As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization.
I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch. This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram. Even a decent 20-minute video can easily take 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor.
I have a pretty small channel (~100K subscribers) with no employees and relatively low upkeep costs (a few hundred dollars a month), and even I could not make this work if I didn't get at least $500-$1,000 per video on average, since it just takes so much time and money.
Most channels with more than a million subscribers are likely founders working 60-80 hour weeks with multiple full-time employees supporting them. You cannot do that in the hopes of viewers donating $5 here and there.
And yes, there are people who make content for free - most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video. And the difference between a million views and a hundred is 10,000x. You cannot create a platform without big users.
I think any real competitor to YouTube nowadays would have to be backed by a big corporation that can pay big creators million-dollar deals to make the switch. Otherwise it's just dead in the water.
You can publish to both and even better your own domain that simply points to your video hosting provider. Long term you want to own your distribution channel as much as possible, while using YouTube as your lead generation tool to drive true believers to your site and premium distribution channel not owned by YouTube. Otherwise, you will always be subject to platform risk via YouTube's whims which has destroyed many content creators. That's the long term winning play IMO and it doesn't preclude tools like FreeTube.
Realistically, how many viewers will be retained should YT shut the OP down? Right now, that number rounds to 0. Practically speaking, YT is free internet video streaming for long-form videos on the US market.
Nobody is going to go to OP's personal site to watch videos. They are going to fire up YT and eat what the algorithm feeds them.
The reason PeerTube and Nebula are important is it provides the potential for a true alternative destination for people looking for videos. Once these platforms have an enough content to draw an audience naturally, then content creators will be able to survive a post-YT world.
For people like the OP, it's probably best to follow the model video games do with DRM. Post on YT first, to get the ad revenue, then repost on other platforms after some time to build up an alternative subscriber base. Presumably, in-video sponsorships will pay for these views as well, even if there's no direct ad-sense like revenue model.
> Nobody is going to go to OP's personal site to watch videos.
Counterpoint: Channels with Patreons with uncensored and pre-release content.
Youtube can't be unseated as the main platform, but you're wildly wrong about the order of operations for what to do beyond your lead audience. No, you want to post on other platforms first, at a premium, and on youtube second. And should Youtube somehow magically evaporate, you just unlock your past premium content so people can find it and you have some degree of word of mouth as content that survived the apocalypse, as a lifeline.
> Nobody is going to go to OP's personal site to watch videos
Unfortunately, I agree. It's not the algorithm for me, though. Rather, it's the capabilities of the platform. I use the cast feature almost exclusively. I rarely watch a video on a computer screen and never on a mobile device. YouTube's casting feature is constantly broken, but it's the only thing that even barely works. I have no idea how many others see it this way, but I don't think I'm particularly distinct.
I've been following https://github.com/futo-org/fcast for a bit, but it doesn't really have a viable receiver implementation that I know of.
> Realistically, how many viewers will be retained should YT shut the OP down? Right now, that number rounds to 0. Practically speaking, YT is free internet video streaming for long-form videos on the US market.
People have been following this strategy of creating their own mini-brands for years and have their own following. YT doesn't even have all of the their content, and YT is just one lead gen channel. Frankly, Ad Revenue from YT is pitiful, and it's an open secret the real money is made as I've described (although it is a long term play).
I don't disagree with you about PeerTube and the like, but it is a two-sided marketplace and you need to prime both sides of that pump (content creators and viewers).
A bootstrap problem. No one goes until there's enough content and no one posts because there are no viewers.
What is needed is a way to ingest YouTube video through peertube or through a client that treats peertube as a primary destination and YT as a fallback.
This client then gives multihosting a single UI and blurs YT branding.
I think I go to YouTube because it has interesting content, and the fact it's in video form isn't particularly relevant. Some content must be in video form but not all of it. I also follow several blogs, and Hacker News. I used to use Reddit when it was less enshittified, the way I use YouTube now. I don't know why I don't follow Nebula - I have a subscription because I want to support more independent platforms.
> Long term you want to own your distribution channel as much as possible, while using YouTube as your lead generation tool to drive true believers to your site and premium distribution channel not owned by YouTube.
This reads like MBA advice but the reality is not that simple. For a variety of reasons, relatively few people have the ability to produce durable revenue over the long term by pushing their YouTube audience to owned platforms.
The most successful YouTubers get a lot of attention but the reality is that outside of the 1%, there is no "long term winning play" for most of these people. The average YouTuber who finds some success building an audience tries to milk it for as long as they can before they're supplanted by new faces, they burn out, their category loses appeal, algorithms change, etc.
Alright, you're hosting on FreeTube (paying for hosting & bandwidth costs) - how are you making money? Most YouTubers don't want to run their own ad network or sell a physical product. Sponsors make deals conditional on YouTube engagement metrics.
There are lots of strategies how to make money and it will vary based on your specialty. It could be premium content, premium services, exclusive engagement with your fans, merchandising (e.g., many cooking YouTubers sell their own brand of cooking utensils that they have designed themselves). It requires some thought, but the idea is to deepen the authenticity and engagement by building an actual community and your own personal micro-brand. The offering needs to feel organic and huge value to your community in some way. Many many people have done this on YT and now are making way more money than what's possible with the pittance that is YT monetization. YT then becomes just one part of your funnel intake strategy once you get big enough.
Edit: Of course, you do need to have enough demand/scale to make it worth your while, but that will depend on your audience size and how engaged/invested they are in your content AND you personally to an extent. Perhaps be creative and start out with small experiments. Not too hard with LLMs nowadays.
A bit more like Kevin Powell, who publishes lots of free CSS videos [0], has some good basic CSS Training Courses for free, but charges money for the advanced ones [1]. His videos are not only available on his site, but they're also on Front End Masters, which is a well known training site.
