Are people blind on PeerTube?

[solarpunker@slrpnk.net]

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.

[nimpnin@sopuli.xyz]

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.

[ulrich@feddit.org]

The sustainability argument stems from technological constraints. YouTube as a company has no problem sustaining millions of dollars in server infrastructure to serve media. Most self-hosters wouldn't be able to do that without significant income.

I don't agree with this perspective but also don't know enough about server infrastructure or video streaming to argue against it.

[asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev]

Running an actively used Peertube instance is a lot more expensive than, for example, a Lemmy instance. Videos take up a lot more storage than text. Not only that, the videos also need to be processed and then served. Who will keep paying for the monthly server bills?

Then there's monetization. Most YouTube creators are there because they make a living out of YouTube. There is no such thing on PeerTube. They would need to solely rely on donations.

The ideal PeerTube network would be where every somewhat big content creator ran their own instance and maybe a few general instances for smaller content creators that are regularly donated to.

If YouTube ever gets killed by Google, don't expect many people to come here.

[jakobfel@retrolemmy.com]

I personally see Peertube as something that'd be better as a small-scale, reasonably low-key way of storing and sharing videos if you're not interested in monetization or views. For example, documentation for a passion project.

For everything else, a different form of decentralization makes more sense, such as Odysee (though we'll see how the Arweave migration goes).

[n3m@reddthat.com]

Like others have said, it's way more resource intensive than text based systems. Even discounting higher res vids, if you go to any random larger YT channel and download all their videos in 144p 480p and 720p it'll be quite a lot larger than you might expect. Sure, if you're serious about it you could get an array of hard drives and a small server, but you're talking hundreds of bucks and lots of upkeep. Outsource it to a VPS and AWS buckets and you've still got upkeep but now you've added an extra 0 to your bill.

There's not enough charitable nerds on the internet to host even a fraction of 1% of Youtube. It's even worse if self hosting instances is pushed. Even as a fellow tech nerd, no way I'm hosting my own instance just so I can share a video once in a blue moon. Something that always gets my goat in fediverse discourse is when people always jump to saying something along the lines of "just host your own" then wonder why AP went from ~2.5M users to 0.8M users.

There's also some Fediverse specific issues that hold back a more mainstream audience. There's some fringe political stuff on both sides of the isle which can pretty easily scare off people, and defederation combined with peertube's more siloed approach makes discovery near nil. (can't see content from remote peertube instances unless somebody has already subscribed to that channel on the remote instance from your local instance AFAIK).

Then there's the new platform (or in this case many platforms connected via one protocol) issues. Lack of users, limited/no monetization, limited development/support, and very few pros + a lot of cons at first glance from somebody who doesn't consider tech a hobby and is comparing it to established platforms.

Edit: Can't remember who, but iirc a peertube user I follow who regularly deletes their videos because their host doesn't give them too much space. It's great for a less big tech way to see their latest videos, but not acceptable if anyone's gonna bill something like that as the next big video platform.

[kolanaki@pawb.social]

Does peertube actually host anything or is it just a frontend? All I've ever seen people linking to it are videos from YouTube, using PeerTube (and a couple other YT alternatives) as the interface.

[thorrjo@lemmy.sdf.org]

As far as I know the p2p only potentially applies when >1 global users are watching a video simultaneously.

edit: am I wrong? I thought they had bittorrent-like swarming.