cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/9820251
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 and Meetup.
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.
So more users = less load 🤔
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If instances shares videos with each other and distribute load of it, then yes instance count makes difference but I don’t know if it works that way.
On the other hand, in an ideal world, if users increases then peers (users) will decrease load of instances. Which is more important I guess.
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Pretty impressive capability for only $20/mo, I gotta admit. I’m wondering how they even got their server rental that low, as it seems a lot cheaper than AWS/Azure for the same type of functionality.
They take advantage of viewer federation a lot, webrtc is used, so all the simulated browsers are sending the video to each other rather than hitting their server. So their setup is really just a part of the p2p swarm, like a single client in a bitorrent network. Doesn’t use anything fancy above that.
Honestly, it’s only a setup that’s gonna get far if you serve very few videos, and the P2P client rate is high. Their “real world” assumption of 50% of all clients being p2p enabled is way too high, and they couldn’t limit p2p bandwidth so all the clients were sending data to each other at lan speeds.
It’s interesting, but it needs to actually leave the simulation and enter real world load to know how things shake out.
All very good points, I fully agree with you. The amount of videos is a particularly valid point I’d like to see experimented with more.
And the bittorrent-like concept has issues that many people won’t want to subject themselves to.
How many people are seeding what videos now?
No its not like that. You only seed videos you are currently watching.
AWS/Azure are incredibly expensive compared to most hosting providers. If you need the services and scale they provide then they can be good value but there are for sure expensive.
For example the Hetzner servers are cheap and have been serving me well for many years. The big clouds are for companies with enough funding. If you need personal servers, the VPS providers give good value for money.