While I can't speak specifically to this person's earnings, I suspect you're overestimating just how much money average YouTubers make from owned platforms when they try to push their audiences to them.
It's very difficult to do this in a way that produces sustainable, durable revenue, and I suspect that people doing technical educational content are finding it increasingly difficult in the age of AI.
Trends for his YouTube channel look pretty much like what I expected given the general trends in the marketplace.
> It could be premium content, premium services, exclusive engagement with your fans, merchandising
To address the elephant in the room, except for "premium content", you're asking to pay for something the users didn't come for and most probably don't want.
So if you're not into mild grifting, the only way your content is directly monetized is paywalls, and that's an utterly complicated business as you need to show enough to entice, but not too much, while dealing with freebooting and custome support. It can be alleviated by joining a paywalled community like Nebula's, but it comes with it's own issues.
As you point out it's not impossible by any mean, it's just a huge PITA that will make no business sense for most creators compared to ad ridden platforms.
> You can publish to both and even better your own domain that simply points to your video hosting provider.
That one is likely the best use case while one monetizes on YT waiting for FreeTube to gain more popularity. Worth also for keeping a safer online accessible backup in case things go south with the YT channel being taken down for any reason, be it bogus copyright claims or else.
What I'm not sure of though is how long until Google changes YT rules to disallow linking or even mentioning competing, or perceived as such, services. Companies always do that: I'm a Ebay user since 2008, 100% feedback both as seller and customer, hundreds of positives not a single negative or neutral in 18 years, but a while ago Ebay in their infinite wisdom blocked a listing of mine because I added the links of the documentation needed to use the device I was selling; no way to appeal successfully or have it restored, they evidently either used a monkey or AI to detect what they identified as an attempt to contact the customer outside of Ebay, for a €30 item nonetheless. Years ago they didn't enforce such idiotic limitations, so I wouldn't put any trust on YT to remain consistent with their current rules.
> they evidently either used a monkey or AI to detect what they identified as an attempt to contact the customer outside of Ebay, for a €30 item nonetheless
Dunno if they’ve caught on, but just send what you need to send in a .png
Probably goes through a not-hotdog test, but that’s about it.
long term he doesn't want his own distribution though. youtube offers you new viewers constantly. peertube only makes sense if it has a viewerbase and an ad network, and at hte point we're back to google but they're going to pay more since they have a larger user base and more ads which means their monetization rate is going to be much higher.
disrupting youtube is super hard, you basically need to bring your own audience from something else to do it, or have a platform already existing that you expand into the us.
People don’t really want another step in the already arduous process of making videos - especially when the return on investment will be $0. This website will die off in a couple years and everyone who wastes time on it will be worse off for it.
You need to build a product so good that my statement above sounds INSANE. Not just “I think he’s wrong” but “dude absolutely no way. Everyone will want this. Are you stupid?”
And this is not that product.
Edit: yeah. I was curious so I went searching for ASMR videos. The default search brought some (terrible-looking) ones up, but half of them were in French? I sorted by views instead, and even though I literally only searched for “ASMR”, there were no longer any ASMR videos near the top of the results. For something trying to compete with YouTube, this is a very mid experience. Nobody is going to waste time migrating.
It's hard to discuss things online because the dumb people will make stuff up, then when you correct it they disappear but leave the wrong info up, confusing even more dumb people. Like an idiot-tsunami growing ever larger
I think for most people you're right, they just want to upload their videos, and maybe make a couple of bucks on the side. I was referring to folks who are truly committed to making this their career and want to have their own brand. Many, many people are already doing this, so it isn't something theoretical. Most YouTubers are automating their production pipeline, so another upload step isn't too hard, especially nowadays where it is easier than ever to build a bespoke, deterministic pipeline with agents writing scripts and programs.
> I think for most people you're right, they just want to upload their videos, and maybe make a couple of bucks on the side.
Sadly, those won’t make a couple bucks anymore. You can’t get a cut of the revenue until you have 1000 subscribers.
The couple bucks a month from my 1 video that was more useful than professional was nice until the moved that goalpost.
In case you were wondering why every bloody publisher, big or small, asks you to subscribe, even if, well, why would you subscribe to a channel that helped you fix your phone one day but their next video couldn’t be more unrelated?
Meanwhile in my “blogging” days, that first couple cents/bucks a month from Adsense convinced me to spend more time on it & make $20/month, then $200. Was $2000/month for a while. Now they expect you to work for free to prove yourself?
It doesn't have to be for your use-case. e.g. KDE has their own instance, as does Blender. It would perhaps be a good fit for MIT to host their OCW videos, or for Khan Academy to host their material, or people sharing conference talks, or governments, or quick home DIY videos, or vlogs and idle musings, or hobbyists showing/discussing their thing they like, etc. Videos that are meant to help people to better themselves or collaborate fit better on a platform that doesn't try to be a constant sales funnel.
There are many people who believe everything must be a grind to get rich. I wish more people stepped back and did things online because they were fun or educational, not because it was monetized.
they need a day job to pay the bills then, which does cut down on the scope of videos you can make
if we could have less working hours or cheaper rent or less expensive bills more people could do hobby stuff again ofc. but right now is tricky for that
Generally speaking, that's how hobbies work. You do them for fun or enrichment and do something else for money. People who try to turn hobbies into a day job seem to get this weird idea that they're somehow critical to the hobby when in fact they're just hyper focused on getting attention and crowding out actually sincere people so they can sell stuff.
e.g. this thread. Here you have people making software for themselves to host their own videos without being beholden to the likes of Google. Absolutely nothing to do with OP. So why is OP criticising them? Where in the README does this free software project discuss monetization (other than mentioning it's ad-free)? Why is the topic even slightly germane?
