What I find crucial about Framasoft’s work is not the idea that PeerTube will « beat » YouTube (that’s not even the goal), but that it exists at all. A small association like theirs reminds us that the way things are done online is not set in stone.
By building tools that prioritize openness and decentralization, they show that there could be real alternatives to the dominant platforms. Even if most people never leave YouTube, the simple fact that PeerTube and similar projects exist keeps alive the idea that the web doesn’t have to be controlled by a handful of corporations.
They need help in their journey - support them :) [0]
Does Peertube not have federation or similar? This will never take off if users have to visit dozens of different instances each specifically for one interest of theirs.
Yup. It's why this, and Mastodon, failed so hard IMHO. It's all on different domains, looks and feels totally different, so the user experience is just terrible.
I thought I did. It worked fantastically well for email and the web, why not this? But it didn't for the reasons I stated (IMHO), and even worse -- even when twitter finally imploded it didn't take over at all.
One solution would be smaller cathedrals. Not everyone wants to go to the bazaar to pick what works for them; but most everyone would benefit if there was a limit to how encompassing a tech company can get.
Network effects are also somehow not working very well for decentralised things, possibly because everyone wants to fork Product X but no one wants to improve it for added discoverability or less bugs.
there are different solutions to different problems.
for example Substack is a good upgrade to social media. It's centralized, but people have to pay their favorite writers. They do this to avoid bs, ads, being a product. The important part of Substack is that if the platform screw the authors over, they have control over their email lists (unlike social media), and they can just move somewhere else.
So a platform like Substack is a move in the right direction vs. something like Twitter.
It's great to see PeerTube development, but I think it will continue to be extremely niche until a good solution for decentralized monetization is found. For both content creators and data hosters.
It's extremely hard to move users accustomed to "free" advertisement-fueled services to the micro-payment model. Content creators actively try to increase revenue by using things like Patreon and membership-only videos, but YouTube ads is still the dominant source for most.
And properly paying for the underlying infrastructure is even more difficult. Filecoin tries to do it, but it's hard to call it a succesfull project.
Personally, I feel we're slowly moving beyond the mindset that one tool or service needs to "rule them all". I was recently very pleased to discover several online events I took part in were powered by PeerTube, and it just worked.
If an organization is looking to host a stream or offer virtual attendance of sorts, it feels like a no-brainer to pick something like PeerTube and avoid the data/algorithm behemoths.
Self-replicating objects always become the majority of objects. Corporations will always find out how to make sure their stuff is self-replicating for revenue. Individual creators won't.
Well, it is very easy to get video demonetized on YT, it is enough to use one of the forbidden words, like Israel. Another thing are shadowbans. I see more and more people are trying to have side channel for the monetization, like Patreon.
This is about PeerTube. I really want this project to succeed but it’s been many years and basically no one has heard of it. Is it really worth directing people to? The positioning of PeerTube, Framasoft, etc gets confusing for an everyday person like me.
As an everyday person, you can continue to use YouTube to discover and consume content.
It's more like, if you find a maker of content that you like, they might happen to have a PeerTube or other independent YouTube-like site up as well, as a backup or larger archive of their material.
The independently hosted FOSS alternatives are more for people who create content and don't want to or can't depend on the good graces of bigtech to indefinitely host their content for whatever reason (usually a practical matter, sometimes even underlying political factors).
For instance, YouTube will scan new content automatically and zap the channel if it says the wrong couple words more than a few times.
Maybe that's not a problem for a lot of channels. But there were definitely tons of creators who got burned by that kind of cancelling over the last n years.
So I imagine, yes, some entrepreneurial, technical, and communication-oriented folks would be interested in things like PeerTube, YouPHPTube (which is actually quite good) [1], etc.
> For instance, YouTube will scan new content automatically and zap the channel if it says the wrong couple words more than a few times.
This type of censorship is why I think decentralized video is important. But if it isn’t accessible to everyday people there will be low views and it hurts the availability of censored content.
