamousguy money for those promises.
It’s not a hobby, it’s a job. And advertisers are not going to be willing to touch peertube because it’s handled by so many fragmented cases that it’s impossible for peertube to have the stability of youtube.
So, I’m not saying peertube can’t grow. I’m just saying its decentralized nature will scare most advertisers away. Without the advertisers, superfamousguy can’t make a living. And at that point it doesn’t matter if peertube has twice as many viewers as youtube. Without money, these professionals cant fund their crew, they can’t make videos, and thus stick to youtube.
Really, Google and Amazon are the only players large enough to make an alternative and host it.
Both companies should just be nationalized by their countries they have their HQ in, or globalized by the UN.
These are integral parts of our world and society, we shouldn’t allow them to be owned and controlled by private intrests.
I hope to see people like Lewis Rossmann erc. Start posting there
FUTO has an instance
A Kodi client that allows seeking would be great.
Yep not sustainable. Think of how much diak space YouTube is using. Just was reading this morning how peertube instances limit new users and that’s ok. If everyone can’t upload videos it we’ll never replace YouTube.
Disk space is quite cheap and I’m sure high quality vids could take a very small space if NPU processed and upscaled.
Disk space is relatively cheap, until you also count redundancy, backups, storage hardware, utilities, and bandwidth.
Redundancy and backup is automatically provided thanks to federation, other instances can decide to host a copy of your vid (see archive.com for example).
Bandwidth is provided by torrent.
Storage HW can be anything.
Ads are supported so you can monetize
Unfortunately, I have zero faith in the team behind it. Unless the team changes, I doubt that peertube will ever become what it wants/needs to be.
What’s the issue with the team?
Yeah, I’d like to know as well, I thought Framasoft was pretty well regarded?
OP didn’t get his feature request.
Sorry to take what seems like such a strong stance but they don’t have what it takes to build a successful YouTube-ish platform imo. This is based on my experience in the field and my observations of their output over the years. I know it sounds like a cop out but I don’t have the time to discuss further rn.
Honestly, I’d be happy to learn that I was wrong. I have and will continue to root for any federated YouTube competitor. I just don’t think it’s going to be from FS.