If it's tricky for people in software engineering (those still holding a job continue to have big salaries compared to most other industries) to have hobbies they are willing to pay for themselves, it's probably them finding excuses instead or living beyond their means.
Nope, there are still people doing this stuff to share what they are excited about, and they will continue to be people like that.
Economy has nothing to do with this — as mentioned, a lot of this comes out of university students and low rung staff, and they were never best paid.
Anything and everything starts costing money when done at a high level. And since you have dedicate yourself full time if you want to be among the best at what you do, you're also forfeiting other sources of income. So you need to make money on your craft. It's not necessarily about getting rich, but getting by.
And there is no audience interested in seeing average things online.
Do you ever think about the fact that if you're making $500 - $1000 per video on average that means Google is making $5000 - $10,000 on each of your videos on average? I mean its working for you, and that's great. I am a student of information asymmetric markets and the whole 'Ad supported' business that Google runs on all of its properties is perhaps the largest one in the current time frame.
The point being that building a production company to produce videos is a known thing, Peertube is a distribution network, and historically this is a remarkable mirror of 'independent' theaters and 'studio owned' theaters. It was a characteristic of that time that the big studios would use their monoply power to force small studios to give them their work at a discount that allowed the studio to get most of the income. They made it just enough that the small studios didn't feel motivated to build a competitive system.
When I read your comment it struck me that perhaps "$500 - $1000 average per video" was the number Google has determined to be 'just enough'.
Google splits with the creator 50-50. If you got paid $1000, so did Google. And given their hosting infrastructure, network, and other tools, I would say it's a miracle they don't charge to upload.
What Google makes is irrelevant to the content prouducer. What matters to them is what they could make on alternate platforms, and the answer is no where near that amount. The slice Google keeps is only relevant to Google and potential competitors who may try to move into the space.
> What Google makes is irrelevant to the content producer.
Is it though? Let's say I weave a basket out of reeds I've spent the weekend picking from the shores of a local creek. I take the basket to a guy who pays me $20 for it. Then that same guy takes it to a swap meet that he runs in town and sells it for $200.
That's just market economics, until you try to set up your own smaller swap meet on the route to this guys market and sell your baskets there, and this guy calls the police and has them shut down your "illegal swap meet." So you go to city hall for a permit and they say, "We don't sell permits unless you can prove that at least 1,000 people will go to your swap meet and every week you'll have at least 10 new products to show." See where I'm going with that?
Asymmetric markets are ones where a single individual or small group of individuals can exercise control over the entire operation of the market. You can think of then as nascent monopolies or perhaps price fixing cartels. In the US, after experiencing the Great Depression, as a result of unregulated markets, the US made it government policy to regulate market abuses as no single participant (or even a set of participants) could hope to compete with the monopoly or cartel.
Information markets, or non-real property markets like video content, did an end run around controls in an effort to capture the value that is associated with a product you can manufacture instances of for pennies, but sell for dollars. Games, Office processing suites, Videos, Musical recordings, can all be "sold" for 100 to 1000x the cost to produce them. It is an area that is under studied in my opinion.
That's fair, Google admitted in the DoJ trial where it was convicted of being a monopolist that the revenues that it paid out were roughly 10% of the revenues it collected. If you have fewer than a requisite number of subscribers they keep 100% of the monetization proceeds. I was simply struck by the parallels between the way YouTube has grown up and how the whole movie industry grew up.
Because Google is losing money for those videos, they're collecting 100% of the revenue and shouldering 100% of the costs and 100% of the net loss. Perhaps they should split the net loss 50-50 with those users, but then no one would use YouTube.
Goog’s monetization requirements make no sense: requiring regular posting of new videos costs them money. You have people posting crap just to keep their monetization active.
More subscribers to a channel doesn’t save Google money at all.
Requiring X hours of views encourages posting longer videos, which costs them more to store and process.
They just want more content. They don't care about quality - the algorithm does a good job of sifting through all the content to find the good quality content. The definition of good quality being something that generates more money and keeps more eyes fixed to the screen!
1000 subscribers, 4000 hours in the last 12 months, and you must have uploaded 3 videos I think in the last 3 months to be allowed to apply for monetization.
There is a different requirement if you only post shorts.
Also worth pointing out that they’ve demonetized people after meeting the old monetization requirements and then not meeting their new requirements. No grandfathering.
I shed a tear (and subscribe) when I encounter an incredibly useful video but they have “only” a few hundred subs.
"As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is lack of monetization."
As a computer user I see that as the main advantage
No third party intermediary
No advertising
Computer users need peer-to-peer options for sharing video with each other that do not use third party advertising companies, e.g., posing as "search engine" or "social media", to transfer the bits
Whether PeerTube works well, I do not know. I know that overlay networks I have tested work well enough
the 3rd party isn't an intermediary, youtube content is fantastic because it found a way to pay people to produce something for every niche, and reward the ones doing well with more viewers and more money.
ofc you would prefer high quality content delivered directly to you for free, because you're ignore the producers perspective.
Youtube rewards producers who use any dark pattern they can think of to get more views. This results in videos that are extremely awful to watch if your brain hasn't already been turned to pulp.
And if they dare touch controversial topics it demonitises them automatically. I find it hilarious that people self censor or invent new terms (like euphemisms for suicide).
The problem with this is that creating the content you watch costs a lot of money and labor.
As a user I would see a grocery store where everything is free as an advantage... utill the products inevitably run out and no food supplier is willing to stock the shelves for free.
