PeerTube just reached its final goal for the mobile app fundraiser - 75k € - with a few hours to spare!
(support.joinpeertube.org)
from AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space to fediverse@lemmy.world on 17 Jun 16:08
https://lemmy.abnormalbeings.space/post/4674439
from AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space to fediverse@lemmy.world on 17 Jun 16:08
https://lemmy.abnormalbeings.space/post/4674439
Thank you, everyone who contributed! And thank you, Framasoft, for providing free and open services like it to everyone!
threaded - newest
PeerTube needs content more than it needs anything else. There’s no reason to use a mobile app if there is nothing to watch on it anyway.
I also feel like the algorithm is kinda brutal. Even if there’s good stuff I’m not sure I’d ever really find it
Same with Loops.
That’s unfortunate to hear, I haven’t really used loops at all but I hope they can figure it out to a point of adequacy
The problem is that it is just a fundamentally un-profitable platform for creators. Ads don’t work (… period but also) because of the decentralized nature of it. Any instance/frontend that added ads would be shunned in favor of those who don’t. And any video hosted only on a single “instance” would rapidly cost way too much if it ever became moderately popular.
Which means there is no reason for Content Creators to… care. So the best it can ever get is “early youtube”. And people SAY they want early youtube videos but everyone is deeply spoiled by the difference between a video that was made in a week of after work tweaking versus weeks of full time planning and editing.
Which is why peertube in general is one of the “fediverse” products that… I feel really weird about. I forget if Floatplane/Weapons of Guntube/whatever use it or something they rolled themselves, but this really feels like the kind of software project that has the end state of getting “adopted” by a corporation and the major devs hired on as consultants.
Like, twitter (mastodon), reddit (lemmy), and even instagram (??) make sense to me and are very conducive to self hosting since… they are message boards and that is how we used to roll. But video is expensive and hard AND needs incentives to create “good” content for it.
Yeah, if it wants to actually compete with YouTube it would have to have monetization. I’ve talked about that on Lemmy before, I agree.
But at least with a good algorithm it could be like old youtube where folks can speak to the world and share things in video format
The issue with “Algorithms” is that you need a lot of data to generate recommendations… which tends to mean centralized (or a LOT of data scraping).
Which is why stuff like Nebula and Floatplane and Ian McCollum’s latest “apolitical” side hustle all are still 100% dependent on Youtube. Hell… I actually still subscribe to Legal Eagle and NileRed on Youtube so that I know when they have a new Nebula video.
And just to be clear: None of the above (including Peertube in general) is competing with Youtube. Well, Floatplane says it is but that is because linus sebastien is a dipshit con man. But it still speaks to the fundamental issue of where Content comes from and what it takes to have the time and resources to do a “good” video.
I know people use YouTube differently, but for me it always was a platform for “video sharing”. I don’t really watch YouTubers, but use it for funny videos, stuff from our publicly funded broadcast channels, music videos. So I guess I am not really using it for channels that require ads. Also I do not watch ads at all at any time due to ad block, and never would.
I was a streamer for an incredibly popular game, I had millions of hours of watch time.
The total amount I made for the thousands of hours I invested is $0.00
My costs were in the thousands, when I consider the extra I paid for high-speed internet, computer upgrades, microphones, blah blah blah
People are a bunch of whining little leeching bitches.
Everyone can shut the fuck up because nobody will support a creator.
I don’t know, saw a “creator” who is funding her endless cruise ship journeys using YT, and all she taks about is how she funds her cruise ship journeys using YT
I’ve been playing video games for 40 years, where can I get my money?
not all of us care about profit. or at least not in the shove promotions in your face youtube status quo way.
And good for you.
But it is the fundamental issue with art. Art needs funding whether that is a patron or a tip jar or whatever. Canvas and paint costs money. Being able to spend an extra afternoon looking at a landscape costs money. Having time to edit and revise your script costs money. And so forth.
