One of the only things I find myself missing about reddit is the videos. I’m aware that it’s not really feasible for videos to be hosted on a lemmy instance at the moment, but I’m curious if that might change
One of the only things I find myself missing about reddit is the videos. I’m aware that it’s not really feasible for videos to be hosted on a lemmy instance at the moment, but I’m curious if that might change
Does PeerTube distribute load across instances, like BitTorrent? Or does it assume that the hosting instance has enough bandwidth to support all concurrent users?
It uses WebTorrent for distribution between viewers watching at the same time which can temporarily help with the load on popular videos, but there still needs to be at least one source instance that’s sharing the video “regularly” (for unpopular or old stuff), which ends up having the same bandwidth issues you’d get with any other video platform.
Oh, cool. I expect that means that bandwidth costs should scale sublinearly in number of concurrent viewers of the same video — so 1000 people watching the same video should cost less in bandwidth than 100 people watching 10 videos, or 10 people watching 100 videos.
PeerTube uses the WebTorrent protocol for its videos, so it does distribute load with everyone currently watching a video helping distribute it to everyone else. Each instance is its own torrent tracker. I’m not sure how I feel about it, because your IP address is visible to anyone else watching the video also.
I’m going to be honest with you, I have absolutely no idea how it works. And as far as I can see, there are very few instances at the moment.
Though someone smarter than me could probably answer you by checking the source code, or maybe they even have some documentation written already.