It's not a problem though. There is absolutely no need for “quality content” whose sole or primary purpose is to monetize it. What we’re all missing is hobby content created out of passion, free of ads and all the nonsense that plagues the modern internet. And another thing - there’s absolutely no need to explain here the basic fundamentals of how money and the economy as a whole work, as if it were some kind of revelation. It’s actually better to think about why this approach is in fact problematic. Look at what it did to the world.
There are 100M+ channels uploading on YouTube regularly and only 2-3M of them are monetized. Not everyone wants to upload videos on the internet with the explicit goal of making money. Professional creators are a very tiny minority, and a platform like YouTube will always be better suited for them (your "small" channel with 100K subscribers is actually in the top 0.5-0.1% of YouTube). There is no reason for Peertube to go after this specific demographic.
Yet those 2-3M channels get the lions share of the views. It is a two-sided system. And if you want to attract viewers, you need what they want to watch. Looking on the front page of peertube the most viewed video I see has 29 views. If I sort by hot, the "hottest" video has 692 in a month. If the intent is to publish videos to have people watch it, PeerTube is clearly not the place to do that.
What does that even mean? Not everything published has to be with the purpose of entertaining. This is a more recent mindset that came with the advent of the "Content Creator" (think Mr.Beast). But it needs not be this engineered. Historically, some of the more interesting channels on YouTube have been people organically sharing something that was genuinely dear to them. Offered with little concern as to whether it's "what people want to watch". They make you want to watch it, because it's a passion that they manage to convey. By contrast, people who are particularly concerned about eyeballs seem to publish with the purpose of meeting the audience's interest as a main guiding factor. And yes, maybe for those, YouTube is a better fit. But I also know many for whom moving to a reliable alternative (tech wise) would be a step up.
If for instance your goal is to share educational content for free, provided that the hosting platform is sound, your main concern as far as your audience finding your content should be that of discoverability. Which is an easy enough kink to iron with current search technology.
> Not everything published has to be with the purpose of entertaining.
1. Why do you assume that people would “want to watch” something only for entertainment reasons, instead of for educational reasons, etc. GP commenter did not seem to even imply any focus on entertainment like your assumption that entertainment is the only reason someone could ‘want to watch’ something.
2. As far as what GP commenter meant by want to watch, they provided some specifics in their post - the most watched video on the home page had 29 views, so that presumably is the sun of people who wanted to watch it (whether for educational, etc reasons), accidentally viewed it, were required to view it as part of an educational program, etc.
The word "entertain" quickly came to mind in that sentence because attracting the audience as a primary concern is typical of the entertainment industry, regardless of the content being educational, news, or otherwise. If we get stuck on that choice of a word, it's admittedly a bit narrow for the point I was making, but I think the rest of my post successfully got things across.
> Yet those 2-3M channels get the lions share of the views.
...because they're directly tied to YouTube own revenue.
As someone who creates a fair bit of content, and am fortunate enough not to have to worry about the revenue from that, I deliberately try to minimize monetization because it ultimately becomes the main driving force behind your content creation.
Monetization as the only model for content creation leads to an incredibly safe and boring world while simultaneously meaning every piece of content you interact with is trying to extract money from you the viewer.
No, it is because that is the content that people want to watch. I too create content that has been widely watched and don't include video ads or any of the other monetization features they push. But I create videos because I want people to watch them. I don't do it for the sake of myself and pushing it out into the void. I don't follow whatever the trends are, I create what I believe will be the most useful as I make educational content. And it works. But I post to YouTube because that is where people will find it.
If I were to self-host my videos or put it on PeerTube if I wanted anyone to see it I would actively have to go out and promote it myself. YouTube does that for me.
I'm confused, why are you arguing about this? Stick with YouTube. This isn't for you.
It's even in the name. PeerTube. Peer. Your talking about 'consumers' of a product you produce vs a way to share videos that isn't YouTube with your .. PEERs.
Not 100k views videos. Think you should step back and think what your actually trying to debate or argue. It comes off kinda like your misunderstanding the software and conflating a lot of things that don't relate and not relevant to PeerTube.
>No, it is because that is the content that people want to watch.
No, that's not a given. It would be more accurate to say it is content people will watch, and not necessarily want to watch. I mean people will watch porn, I'm not sure they want to watch porn.
If you asked someone before vine or tiktok whether you wanted to watch an unending carousel of thirty second videos from nobodies for four hours straight I'm not sure a lot of people would say yes.
Am I the only one who sees ragebait titles to youtube videos that do not contain a modicrum of the rage that is advertised in the title?
I don't think we need to conflate algorithmic nudging with the conscience preference of the user frankly.
Then there's even less reason to host outside of YouTube, why would I want to host a server that costs money if I'm not making any money from the videos? It works for those who want to own their content and verify its safety, or for ideological reasons such as supporting OSS but I'm not sure why the average user would care about PeerTube.
The problem is that big creators have many subscribers, because they're the only ones making videos people want to watch.
If a channel has 100 subscribers - (except if it's a brand new channel) - it's because people saw the videos and decided, no, I don't want to see this, I'm not going to subscribe.
Put all of those people on a platform together, you will just end up with a platform with more creators than viewers.
So? Why is that a problem? My wife occasionally watches this old lady who's vlogged every day for over 14 years straight. She averages 150-200 views. The people who try to build a brand end up getting outsized attention so it seems like that must be what anyone would want, but most people actually aren't trying to do that.
It's not an either-or, but generally speaking, a platform centered around getting more people to watch is probably worse to have in the world than one centered around people just expressing themselves to a handful of e.g. family/friends/small communities. Especially if the former is really just a conduit for ads.
I understand where you are coming from, and if monetization is your primary reason for being on a platform, it's likely that PeerTube is not for you, unless your videos help you move your own product or service.
That said, I'm also okay with there being platforms out there where monetization is difficult or impossible. I want there to be places where creators can get paid, but I am also nostalgic for a less commercial internet.