And same for youtube. It is the difference between being able to “get it right” versus just using the footage you have and “making it work”. Hell, I love videos that explain how to do basic repairs that I should have learned long ago. And having the money to set up a free standing pipe or cut a bathtub spout in half works a lot better than trying to hold a camera to record yourself replacing a dishwasher airgap and not actually capturing where the clips were.
good for me, like i have money? assuming a lot bub
thanks for sharing about funding and youtube amd repairs. i agree, and you sound cool.
my point is that federated services should be source of truth, and that we can federate to corporate platforms as needed.
for example i use Discord cuz people are there. but i do important stuff in Matrix these days, and copy/paste to Discord as needed. that way we control our work and what is put into the Discord system instead of it being the default. this is my aspiration, migrations take a while.
I think you do bring up important points, and ads are indeed a de-facto impossibility (even though, technically, there’s nothing stopping someone creating a plug-in that shows ads, the dynamics you describe would make platforms using it isolated quickly). I would add that, personally, I don’t want to ever have PeerTube go down the ad rabbit hole, it comes with a lot of dynamics that almost make enshittification inevitable - although I heard some Fedi platforms had some success with very selected and limited sale of hand-curated advertisement spots, that really isn’t scalable in the same way.
But while this makes PeerTube uninteresting to the really big players that want or need to maximise their income - I think there is still a lot of potential left. Two of the other big revenue streams are still available - sponsored segments in videos can work basically the very same as on YT. And Liberapay/Patreon/Ko-Fi are still available as well, with Framasoft mentioning looking into enabling better integration for services like it in the future. Another possibility I imagine could work, would be Nebula-like platforms utilising the technology eventually, with local content on the server being fenced-off to paying subscribers, but those registered local users still able to also reach the bigger, free network of videos in the Fediverse beyond that.
There are a lot of mid-sized YT channels, and channels not wanting to compromise on satisfying ad guidelines, that basically only make pennies from YTs normal monetisation strategies and completely rely on sponsoring and patrons. For those, PeerTube is a genuine possibility in the future, after more organic growth. And that growth will have to follow the usual stages of alternative platforms, with currently enthusiasts and hobbyists being the “moss and lichen” to enable growth of “grasses” in the future, to use a metaphor.
I can understand the fear, but from what I know of Framasoft - if they were prone to sell out, they would not have “wasted” decades on their passion projects, and stubbornly delaying to do more dynamic, non-local, non-French marketing of their “de-google-ify” suite.
EDIT: Good exchange indicative of this I just (at the time of this edit) witnessed on Mastodon: <img alt="" src="https://lemmy.abnormalbeings.space/pictrs/image/bbe5a04b-fb68-499f-a5d4-5f947372e6f3.png">
Yes. Discoverability is the real key. Which also is not at all addressed on peertube and, as I mentioned above, mostly still comes from youtube for the creators who have branched out to other platforms.
A Michael Reeves can get away with just having a kofi and making massive bank because of how big he has gotten… from youtube. Whereas even a Not An Engineer has a channel that lives or dies by collabs and shoutouts from other youtubers (I do suspect he has an independent source of income though).
Also… you put even Not An Engineer on your peertube instance and he is going to consume a disproportionate amount of bandwidth. Let alone a Michael Reeves who would crash the entire fediverse during his annual video.
What you are describing is “if you build it, they will come”. Which is patently false. Ad revenue gets worse and worse every year but it usually is essential to even offsetting parts and labor for a video for smaller creators. I think it was Gamers Nexus that discussed the different tiers of monetization in the context of the honey scandal, but the basic idea is that ads are what let you know if a channel has any legs and referral links are what keep you alive until you are big enough for a sponsor to care.
Which… is also the issue. The kind of sponsors who would fund a peertube video (and just look around at how fediverse folk view ANY form of monetization of the content they consume…) are going to be more bluechew than not, if you catch my drift. And they aren’t going to pay much.
Which gets back to: Peertube as a concept is great for official tutorials and MAYBE blog posts by “nobodies”. Why would anyone go out of their way to join in decentralized hosting of that? And while it is conceptually a great way to “can’t stop the signal” an important video… it either rapidly becomes liveleaks or we see the same thing that happened with Lemmy where the instance owners get a phone call from their local FBI equivalent and rapidly say “I don’t want that smoke”.