I agree with him. The whole, "consume content" phrase has a subtle effect of making us int mindless consumers rather than freedom choice thinkers. People need to stop drinking the consumer market koolaid.
i dislike the phrase too but the tone of the comment was pretty shitty, apart from being off topic.
Also to think that it's the phrase "consume content" making us mindless consumer seems way off to me. What would you call most of the videos on youtube/tiktok/instagram? Art, Documentaries, Didactic aid? Perhaps "content" is the best way to refer to them.
That's another good objection, next to lumping all stuff into one category: some creative output is "content", not writing, or video, or spoken word, or painting, or acting or even "merch", it's all "content". Calling every item sold, from toothpaste to iron pipe to dump trucks "product" is the same: disrespectful of the thought and effort and craft that go in to making ping pong balls or airplanes.
It's an MBA's way of denigrating everything not presentable in a PowerPoint.
Whenever I look at PeerTube there is basically no high quality stuff on it - i look through it for 5-10 minutes and it’s all bad.
To me it’s so far removed from what YouTube is i find it hard to compare the two - it might market itself as an alternative but I don’t see how that can be
We have to distinguish delivery and discovery. Any competing video platform will have a very skewed selection of content at the start, biased towards stuff YouTube doesn't want to show its users, and in most cases, with good reason (i.e, stuff the users wouldn't want to see). Any kind of popularity-on-the-platform based filtrering will also not work, due to this skew.
yes! i think we also need to keep reminding people that discovery is not an euphemism for advertisement. and if they expect it to be this passive, detached process of being told what the good shit is and then fed it, then they're part of the problem.
i've had good experiences with discovery on decentralized platforms. it's proceeded by means totally unlike advertisement, hmm, i wonder if anyone remembers what those were?
what i find funnier is how the platforms that have actual content hate crypto, and the platforms that have crypto ... i'm not sure if they even remember what "content" was. that ain't a way to starve youtubers, it's the exact opposite. shame.
This is nice but I have zero idea how I can surface interesting or useful videos. The search function on PeerTube doesn't give me anything useful for my topics of interest.
As a result, I wind up wasting hours and I simply do not have that time.
I'm basically saying, you can't rely on on-platform discovery. You'll have to find the links to good stuff on peertube somewhere else than peertube - anywhere else. It could even be here.
Or to take it from the other perspective, if you make videos on Peertube you need to give people some way different than doomscrolling/built in search to find your stuff.
Yeah this is a good point. I have been thinking about doing some video creation and I really don't want to be locked into YouTube's platform. I want people to find my video content in some other way because I do not want YouTube to be dominating how my content is shown or becomes visible because then, they are in control of my creative process, not me. So I will stick to posting links on my website and surfacing my content by posting on sites like this. Maybe someday I will find any more automatic way of doing this at some point. I wonder if that is allowed on HN?
fair point! depends on the search space, though. can't do much channel surfing on 2 channels, one of which broadcasts in russian on fridays. (actually turns out you can; you catch cable from the neighbors' leaky wiring and discover lil kim.)
i don't think you can do much doomscrolling on peertube, either. but then, that's probably a non-goal for their project. instead i think i'll go look if there's a 3rd party frontend for that now, blessings :-)
That is simply your outdated opinion. By facts it is a better alternative as I just created an account and I see it as a better option. The joy in my words is enough to tell you how good I feel about it. Youtube is history for me and many others, your opinion will not change that.
It hasn't succeeded yet, so therefore we should stop talking about it? I never understood this line of thinking. Some new inferior but better hyped variant, like Bluesky to Mastodon? Yes, the better technology doesn't always win out, but should we make that a self-fulfilling prophecy by pre-emptively abandoning something?
The value in YouTube is their monetization network which brings real money to the people uploading videos through advetising deals and the premium subscription. This is why YT became such a juggernaut - it's not just covering its tech costs, its also providing folks with real revenue to create those videos.
And this is where Peertube isn't really the same kind of a platform so you won't see the same kind of videos.