I heard that main source of income for some professional YouTubers are Patreon and sponsorships. Ad revenue is dead last and very unstable. Also, if you are building your business on single platform, which one day might decide that your content does not adhere to their rules - that's a high risk to take.
Sponsorships are definitely the highest if a youtuber actively engages in them, ad revenue vs patreon depends highly on if you have i.e. a small but highly active fanbase of core fans, versus a wider more general audience that you entertain a bit.
I think people should be more aware of the perverse incentive of YouTubers saying, "my guaranteed source of income is very little and unstable guys, I need you to also subscribe to my patreon" where - could YouTubers perhaps have a reason to act like their ad revenue is very little? In my experience, while ad revenue isn't great, for any decent-size YouTuber its still enough to live on and in any case it always stays a significant income stream.
Dunno about the storage side, but fly by night operators seem to be constantly available to stream every movie and tv show and somehow afford the bandwidth, transcoding and all other costs while being shunned from the general ad industry…
You say your target is $500-$1000 per video and let's assume you do videos weekly. That would mean your optimistic goal is $4500 a month. Let's say you create a voluntary donation subscription at $5 per month for people willing to support your work. That means you would need 900 true fans, patrons, or whatever other label you want to give them to hit your $4500 goal. That's a 0.9% conversion rate from subscribers to donators. Doesn't seem that impractical when looked at in those terms. This is often the default monetization model for small podcasts because RSS feeds don't have built in ad revenue the way YouTube does.
Voluntary donations are practically impossible. Sure, you get the odd straggler, but it’s so, so rare.
I have the most popular NSFW LoRA (actually a LoKR but whatever) for at least one major text to image model on CivitAI.
Once it blew up I made a Patreon, maybe 6 months ago? I get $50 a month from it. I doubt that even covers my electricity costs for training.
Podcasts and videos do have the advantage of being able to ask for people to donate with every podcast/video, but people just aren’t inclined to give their money away when they don’t have to. It’s a rare trait.
Quite frankly, I don't think you can compare image generation, let alone NSFW image generation, with YouTube and podcasts. You are simply operating in a medium in which this is going to be dramatically tougher, primarily because most people who consume your content are likely there for the content and unlikely to have any relationship to you specifically. But either way, "It's a rare trait" isn't disagreeing with what I said. The successful conversion rate in my last comment was below 1%.
At that point I'd just make a Patreon (that offers various benefits including exclusive videos not on YouTube) while also monetizing via YouTube ads and sponshorships.
Yes, there is a reason I said "you would need 900 true fans, patrons, or whatever other label you want to give them". I'm not claiming this is a new concept, I was making specific allusions to Patreon and the idea of 1000 true fans[1].
The Youtube experience has always sucked for me - right from the first year Youtube launched. I just don't like the interface, web site, layout, etc. It's why I didn't have a Youtube account until I needed to share a video with someone, and even then, I never log into it (so I don't follow[1], rate, etc).
And then over the last few years, the ad situation has gotten astronomically worse. I'm not exaggerating when I say that old school cable TV with its ads was a significantly better experience.
I do a search for something specific. I start clicking videos to see if it has the content I want. But very often, on my Roku or similar device, I won't be able to see anything of the video unless I watch 15-60s of ads.
Only to find out the video is not useful for me. Click next video. Repeat the pain.
I think this is what leads a lot of people to just plain hate Youtube. It's what leads me not to care if suddenly no one can make money on Youtube (even the folks I like). It's why I want Youtube to just die.
If they made the site much more pleasing, and found a way to allow 3rd party interfaces (while still serving ads), and weren't anywhere near as annoying with the ads, I'd like the platform.
Regarding monetization: For the folks who have well established viewers, and who make most of their money via embedded ads in the video, I don't think they'll lose anything by switching to Peertube - as long as the Peertube infrastructure can handle the load. The major fans will know where to find the content.[2]
The real problem with Peertube is discovery. How can a new content creator be noticed? And then how can they show accurate viewership numbers to get those sponsors?
[1] Well, I may follow via other means: Manually, or via RSS, etc.
[2] Incidentally, some of the "popular" content I watch on Youtube exclusively gets monetized via embedded ads. Youtube demonetized that whole category a while ago. So embedded ads is totally viable.
I miss old, grass-roots youtube. I used to be a 'youtuber' back in the very very early days where it was just a case of sharing yourself doing dumb things.
I completely get that it's your job now... But the fact it's become a job for people is probably why I don't like it so much anymore. With all the ads and such too, it's now just television. But worse.
> most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video.
I get your point, but many of them fail to hit some hundreds of views due in large part to all of the large, professional channels that are spending hundreds of man hours as week producing content.
If the production was less professional do you think total viewership hours would drop significantly, or would it be distributed across more channels?
Is the argument that such a world is possible to create, where the audience does not have the choice of the ‘professional’ looking content so can't choose it?
It would still be a great alternative for the original YouTube. The one with video replies and all that, that was basically just people video blogging at each other or into the ether.
> And yes, there are people who make content for free - most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video.
Where is the "fail" though? Some of those videos take exactly as long to make is it does to watch them. If they don't get monetized (maybe for speaking normal English instead of saying "unalive" and "to grape"), then someone else doesn't make a lot of money from even the little effort it took them by showing ads [0] to people. If all you want to do is talk at a camera and maybe with some people, then all that is a plus.
[0] Speaking of ads, some of the stuff on youtube is wild. Like, honestly gross and disturbing to me.
