PeerTube is a decentralized and federated alternative to YouTube. The goal of PeerTube is not to replace YouTube but to offer a viable alternative using the strength of ActivityPub and P2P protocols.
Being built on ActivityPub means PeerTube is able to be part of a bigger social network, the Fediverse (the Federated Universe). On the other hand, P2P technologies help PeerTube to solve the issue of money, inbound with all streaming platform : With PeerTube, you don’t need to have a lot of bandwidth available on your server to host a PeerTube platform because all users (which didn’t disable the feature) watching a video on PeerTube will be able to share this same video to other viewers.
If you are curious about PeerTube, I can’t recommend you enough to check the official website to learn more about the project. If after that you want to try to use PeerTube as a content creator, you can try to find a platform available there to register or host yourself your own PeerTube platform on your own server.
The development of PeerTube is actually sponsored by Framasoft, a french non-for-profit popular educational organization, a group of friends convinced that an emancipating digital world is possible, convinced that it will arise through actual actions on real world and online with and for you!
Framasoft is also involved in the development of Mobilizon, a decentralized and federated alternative to Facebook Events.
If you want to contribute to PeerTube, feel free to:
- report bugs and give your feedback on Github or on our forums
- submit your brillant ideas on our Feedback platform
- Help to translate the software, following the contributing guide
- Make a donation to help to pay bills inbound in the development of PeerTube.
This sounds awesome, I hadn’t heard of it before. Thanks for sharing!
Very well explained… I think a lot of people do not get it and take Peertube for another entertainment platform, only with poor content!
Does anybody use Peertube here? How is it? Good content? Accessible from mobile?
I would love to use it more, but there is just nothing on there to watch except for a few channels that just mirror a YouTube channel, or niche FOSS content.
I use it from time to time. The tech is getting better.
But it’s very hard to find anything interesting on it.
They REALLY need to focus on implementing content filter and discovery tools.
Right now it’s a lot noise and reposted videos. The search function doesn’t work at all.I think the platform could be viable with a decent, verbatim search function; a tag-based browsing system, and the ability to visualize the federated instances and browse any of them as local.
It’s still possible to find interesting videos by browsing an instance focused on a specific interested as local.
I would agree that the biggest things holding PeerTube back right now are just the lack of interesting content and better search functionality. Unfortunately the content problem would probably only be fixed by PeerTube becoming more popular, but the way it would get more popular is through having more interesting content… Vicious cycle. PeerTube doesn’t have the benefit of a lack of alternatives whenever YouTube causes a mass exodus from their site, as Mastodon had with Twitter or Lemmy with Reddit. There are at least a few other YT alternatives such as Rumble and Odysee that already have strong advantages over PeerTube in the content, UI and funding departments, and some have mobile apps as well. Some even have sync features with YT to simultaneously post to YT and their site, a feature I don’t believe PeerTube has. It’s gonna take a lot of work to compete even with those sites.
Hi,
Can you paste examples of when the search doesn’t work? And are you talking about the PeerTube instance builtin search or https://sepiasearch.org/?
I have never had any success in using it the same way you’d often use YouTube, by going to the front page and looking for content.
However, after a few years on Mastodon, I have often found myself watching videos from Peertube that popped up in my feed. As the speed of the stream depends on the capacity of the host instance of Peertube, I would often encounter performance issues when watching Peertube videos a few years ago, but the last year or so it has been nothing but great.
And since it’s the Fediverse, you could follow for example @blender and have all their future videos show up directly in the feed of whatever platform you’re on. :)
- Does anybody use Peertube here?
nobody
- How is it?
pretty good beside the fact that there is no videos.
- Good content?
no
- Accessible from mobile?
no
I migrated some videos I had on YouTube to PeerTube last year. But apart from that, I use it less time than I would like to.
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Me. I just only use it to send memes over here.
It’s usable, but definitely needs work with the UI design and for finding new videos. For mobile, newpipe works for peertube as well as youtube, but doesn’t allow logging in. Fedilab allows logging in to peertube accounts, although it’s slightly annoying switching between that and my Mastodon account.
There isn’t that much good content yet, although there’s a lot of videos about open source software like linux, the fediverse, kde, emacs, blender or krita. There’s also a decent amount of gaming content too. My favorite instance is probably tilvids.com which is focused on educational videos. They have open account signup if you just want to follow, vote and comment, but you need to apply to upload videos.
Very cool, but is this the right community for it?
Linux is more than just code, it’s community and values. Peertube certainly represents those ideas more than data harvesting systems designed by advertising companies to track us. I think we should support the communities, companies and software in line with our motivations for using Linux, namely freedom in the case of Peertube.
Ah, the remote transcode function will really help with hosting it. You can get a relatively cheap VPS with fast net connection, but those usually lack the CPU power to transcode the videos on upload. But now it seems like you can have a fast PC somewhere on a reasonably fast fiber line onto which you can off-load the video transcoding job easily.
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Oh God the spam bots are already here…