I think it’s worth remember that at any time a service like YouTube can do something that like everyone off. It hasn’t happened yet, but when it happens, people will need a place to go to. Now imagine if people start thinking about it only after the enshittification get so bad that getting an usable alarmeis would take years.
Great initiative thank you, it was time to have a better platform. Just created an account with 500gb free and no bullshit. Youtube deleted my account because simply I was showing HugstonOne to the world and that is a violation of their privacy. All I hear from Youtube users is frustration and all are leaving in anger. Personally I don´t like tyranny and will never go back to youtube-google-producthunt...
There are plenty of pleasant alternatives. Here my new channel: https://clip.place/w/inRMaEHjNeLvBLAS9Yas89
For me, as a parent, YT has clear issues, for instance I am not able to block the channel, so no video from the channel can be viewed by kid. The only way is to add channel to "don't recommend" list, which is not working.
Too bad the creators stopped giving Mobilizon (Facebook events/meetup alternative) love a while back. It's a wonderful idea and pretty close to useful but so riddled with bugs it's painful. I've opened a few very small PRs and issues and posted them in their Matrix but nobody seems to be home to look.
What I find crucial about Framasoft’s work is not the idea that PeerTube will « beat » YouTube (that’s not even the goal), but that it exists at all. A small association like theirs reminds us that the way things are done online is not set in stone.
By building tools that prioritize openness and decentralization, they show that there could be real alternatives to the dominant platforms. Even if most people never leave YouTube, the simple fact that PeerTube and similar projects exist keeps alive the idea that the web doesn’t have to be controlled by a handful of corporations.
They need help in their journey - support them :) [0]
[0] https://framasoft.org/
A few of the sizable instances I know of:
Debian: https://peertube.debian.social/
Blender: https://video.blender.org/
Extinction Rebellion: https://tube.rebellion.global/
Does Peertube not have federation or similar? This will never take off if users have to visit dozens of different instances each specifically for one interest of theirs.
It does. It federates with all the other services like mastodon and pixelfed.
Discovery is still absolutely ass even if you're using it right though
Yup. It's why this, and Mastodon, failed so hard IMHO. It's all on different domains, looks and feels totally different, so the user experience is just terrible.
Well do you want decentralization or not?
IMO This is like people complaining that multiple Linux distros exist.
I thought I did. It worked fantastically well for email and the web, why not this? But it didn't for the reasons I stated (IMHO), and even worse -- even when twitter finally imploded it didn't take over at all.
I think that most people don't want decentralization. Most decentralized systems have bad UX.
The issue is monopolies.
What solution is there, if not monopolies or decentralization?
One solution would be smaller cathedrals. Not everyone wants to go to the bazaar to pick what works for them; but most everyone would benefit if there was a limit to how encompassing a tech company can get.
Network effects are also somehow not working very well for decentralised things, possibly because everyone wants to fork Product X but no one wants to improve it for added discoverability or less bugs.
there are different solutions to different problems.
for example Substack is a good upgrade to social media. It's centralized, but people have to pay their favorite writers. They do this to avoid bs, ads, being a product. The important part of Substack is that if the platform screw the authors over, they have control over their email lists (unlike social media), and they can just move somewhere else.
So a platform like Substack is a move in the right direction vs. something like Twitter.
It's great to see PeerTube development, but I think it will continue to be extremely niche until a good solution for decentralized monetization is found. For both content creators and data hosters.
It's extremely hard to move users accustomed to "free" advertisement-fueled services to the micro-payment model. Content creators actively try to increase revenue by using things like Patreon and membership-only videos, but YouTube ads is still the dominant source for most.
And properly paying for the underlying infrastructure is even more difficult. Filecoin tries to do it, but it's hard to call it a succesfull project.
> extremely niche
Personally, I feel we're slowly moving beyond the mindset that one tool or service needs to "rule them all". I was recently very pleased to discover several online events I took part in were powered by PeerTube, and it just worked.
If an organization is looking to host a stream or offer virtual attendance of sorts, it feels like a no-brainer to pick something like PeerTube and avoid the data/algorithm behemoths.