If you are looking to make money of it, sure, starting with peertube only would be nonsense. If you just wanna make videos, do it! Upload the best ones to youtube and mention peertube, so you maybe get some audience. Then if you really get into it, and make better stuff, spend more effort than just "start record, say things, upload as is", you can upload everything to youtube, too. After having livestreamed the whole thing on Twitch, just to use every part of the buffalo.
You want the numbers that come from mass consumption, which means catering to the lowest common denominator thus producing shit with gold plating while then complain the gold plating is bloody expensive.
Some people just are knowledgeable and want to share with the rest of us mortals like say someone like Terrence Tao. Putting someone like him on "YouTube" is a goddamn travesty. We need an alternative and yes, you won't make money and no, it's not for you then.
Your issue is assuming that this is trying to replace YouTube for those who wish to try and make money from this. I suspect this is much more closer to a Google videos or YouTube back in the day which was pretty much just random videos, plus lots of conferences on there (which don't get enough views to monetize). This can easily replace that and is something I would support. YouTube hasn't always been monetising and it is good if we have a competitor against it.
It's not about people "trying to make money", it's about viewers wanting to see high quality videos.
High quality videos just cost a lot of money and labor to produce. There is simply no way around this. Any platform which doesn't let creators monetize effectively will be stuck with what people produce in their free time. Which will essentially always be worse, because the competitors will have creators with actual budgets and time to work.
They don't necessarily. e.g. I'd consider Ravi Vakil's Algebraic Geometry videos[0] among the highest quality videos on youtube, and its just him talking over a screen share. Fields medalist Richard Borcherds likewise has posted a ton of lectures of him just talking while he writes on paper.
In fact, I'd expect the highest quality videos to have a relatively low viewership. Most people seem to want Mr Beast or whatever.
High quality doesn't just mean production values, it can relate to any aspect of the video. High quality could simply reflect the quality of content. I would much prefer if PeerTube became a far easier to browse version of Archive along with creators producing items of creative and knowledge value. We don't need to replace YouTube as it likely can't be replaced. However switching a significant number away with a different approach to what is hosted there would be a positive.
That's the thing; not everything has to be or should be monetized. The thing I miss the most are the funny dumb amateur videos.
There are several YouTube channels I love; Folding Ideas, hbomberguy, Kurtis Conner, Contrapoints, etc... but I see those essentially as semi professional / professional variations on television. Once I got into their content via YouTube, YouTube of course drove me away with horrid vile ads, and I moved on to supporting those creators on Patreon.
And that's all good - the digital medium needs places like YouTube. But that doesn't mean there isn't a huge amount of value in the amateur unmonitized video landscape. Pairing those with some niche phpbb style forums was, for me, the last time I truly enjoyed the experience of actually being on the internet.
Not bare breasts. Cleavage. Nearly all of Pamela Anderson's notable body of work would need to be censored to avoid risking loss of that precious, precious monetization. It's like fucking Iran.
And of course you can't say "die", "kill", "suicide", etc. You have to talk like a parody of 80s cartoon censorship—literally. (The neologism "unalive" came from Deadpool in an animated series called Ultimate Spider-Man, who realized he was in an animated show but thought it was 80s Saturday morning fare and constantly minced his intent to kill by saying he was going to "unalive" his target.)
Monetization has had a chilling effect on the kind of content people put on YouTube. I do not mourn its lack, at least on alternative video platforms.
Where are you located? I'm looking as we speak at a bunch of YT videos of women with cleavage, or promoting fashion that involve stripping down to their underwear.
If they're getting sponsorships or just engagement-baiting gooners to get OnlyFans signups, maybe they don't care that much about video monetization. The ones that do are starting to censor cľeavage.
Understood your situation, but personnaly I'm not watching so much professional content on YT; actually, I'm not watching YT as much as I used to when the service was young and unprofessional.
What I want from such a platform is authenticity... and curation.
Through effective search, Google enabled mass deportalization. The best link would win. Your crappy but good blog about how to fix an issue could become top in the results.
Now YouTube favours entertainer-mechanic making subscribeable but generic videos instead of… the one specific to your vehicle by some gruff but knowledgeable mechanic.
Like, c’mon buddy, the bolt only comes off like that in the studio after 3 practice runs.
its fine for the genre of video thats just someone narrating while filming with there phone and almost no editing. if someone is doing something interesting, i prefer this to something well produced, its more candid and relatable, and lacks the artifice most projects designed for youtube have
But isn't know most of the money they make from direct sponsors instead of adsense? I have seen a few creators putting their income sources and most of the money comes from direct sponsors instead of adsense.
So if these sponsors would continue to sponsor them in other platforms, it can take YouTube monopoly away. The problem now is that those others video platform don't have the eyeballs as YouTube
> This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram
Low key shitting on other content creators? Some of IG content creator easily match professionalism you are describing. I know you are probably partially venting your frustration, but that doesn't paint you in a nice light.
Yeah reminds me of how Kick seems to be winning over the Twitch creators. Now Kick isn't a shining beacon by any means, its got gambling issues for one, but I do think this is one area the big companies are vulnerable in: Rev share.
If a new incumbent can raise some money, offer creators some money and a path to a higher cut than their competitors, they can win big.
I think this is the only way for new platforms to ever rise in this space.
A video sharing website is not a social media platform, it's a streaming platform. The real competitors to YouTube are not PeerTube or whatever, it's Netflix and HBO.
This is why Nebula also managed to find a niche and be relatively successful: the issue is not ads or a monthly subscription or something, the only problem is: people want to watch high-quality content. Find a way to get them high-quality content. If you cannot do that, everything else is meaningless. In Nebula's case, even a few high-profile YouTubers in the same niche uploading exclusives on a platform is better than a thousand nobodies uploading low effort content.
>You cannot do that in the hopes of viewers donating $5 here and there.