But Peertube as something people would even want to browse or create Content for? I have yet to see any path toward that that isn’t “Well, people really love the ideologies of FOSS so they’ll do it out of the goodness of their heart”
Hmm, I think we have vastly different perspectives on what PeerTube has to become to be a worthwhile product, because I agree with a lot of what you said, but I don’t fully see what the problem is and don’t think the ultimate conclusion - which seems to be “No one would want to produce and/or browse content on there” - is true. I think the basic issue is that you seem to have the maximalist goal of wanting PeerTube to be at similar numbers to YouTube, and missing that, you don’t see anyone finding worth in it - so I will argue against that point, hoping I did not misread you there.
A small thing to start out with, but it is something I have definitely noticed while running an instance these past months, and something people underestimate I think - concerning:
While taken as-fact if those number of viewers just appeared right now outside of organic growth, it might be true, I am not aware of scaling tests that go that large. But PeerTube is ridiculously scalable in bandwidth, thanks to the Peer2Peer nature. For the same reason many thousands of people can download 4k movies and shows concurrently via torrents with just a few dedicated seedboxes, PeerTube can scale bandwidth really, really well. My server has ~300GB reserved to automatically mirror and seed trending, new and popular videos, for example, so it is also not just home internet connections helping with bandwidth security. So I think you are underestimating the scalability here.
The real costly part is storage, bandwidth is surprisingly affordable considering the project we are talking about - the influx in audience a “big creator” could mean to an instance, as well as with it potential support in donations both directly and indirecty, could very well outweigh the addional costs (again - mostly storage). More generally as another anecdote about how scaleable PeerTube is thanks to the underlying tech - Mastodon has been much more of a head-scratcher in scalability for my server resources (A bit of config changes helped there, thankfully, but it is still far less efficient) - and that is with just me myself as a user on there at the moment, compared to ~50 active users on my PeerTube instance, including people uploading videos.
And:
I don’t know Gamer’s Nexus, and how their numbers broke down, so I have no real grounds of questioning their logic. On the other hand, I do know of a few channels I used to watch on YT publishing their numbers in community posts. Those numbers definitely made me think, that channels that make proper money from ads that would be essential in any way, are not what I would call “small” at all. And I am a bit confused - first you mention it is essential income, then you mention it is in fact mostly useful as a metric for measuring feasibility? I think I may have misread something there.
I’m assuming I missed a valid scandal here that led to closing of an instance, but - Lemmy (and PieFed, and mBin) is very much alive and we are discussing on it. It is even a better place for some niche content in the FLOSS sphere, than Reddit is right now. So, I am not certain what exactly you mean by the consequences of something happening to Lemmy?
“Well, people really love the ideologies of FOSS so they’ll do it out of the goodness of their heart” is indeed part of the first wave of the ecosystem. And roughly four years ago, when I first had a look at PeerTu
No, my point is that there is no reason for a Content Creator to actually put effort into Peertube (or even the youtube alternatives that they aren’t co-owners of). And there is no path toward that.
People run seedboxes because they get something out of it: Private tracker access.
You apparently are happy to donate your bandwidth. Good for you. I suspect you would think otherwise when a video “goes viral” and you suddenly get a call from your ISP telling you they have decided you are hosting a business and that you need to pay for a different internet plan. PLENTY of people learned this the fun way back in the 90s/00s.
In the context of file hosting, “bandwidth” is usually used as a catch all for both the raw bandwidth of a single node AND the requirements of a CDN. Otherwise that server gets hugged to death, everyone is angry, blah blah blah. Again, this is a lesson we learned in the 00s.
Ah, so now content creators are working specifically to support Peertube. Which means their effective operating costs have just skyrocketed because now they are paying for their own hosting AND paying for all the time and materials to make the video in the first place.
Which is WHY Youtube became so massive. Paying for your own hosting is REALLY expensive and tears into already thin margins for the vast majority of Content Creators.
