PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform (github.com)
210 points by doener 7 hours ago
djaro 18 minutes ago
As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization.
I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch. This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram. Even a decent 20-minute video can easily take 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor.
I have a pretty small channel (~100K subscribers) with no employees and relatively low upkeep costs (a few hundred dollars a month), and even I could not make this work if I didn't get at least $500-$1,000 per video on average, since it just takes so much time and money.
Most channels with more than a million subscribers are likely founders working 60-80 hour weeks with multiple full-time employees supporting them. You cannot do that in the hopes of viewers donating $5 here and there.
And yes, there are people who make content for free - most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video. And the difference between a million views and a hundred is 10,000x. You cannot create a platform without big users.
I think any real competitor to YouTube nowadays would have to be backed by a big corporation that can pay big creators million-dollar deals to make the switch. Otherwise it's just dead in the water.
infamia 11 minutes ago
You can publish to both and even better your own domain that simply points to your video hosting provider. Long term you want to own your distribution channel as much as possible, while using YouTube as your lead generation tool to drive true believers to your site and premium distribution channel not owned by YouTube. Otherwise, you will always be subject to platform risk via YouTube's whims which has destroyed many content creators. That's the long term winning play IMO and it doesn't preclude tools like FreeTube.
ndriscoll 6 minutes ago
It doesn't have to be for your use-case. e.g. KDE has their own instance. It would perhaps be a good fit for MIT to host their OCW videos, or for Khan Academy to host their material, or people sharing conference talks, or quick home DIY videos, or vlogs and idle musings, etc. Videos that are meant to help people to better themselves or collaborate fit better on a platform that doesn't try to be a constant sales funnel.
paxys 7 minutes ago
There are 100M+ channels uploading on YouTube regularly and only 2-3M of them are monetized. Not everyone wants to upload videos on the internet with the explicit goal of making money. Professional creators are a very tiny minority, and a platform like YouTube will always be better suited for them (your "small" channel with 100K subscribers is actually in the top 0.5-0.1% of YouTube). There is no reason for Peertube to go after this specific demographic.
the_cat_kittles 11 minutes ago
its fine for the genre of video thats just someone narrating while filming with there phone and almost no editing. if someone is doing something interesting, i prefer this to something well produced, its more candid and relatable, and lacks the artifice most projects designed for youtube have
deepsun 9 minutes ago
Honestly I found that the videos I come to Youtube to watch are either personal, non-monetized hobby video, or just a head talking to camera.
ktallett 15 minutes ago
Your issue is assuming that this is trying to replace YouTube for those who wish to try and make money from this. I suspect this is much more closer to a Google videos or YouTube back in the day which was pretty much just random videos, plus lots of conferences on there (which don't get enough views to monetize). This can easily replace that and is something I would support. YouTube hasn't always been monetising and it is good if we have a competitor against it.
CM30 2 hours ago
It's a promising system, and I'd probably use it over a non-federated video hosting system if I wanted to run a video hosting site of some kind.
Yet it's currently hard to find a real usecase for it, since neither the content you want nor audience is there on PeerTube at the moment. If you're interested in open source software or data privacy you might find something here or there, but topics like gaming, music, sports or movies are very much underserved on the platform at the moment, and get almost no attention from viewers.
For example, I recently did a test search and found a let's play for the Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. The videos had something like 3-5 views on PeerTube, and about 10-15 times that on the creator's YouTube channel.
It's the same issue as on Mastodon and Lemmy to be honest, except exaggerated. If the majority of topics aren't well represented on these platforms, then the general public won't use them. And if the general public won't use them, then the creators that would bring the general public over won't use them either.
They need to figure out a way to encourage people outside of the 'hardcore tech nerd raised on Usenet' audience to use these platforms.
WarmWash 24 minutes ago
Creators get 60% of youtube's ad revenue from youtube.
What does Peertube pay?