Self-replicating objects always become the majority of objects. Corporations will always find out how to make sure their stuff is self-replicating for revenue. Individual creators won't.
Well, it is very easy to get video demonetized on YT, it is enough to use one of the forbidden words, like Israel. Another thing are shadowbans. I see more and more people are trying to have side channel for the monetization, like Patreon.
This is about PeerTube. I really want this project to succeed but it’s been many years and basically no one has heard of it. Is it really worth directing people to? The positioning of PeerTube, Framasoft, etc gets confusing for an everyday person like me.
As an everyday person, you can continue to use YouTube to discover and consume content.
It's more like, if you find a maker of content that you like, they might happen to have a PeerTube or other independent YouTube-like site up as well, as a backup or larger archive of their material.
The independently hosted FOSS alternatives are more for people who create content and don't want to or can't depend on the good graces of bigtech to indefinitely host their content for whatever reason (usually a practical matter, sometimes even underlying political factors).
For instance, YouTube will scan new content automatically and zap the channel if it says the wrong couple words more than a few times.
Maybe that's not a problem for a lot of channels. But there were definitely tons of creators who got burned by that kind of cancelling over the last n years.
So I imagine, yes, some entrepreneurial, technical, and communication-oriented folks would be interested in things like PeerTube, YouPHPTube (which is actually quite good) [1], etc.
[1] https://youphp.tube
> For instance, YouTube will scan new content automatically and zap the channel if it says the wrong couple words more than a few times.
This type of censorship is why I think decentralized video is important. But if it isn’t accessible to everyday people there will be low views and it hurts the availability of censored content.
FYI: Us humans call it "watch videos", not "consume content".
you made an account 1 hour ago to post 2 snarky comments? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I make a new account every few days or so, however long it takes for the previous one to be shadow banned.
It's not a big deal.
I agree with him. The whole, "consume content" phrase has a subtle effect of making us int mindless consumers rather than freedom choice thinkers. People need to stop drinking the consumer market koolaid.
i dislike the phrase too but the tone of the comment was pretty shitty, apart from being off topic.
Also to think that it's the phrase "consume content" making us mindless consumer seems way off to me. What would you call most of the videos on youtube/tiktok/instagram? Art, Documentaries, Didactic aid? Perhaps "content" is the best way to refer to them.
"Videos" seems appropriate.
That's another good objection, next to lumping all stuff into one category: some creative output is "content", not writing, or video, or spoken word, or painting, or acting or even "merch", it's all "content". Calling every item sold, from toothpaste to iron pipe to dump trucks "product" is the same: disrespectful of the thought and effort and craft that go in to making ping pong balls or airplanes.
It's an MBA's way of denigrating everything not presentable in a PowerPoint.
Whenever I look at PeerTube there is basically no high quality stuff on it - i look through it for 5-10 minutes and it’s all bad. To me it’s so far removed from what YouTube is i find it hard to compare the two - it might market itself as an alternative but I don’t see how that can be
We have to distinguish delivery and discovery. Any competing video platform will have a very skewed selection of content at the start, biased towards stuff YouTube doesn't want to show its users, and in most cases, with good reason (i.e, stuff the users wouldn't want to see). Any kind of popularity-on-the-platform based filtrering will also not work, due to this skew.
yes! i think we also need to keep reminding people that discovery is not an euphemism for advertisement. and if they expect it to be this passive, detached process of being told what the good shit is and then fed it, then they're part of the problem.
i've had good experiences with discovery on decentralized platforms. it's proceeded by means totally unlike advertisement, hmm, i wonder if anyone remembers what those were?
what i find funnier is how the platforms that have actual content hate crypto, and the platforms that have crypto ... i'm not sure if they even remember what "content" was. that ain't a way to starve youtubers, it's the exact opposite. shame.
This is nice but I have zero idea how I can surface interesting or useful videos. The search function on PeerTube doesn't give me anything useful for my topics of interest.
As a result, I wind up wasting hours and I simply do not have that time.