This board is on the dot world instance. Back when Luigi allegedly popped that guy, dot world was leading the charge in terms of complete nonsense CYAs to protect the instance from getting a knock from the FBI equivalent. Similarly, I have my account on the dot zip instance and we have very weird rules regarding the UK because of their data privacy laws.
Or, to be an old again: Every even semi-public FTP server goes the same way. Everything is great. Then you suddenly realize that porn has appeared out of nowhere. And, best case scenario, it is the kind of porn that gets people arrested (because it can get SO much worse…). The same issue came up with file sharing back in the day. And it is why a lot of lemmy/mastodon instances have very specific rules regarding image hosting and NSFW content.
It is great you have had a good experience. Others won’t and will rapidly realize just what they are doinating their bandwidth to.
Great. I didn’t “disregard” anyone. But you have to understand that You Don’t Matter. Because all those things that you (and I) hate about modern video content? That is done to make money.
Google are constantly running analytics to figure out what length of video is most profitable for them in terms of storage, bandwidth, and monetizability. Content Creators are constantly figuring out what Google wants to get a video promoted to the front page AND what will make people not only click that video on the front page but also keep watching so that they can get the metrics that get them those sponsorships.
And its great that you and the people who like Peertube don’t care about that. But that gets back to the same exact point I have been making the entire time: if creating content for a platform can’t even meaningfully offset the cost of creating that content in the first place, the VAST majority of people won’t and you are basically left with the independently wealthy people.
Already mentioned it elsewhere in the thread but this is a story as old as history itself. Creating art costs money. Canvas and paint costs money. Having the time to stay another day to look at that landscape for just a bit longer costs money.
Having a good camera and mic costs money. Having the newest fanciest cell phone with the auto stabilizer so you don’t need a rig costs money. Having the time to learn and use that video editing software costs money. Havi
I think there is some aggression here directed at me that comes from stuff other people in the thread have been throwing at you, so I have some understanding for the aggressive tone, even though I wonder why you are that emotionally invested, or at least, why your language seems to reflect that to that degree at this moment. I don’t think we will be able to change each others’ mind either way. But I feel like I should address at least a few points, where I think your estimations are at least off (again, not completely untrue):
Okay, that at least makes the context more understandable to me. And for the big ones, I still agree. For a lot of others, I think even now publishing on both can make genuine sense, it’s surprisingly cheap, or even free utilising one of the many established instances, to have additional reach with a passionate and growing community. And I do think that with further growth, there is potnential for it to attract more than just people doing it “out of the goodness of their heart.” And I do think it is not doomed to be a “fundamentally un-profitable platform”. Even now, with just a few months running, I have a surprisingly large chunk of costs covered by donations already, which I did not expect.
And people run PeerTube instances for a multitude of reasons. Some financed by donations, some out of pocket, some by non-profits. They get the same out of it, as any of the other big Fediverse instances, sometimes just community and pride, sometimes a genuine side job, some non-profits have employees having it as a main job, too.
Well, it wouldn’t be my ISP, as it’s not my home connection, but my server provider. But, point taken. So far, stress tests haven’t yet produced the risk of what you are describing, to my knowledge. Might happen, might not, you seem to have experience, which I respect. But I also know that experience might not translate to different situations and dynamics properly at times, and I also respect the people in the broader PeerTube community running instances with their own experience also greater than my own not agreeing on that point as unambivalently.
Actually, you misunderstood what I meant here. What I meant was a large content creator just generating a growth in community for an instance, some of which will be supporting the instance on their own, with the content creator maybe also adding donations if they want to. Again, everything I have heard from the community currently active on PeerTube, some of which having been active for Years, indicates costs scale better than your estimate seems to indicate, including, again, from people more experienced than me, and with some exceptional videos already in the 100ks of views.
You kind of did with:
Maybe you did not mean it that way, but claiming “everyone” is a statement that disregards people you claim are not existing in “everyone”. Speaking of disregarding:
I mean, that’s what I mean with, why do you seem so emotionally invested. What are you trying to do? Save us all from investing resources into PeerTube? Just end up “winning” this argument for winning’s sake?
