Each PeerTube instance provides a website to browse and watch videos, and is by default independent from others in terms of appearance, features and rules.
Several instances, with common rules (e.g. allowing for similar content, requiring registration) can form federations, where they follow one’s videos, even though each video is stored only by the instance that published it. Federations are independent from each other and asymmetrical: one instance can follow another to display their videos without them having to do the same. Instances’ administrators can each choose to mirror individual videos or whole friend instances, creating an incentive to build communities of shared bandwidth.
Videos are made available via HTTP to download, but playback favors a peer-to-peer playback using HLS and WebTorrent. Users connected to the platform act as relay points that send pieces of video to other users, lessening the bandwidth of each to the server and thus allowing smaller hardware to operate at a lower cost.
Yeah, but Lemmy instances don’t split bandwidth P2P. Imagine hosting a video on some cheap cloud instance that doesn’t have any kind of traffic sharing and putting some brand new game trailer up like Diablo 4, then someone links your video copy on something like Reddit. You’d get obliterated if all the video traffic was just coming from your server.
Quoting Wikipedia:
Each PeerTube instance provides a website to browse and watch videos, and is by default independent from others in terms of appearance, features and rules.
Several instances, with common rules (e.g. allowing for similar content, requiring registration) can form federations, where they follow one’s videos, even though each video is stored only by the instance that published it. Federations are independent from each other and asymmetrical: one instance can follow another to display their videos without them having to do the same. Instances’ administrators can each choose to mirror individual videos or whole friend instances, creating an incentive to build communities of shared bandwidth.
Videos are made available via HTTP to download, but playback favors a peer-to-peer playback using HLS and WebTorrent. Users connected to the platform act as relay points that send pieces of video to other users, lessening the bandwidth of each to the server and thus allowing smaller hardware to operate at a lower cost.
Wikipedia Source
Ah so the P2P works via instances, not users. Interesting idea.
sounds like Lemmy.
Yeah, but Lemmy instances don’t split bandwidth P2P. Imagine hosting a video on some cheap cloud instance that doesn’t have any kind of traffic sharing and putting some brand new game trailer up like Diablo 4, then someone links your video copy on something like Reddit. You’d get obliterated if all the video traffic was just coming from your server.