I'm basically saying, you can't rely on on-platform discovery. You'll have to find the links to good stuff on peertube somewhere else than peertube - anywhere else. It could even be here.
Or to take it from the other perspective, if you make videos on Peertube you need to give people some way different than doomscrolling/built in search to find your stuff.
Yeah this is a good point. I have been thinking about doing some video creation and I really don't want to be locked into YouTube's platform. I want people to find my video content in some other way because I do not want YouTube to be dominating how my content is shown or becomes visible because then, they are in control of my creative process, not me. So I will stick to posting links on my website and surfacing my content by posting on sites like this. Maybe someday I will find any more automatic way of doing this at some point. I wonder if that is allowed on HN?
how do you manage to waste entire hours without ever finding anything interesting or useful to watch?
Before there was doomscrolling, there was channel surfing. It can be very easy to end up spending a lot of time looking for something good.
fair point! depends on the search space, though. can't do much channel surfing on 2 channels, one of which broadcasts in russian on fridays. (actually turns out you can; you catch cable from the neighbors' leaky wiring and discover lil kim.)
i don't think you can do much doomscrolling on peertube, either. but then, that's probably a non-goal for their project. instead i think i'll go look if there's a 3rd party frontend for that now, blessings :-)
That is simply your outdated opinion. By facts it is a better alternative as I just created an account and I see it as a better option. The joy in my words is enough to tell you how good I feel about it. Youtube is history for me and many others, your opinion will not change that.
It hasn't succeeded yet, so therefore we should stop talking about it? I never understood this line of thinking. Some new inferior but better hyped variant, like Bluesky to Mastodon? Yes, the better technology doesn't always win out, but should we make that a self-fulfilling prophecy by pre-emptively abandoning something?
The value in YouTube is their monetization network which brings real money to the people uploading videos through advetising deals and the premium subscription. This is why YT became such a juggernaut - it's not just covering its tech costs, its also providing folks with real revenue to create those videos.
And this is where Peertube isn't really the same kind of a platform so you won't see the same kind of videos.
> I really want this project to succeed but it’s been many years and basically no one has heard of it
It's about authorship, not the tool.
I hope non-profit and academia would embrace peertube.
I think it’s worth remember that at any time a service like YouTube can do something that like everyone off. It hasn’t happened yet, but when it happens, people will need a place to go to. Now imagine if people start thinking about it only after the enshittification get so bad that getting an usable alarmeis would take years.
[dead]
I'm just waiting for YouTube to do something stupid that forces a bunch of creators to PeerTube, like what happened with Twitter and Mastodon.
They already did, users are leaving in masses, AI content is dominating youtube to cover losses, youtube is the new blockbuster:)
Users are leaving in masses? Do you have a source?
Discussed on HN recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45173455
Here is one of them: https://www.businessinsider.com/were-entering-a-new-era-of-y...
Do your own research if you want to know more.
Isn't the point of sites like this to share research with one another? And interesting commentary. It is for me.
Thank you for the link.
Journalists tend to write catchy titles like "big name here blahblah".
Same here, the minimum would have been to add Peertube in the title.
Great initiative thank you, it was time to have a better platform. Just created an account with 500gb free and no bullshit. Youtube deleted my account because simply I was showing HugstonOne to the world and that is a violation of their privacy. All I hear from Youtube users is frustration and all are leaving in anger. Personally I don´t like tyranny and will never go back to youtube-google-producthunt... There are plenty of pleasant alternatives. Here my new channel: https://clip.place/w/inRMaEHjNeLvBLAS9Yas89
glad to see more features!
For me, as a parent, YT has clear issues, for instance I am not able to block the channel, so no video from the channel can be viewed by kid. The only way is to add channel to "don't recommend" list, which is not working.
Too bad the creators stopped giving Mobilizon (Facebook events/meetup alternative) love a while back. It's a wonderful idea and pretty close to useful but so riddled with bugs it's painful. I've opened a few very small PRs and issues and posted them in their Matrix but nobody seems to be home to look.