There is your answer. If people want good stuff, there needs to be money flowing to the source of it. The internet desperately needs to shed this "everything good is totally free" mindset, because what is actually manifests as is "I love taking without the requirement of giving".
paxys 13 minutes ago
Online video sharing doesn't have to exclusively mean professional "creators" who make content with hollywood-like budgets and expect massive returns. There are 100+ million accounts regularly uploading on Youtube and only around 2-3 million of them are in the partner program. The overwhelming majority get nothing.
zelphirkalt 20 minutes ago
The matter of compensation or donation can be handled completely separately. Creators can be supported on other platforms like Liberapay, Patreon, Kofi, and many creators are supported that way.
If we are talking about clickbait and making money from getting unwanted ads in people's faces, no thank you we don't need more of that.
djaro 6 minutes ago
WarmWash 13 minutes ago
austinthetaco 17 minutes ago
dylan604 21 minutes ago
Not really sure how people need to be explained this, but for whatever reason, this most basic of information is seemingly skipped over. Even if peertube wants to pay 65%, that's just a bigger percentage of nothing.
bobbob1921 15 minutes ago
I agree this is a real issue, however hopefully a solution is that creators will upload their videos to both sites (ie YouTube is their primary but also upload to peertube at the same time) which is pretty easy to do and eventually a site like peer tube might reach that critical mass with enough content
karmakurtisaani an hour ago
Lemmy is pretty ok actually. The lack of big user base is more of a feature than a bug.
organsnyder an hour ago
I've found the same with Mastadon. It has a pre-eternal-September feel to it.
al_borland 41 minutes ago
Has it normalized? When I first tried Lemmy it was mostly communists talking about communism. Then after some Reddit drama it seemed to be a bunch of people complaining about Reddit.
I generally like smaller sites, but those topics weren’t exactly engaging for me.
raphinou 2 hours ago
I am currently recording tutorial videos for an open source project. It's produced fully with Foss software (on Linux, obs, kdenlive) and about an open source project, so I wanted to host it with peertube (though YouTube might be used later on for its network effect, it was easier to publish with peertube as yt required an video of me and my ID). It's going fine until now. I don't host peertube myself though, I use an existing instance, and embed the videos in the website.
It was a really good experience, so I'll continue that way.
If you want to check out the videos: https://www.asfaload.com/videos/
pocksuppet 2 hours ago
PeerTube has some interesting technology with the P2P sharing between users who watch at the same time. But with these kind of projects I think there are unfortunately social factors that impact their success as well as technical factors.
It's one thing to put a <video> element on a HTML page (or implement video over webtorrent), it's quite another to make people actually watch it instead of their TikTok feed.
an0malous 2 minutes ago
The P2P stuff will take off once AI slop is done destroying the current web, like a new ecosystem emerging out of the carcass of a dead whale
manusartifex123 an hour ago
yeah video social media is way ahead with algorithms and content. I still think they need to exist and keep pushing for this idea
orphereus 2 hours ago
Does it have good content? I explored it a bit in the past, but was a bit underwhelmed with content I could find there.
Edit: in the past
hungryhobbit an hour ago
Stupid question: when people inevitably use this for pirate content, and the feds try to shut the service down ... what's the plan?
paxys 30 minutes ago
They can't shut down the service because there is no single service. They can go after individual servers, and that is fine. The admin is responsible for what happens on their server.
dewey an hour ago
Someone is still hosting the content and paying for resources just like with every other service distributed or not so it doesn't really add anything new to the equation.
rpgbr 42 minutes ago
The feds will go after the instance admin that is sharing pirate content.
treyd 27 minutes ago
The plan is the same as it always has been. It's no different than running an open FTP server.
GodelNumbering 41 minutes ago
Youtube has been incredibly frustrating for many many reasons and is evidently evil in many axes now. We really need competition in video hosting.
xfeeefeee 16 minutes ago
I am still a bit upset that I got banned without even a warning. I tried to adhere to policies and figured if anything was wrong, I'd get a warning at least, and then I'd know better what the limits are. Unfortunately there is little recourse and even less feedback.
Even more annoying is that it terminates your YouTube account entirely, so now I can't even login to use it. And I was a premium subscriber, too!