But you can do that in hopes of youtube sharing a percentage of fluctuating ad revenue? Certain things can get you de-monetized, you can get strike-bombed, falsely accused of copyright infringement via automated systems, etc, and unless you are a very big channel owner, you will receive a minimal droplet of support likely involving no humans in the loop.
There are sustainable creators getting much more revenue by collecting direct subscription money from their patrons while providing exclusive or first-hand content to them which is then re-uploaded to youtube for reaching a wider audience. They can run their own integrated ad-campaings without google deciding what they are advertising or which content they can or cannot produce.
To put a finer point on it, I recognize there are a lot of good creators on YouTube and I'm glad it can support their work. But the overall trend has been for the worse, at least for the target audience I belong to. The change in the average title card tells a story. I believe it would be fantastic if there was a competitor that captured the original motivation.
And there is Asmongold doing a video of him watching someone else making a video with commentary like “absolutely”, “outrageous”, “bold” and having it all monetized with literally ZERO effort.
So yea.. it takes a lot of effort -> if you are nobody.
For eatablished streamers just slapping something from stream on ytb is enough.
this is exactly right, people dont realize that they're getting a great deal on youtube. if you want to disrupt youtube you need to do it by winning over the creators which is a difficult thing to do since no new platform can subsidize to the scale of what youtube offers already due to its size, the only ones who really could are meta since they have the ad network and users already to funnel to it, or another company willing to eat a loss for a long time. The issue with eating hte loss, is video is a pretty painful loss to eat compared to text, so why not go into every text market first for places like meta.
Sure, but compare that to all other television and streaming services, where all independent creators are demonetized and banned by default. If you don't have the right contacts you're not allowed to put your video on Netflix.
As a professional watcher, I consider the lack of monetization a feature. I'd much rather see genuine videos from amateurs than commercialized crap with sponsored segments and undisclosed sponsorships and product placement and filler to keep up release schedules and please like and subscribe and whatever other dark patterns commercially motivated video producers come up with on "free" platforms. And of course also without the ads the video platform adds on top of all that. Not everything needs to be a viable job.
Monetization is the easy part, a plugin that adds advertisements, paid subscriptions, or some other form of monetization could easily be made if there was a demand for it.
The real barrier issue is that of network effect. There's simply (almost) no audience, which means there are (almost) no creators, which means there is (almost) no audience.
I've been publishing my videos on my own peertube instance for a while and I really do appreciate it as a platform, but I don't think that the technical aspects of it alone will ever be the key to its potential success.
Interesting, I thought the major issue with PeerTube was the high latency due the decentralized nature and that they don't have the backing of Google infrastructure.
What you state sounds more like a chicken and egg problem. You'll publish content only when there are enough viewers but there can be viewers only when you publish content.
Like others have said, There's not much effort to publish in both platforms; good way to hedge against the algorithmic risks.
They're not. No one asked OP to use peertube. This is software for people who want to share videos. Coming in and declaring you won't use it because you can't make money from your videos should just get an "okay?" Interjecting into a FOSS space and complaining they are not paying you is beyond bizarre. Doubling down when people basically say "actually I'm specifically looking for non-commercial groups, so your absence is appreciated" is crazy.
If you want to make money in something, you're not part of the group who doesn't. There's already a giant platform for you. Why would you say hobbyists are entitled?
The issue he has is he wants to find/communicate with hobbyists, and instead runs into people trying to turn it into a profession. It becomes difficult to find like-minded people when every topic is infected by grifters. Injecting money into a leisure activity will inevitably ruin it and the people participating.
The reason why is on full display here: this entire thread has been derailed by people asking how you're supposed to make money with it, denigrating people who "only" have 100 subscribers (imagine 100 people regularly coming to watch you give a talk or demo or performance out of pure interest!), etc.
In a hobby or leisure space, appreciation or encouragement alone is valuable. Monetizing leisure leads to some crazy ideas. Like completely turning the perspective around: "content creators" think what they're doing is interesting enough that not only will I give them my attention, but that I should somehow compensate them for it? Crazy.
> The issue he has is he wants to find/communicate with hobbyists, and instead runs into people trying to turn it into a profession.
To me that is in line with my original quote. He actively seeks work people put in while haivng an issue with them getting compensated for it.
Whether YT has monetization or not people's incentives are the same. Imagine that YT has no ads, people would put stuff behind paywalls or upsell aggressively.
> denigrating people who "only" have 100 subscribers (imagine 100 people regularly coming to watch you give a talk or demo or performance out of pure interest!), etc
I would never denigrate those people. But if you work hard enough and put in enough work that people watch 4000 hours of your videos in last year, and eventually you want to quit the job you don't like and just get paid by creating for people like that guy, and that guy says "monetization is the problem I have", it's kind of sociopathic. Drawing this line between work and hobby, like you have to do stuff you hate for money and god forbid you start getting paid for doing stuff you like
My assertion is that he's not actively seeking work people put in; he's actively seeking people. The sociopathic thing is exactly reducing people, interests, and interactions into something transactional like this. He's looking for people who don't think that way. So putting things behind paywalls is fine; it makes those people disappear. Upselling remains annoying. It recasts every interaction into a sales pitch.
What that guy is telling OP is that he's not creating for him. OP came into a thread about a platform for freely sharing video, not for getting a job in the entertainment industry. There's already at least 3 major platforms for that, and the monetization is what that user said he doesn't like about youtube [in contrast to this]. It's like commenting in a thread about a package repo complaining that the problem with FOSS communities is lack of monetization. If you want a job in the field, go somewhere where people are looking for help and will pay you to do things for them. Not places where people are having fun so you can try to upsell.