And people passionate about things, which is an important group. E.g. I am living on disability payments that are subsistence level (in a western European country, so it is overall oka
To be honest, I had the feeling it is lopsided the other way around at the moment: There are quite a few good and passionate content creators, lacking in an audience and interaction. I mean - sure - it does not have the amount of content of a big tech platform like YT, and not enough to binge watch stuff all day long, but I think lack of an active audience is at the moment more pressing - as is discoverability. If not using outside channels - like promoting on their Mastodon accounts primarily - or using places like !peertube@lemmy.world or !peertube@lemmy.wtf to discover things, a lot of worthwhile content right now flies under the radar. And that is excluding unofficial mirrors of YT content, which I tend to avoid.
On the other hand - I know lack of a mobile app has come up at several times in comments on there, and I have myself by now anecdotally heard from a few people wanting to try PeerTube and then being weirded out by the unfinished mobile app in ways that were unrecoverable. In addition, adding more know-how and codebase for mobile applications into the greater FLOSS ecosphere and Fediverse is good in its own right, there is a severe lack of it.
Always ready to complain. All these things need to exist in order to gain traction. You need to have content and multiple ways to view it. Complaining that there’s an additional way to view it is just unnecessary negativity.
If you think there isn’t enough content, be the change you want to see: make it.
Anti Commercial-AI license
I’m not complaining, I’m stating a fact. Also, the argument “if you can’t find the content you want, you need to make it” is stupid. I can go to YouTube and find content about sealing a concrete patio. I can’t on peertube, so I need to figure out how and make a video on how to do it? That’s stupid.
“That’s stupid”. Great argument. “This content doesn’t exist on $platform ergo $platform is stupid”. “Be the change you want to see is stupid because it’s stupid!”.
Can’t wait for the content you’re going to contribute to peertube.
Anti Commercial-AI license
It’s a chicken and egg issue. Nobody will create content on a platform with inferior usability.
Hard to capture that lightning
It’s a chicken and egg issue for sure, but I think you’ve got the wrong egg.
Nobody will create content on a platform with few viewers. Nobody will be a viewer on a platform with few content creators.
And there will be even fewer users with a bad or lacking interface. It certainly does not solve the problem, but it helps reduce barriers to entry for new users.
I mean that’s true but I don’t think that’s part of the chicken and egg cycle, as you can improve UX before getting users too
I think they need an application that simultaneously posts to YouTube and PeerTube. So creators can effortlessly post to both the existing platform with all the viewers while also adding content to the alternative.
Similar how OBS can stream to YouTube and Twitch simultaneously.
That does sound like it would help.
The channel sync is awesome and very stable.
Most of the creators on Canadian Civil use it. The issue is if you just dual-post you don’t get the benefit that PeerTube offers of a place to test and reupload your video.
Is the egg not income or does peer tube pay creators now?
There is now enough interesting content that I find myself spending more and more time on peertube. The trick is finding it I guess. Sepia search does help but it’s not perfect. I’ve found that following the #peertube and #livestream hashtags on mastodon is a good way to catch a livestream or find people promoting their channel on fedi.
Plus some sort of payout system.
I wonder why almost no one uses PWAs ? (Now that Mozilla supports PWAs)
PWA = Progressive Web-App
if i streamed video games to peertube would you watch it 🥺🥺🥺
Yes I would, Please stream some video games. But what are you going to stream & on which instance ?
uhhh call of duty and uhhh i dont know
Depends, I am not a person that watches a lot of streamers - but if you end up streaming a blind playthrough of Disco Elysium, I am literally addicted to that.
Are you funny, giving advice the entire time, or hot?
The trinity of game streamer archetypes
I’ll check it out.
last time i used it it was full of explicit content in default filters
Yeah, that is very varying from instance to instance, I try to keep outright porn completely out of mine, for example, but allow non-sexualised nudity (within reason), both for my own server and content I federate with. Others, like peertube.wtf don’t allow porn on their server, but allow it in the federated content. Others again just outright ban NSFW content altogether.
I know! It’s even more like youtube than I expected.