The best thing about YouTube is their agreements with rights holders to allow music and revenue sharing easily, which makes it very simple for creators and remixers etc to not get their stuff removed via DMCA.
WarmWash 20 minutes ago
Then start loading ads.
Youtube's biggest threat ever died in the cradle because they foolishly thought users would volunteer money to them.
No one with capital and capability looks at youtube, looks at youtube's audience, and says "Yeah, 30-40% ad-blocking and 4.5% paying for premium, these are the people I want to build services for!".
jesse_dot_id an hour ago
I like the idea of all of these federated services but why does the UX always feel like an afterthought when it is the most important factor for adoption?
cosmic_cheese an hour ago
Same reason why the Linux desktop often suffers on the UX/UX front: people naturally drawn to these projects tend to lean heavily technical, and highly technical circles have a bad habit of driving out less technical contributors through devaluation of their work and lack of agency within the project among other issues.
That sort of work also tends to be less well-compensated than that of SWEs which makes it more important to be paid for work (which most FOSS project cannot do).
StableAlkyne 39 minutes ago
UX work is often also a lot heavier and more subjective than the plumbing.
I might open a pull request to support some new video code, and that might only require a few dozen lines over a few files. That's easy to review, and it either works or it doesn't. Worst case they say "our convention is to register codecs as a subclass of X class, but you subclassed Y class" or something equally straightforward.
Let's say instead I wanted to change the workflow to register an account. Now I'm changing a bunch of JavaScript, CSS, templates, I'm adding pages, and I also need to update the backend. Even if someone is that into frontend work, it might take forever to even get reviewed by the maintainers because it's a massive PR.
Plus, now we've moved into subjectivity land: "I'm used to the old workflow," (because they designed it) "The last one was really easy" (for an engineer), "I think we should focus on the backend before we work on the UI," "I don't like this font because the license isn't free as in freedom" etc.
Even if you just mockup something on Figma or whatever, unless you're a maintainer it's probably going to just get ignored as a feature request. Because there's also the psychological aspect of basically being told that the UI you wrote is implicitly bad, if you're the maintainer reviewing the mockup.
jollymonATX 20 minutes ago
Maybe some devs in OSS are married to their horrid idea of how things should work?
matt_lo an hour ago
Random idea…
1. Chunk one inside a YT video 2. Chunk two inside a TikTok video 3. Chunk three on an X thread
And then just post the manifest somewhere that can be read by a client, that then pulls the data in (video, doc, anything)
Obv, not meant for speed or good UX, but if we’re going down the route of decentralization, we can probably leverage social platforms to host chunks of data.
RobotToaster 2 hours ago
Last time I tried it the federation was whitelist based, that is you could only follow people on instances added by the admin of your instance. This made content discovery difficult.
Raed667 an hour ago
It is unfortunate that in french « peer » reads as « pire » which translates to « worse-tube »
astrobe_ 11 minutes ago
Let's go for "PearTube" then.
dewey 43 minutes ago
It's developed by a french company, so that confusion can't be that critical.
gausswho an hour ago
Snarky lemma: In French, is the trend of things going worse to worse?
zuzululu an hour ago
is it bulletproof ? I don't think peertube has fixed that massive legal liability to the "seeders"
same situation that bitorrent found itself in
thinkingtoilet 2 hours ago
My recent experience with PeerTube was to click on the OpenMW released video and the video didn't load. Is that a regular occurrence on PeerTube?
ekjhgkejhgk 2 hours ago
Does it allow streaming?
serendipty01 2 hours ago
mxuribe 2 hours ago
I'm not affiliated with peertube...but yes it does enable/support streaming: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube#video-streaming-even-...
polonbike 2 hours ago
Yes. But a click on the link will provide a more detailed answer.
EGreg 2 hours ago
This does: https://safebots.github.io/Safecloud
I designed it in order to stream videos and get paid without worrying about getting deplatformed
Two weeks ago it was covered in a respected security publication: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/06/19/safecloud-browser...
It's coming out soon, but if you're adventurous, you can try it on GitHub already.
Edit: I posted it on HN right now as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48763565