And yes there should be a line between work and hobby. Hobbies are things you do for you. Work is something someone else wants and pays you to do. You are doing it for them. e.g. with making software, work should not be fun. It should be boring. Making it "fun" is just a pain for your colleagues. Conversely, leisure should be fun. Making it into a money-making endeavor makes it unenjoyable for everyone else. There is supposed to be a line.
> The sociopathic thing is exactly reducing people, interests, and interactions into something transactional like this
Saying that people need to have money to survive and that it's great to be getting paid for doing something they love (while making stuff that's free for you to watch) is sociopathic and reducing them?
> OP came into a thread about a platform for freely sharing video, not for getting a job in the entertainment industry
Yes. But it's pretty silly to not think it will be compared to youtube. It's even called PeerTube, pretty obviously. youtube became so popular to inspire peertube in the first place thanks to its monetization. So it's a very obvious thing to bring up.
> And yes there should be a line between work and hobby. Hobbies are things you do for you. Work is something someone else wants and pays you to do
You keep that masochistic distinction if you want but please don't impose it on others
Yes, requiring payment to do things you love is sociopathic. It's the same as "keeping score" in a relationship. It will only make you and your counterparty grow to hate each other. This is exactly the "they just want something for free" dynamic. One or both parties thinks the other is an entitled freeloader and one or both thinks the other is an entitled dickhead.
You take payment to do things that are acceptable to you, that the other person needs, and that you are capable of. You don't tie emotions into it. Certainly not strong ones.
Of course they compare themselves to youtube, but via contrast. Specifically, that you control your own platform and (out of the box) there's no ad ecosystem. For people who want to share videos without making people watch ads, that's perfect. The entire point is that it's not youtube. And if you want "not youtube but still full of shills and grifters" there's also Instagram and TikTok. The "monetized 'content'" space is very well served already.
Masochism is turning the things you love into a grind, recontextualizing them such that they're now always carrying a question of economic utility (and therefore optimization) as you do them so that you can no longer just enjoy them for what they are.
'if you work hard enough and put in enough work that people watch 4000 hours of your videos in last year, and eventually you want to quit the job you don't like and just get paid by creating for people like that guy, and that guy says "monetization is the problem I have", it's kind of sociopathic. Drawing this line between work and hobby, like you have to do stuff you hate for money and god forbid you start getting paid for doing stuff you like' did you read that part?
'But it's pretty silly to not think it will be compared to youtube. It's even called PeerTube, pretty obviously. youtube became so popular to inspire peertube in the first place thanks to its monetization. So it's a very obvious thing to bring up.' or that
it makes it clear what I think about people being able to get paid for their work and 'they would not otherwise make them' is bullshit i never said. they would never make the videos that in recent years made youtube the place it is nowadays, but they would make some other stuff.
> they would never make the videos that in recent years made youtube the place it is nowadays, but they would make some other stuff.
Yes, that's exactly it. What I'm saying is I'm fine with not having the videos that in recent years made youtube the place it is nowadays, and I'm fine with the other stuff.
The place it is nowadays is the place you go to watch videos. You literally wrote "as youtube watcher".
The existence of ad bucks is what made people create better and better productions, which attracted more viewers, and that is why youtube became the default place for people like you to go for video stuff. You can't just remove that feature and have the rest.
I'm sure you didn't talk to every single creator whose video you watch and ask them if they did it without hoping for some YT ad bucks and whether they would have done it if there were no YT bucks. You can say they would but don't kid yourself we live in a capitalism and most people don't have enough money
> Youtube itself is responsible for an entire generation expecting the videos to be free.
True, it did create this weird world. But then think about all of the amazing high production value work we enjoy because someone once did it for fun, got paid and then decided to keep doing it and make a nice living off it while you still don't pay them a cent. Sadly it's probably impossible for YT to have that original atmosphere.
You are a self described youtube watcher. Unless you pay for youtube premium, you expect free content literally every time you open youtube. By definition.
> All the people who want to make money from YouTube can just stop making stuff if money is what's motivating them.
I don't know how old are you but after certain age things are not so black and white. We don't live in severance where we can slave away at a denigrating unethical job we hate just to earn money. People prefer to do something they love AND earn money from it. If they don't do the latter they starve and go bankrupt. Guess what then they can't provide free content for you.
I guess you never used YouTube in the early days. It was a site for posting and watching random home made videos and recorded broadcasts. Just for fun. Revenue streams for creators came after Google bought it, I think. Along with the ads.
This might simply revive a platform that no longer exists. It might not be about paying creators or collecting ad revenue. It's peer to peer, after all.
>I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch.
This is something I always thought to be extremely funny. Producing videos is a hobby. If you made it your job, go figure out how to monetize your material yourself. Nobody prevents you from taking sponsorships.
Seems advertising could be a third-party service on top of the video streaming service. Just like there are ad platforms that plugin to web pages. If that grows, you get your monetization.
If YouTube becomes a quarantine for high-quality content, then it will also become a quarantine for viewers.
the fundamental issue a lot of people here don't seem to get is that high quality videos that people want to watch are expensive to create. Besides the huge amount of high-skill labor, there's also just production costs, software, equipment, upkeep, etc.
At the very least, ignoring all other costs, a single person making good videos somewhat regularly is a full-time job. People who make entertainment also need to eat and pay rent, the money has to come from somewhere.
They have a problem with high quality production (more engaging due to production), low value content that proliferates on platforms like YouTube, and would rather see more high value content regardless of production quality, and Internet, in general enabled that if not for people starting to think about (ad supported) revenue first.
Not everyone is a "professional Youtuber" like you, and that includes a lot of Youtube who upload videos without any expectation of income, for who Youtube is mainly a free video hosting service that also allows them to reach a wider viewership.
Thr one solution I see to that is sponsorships, the number I've heard is they typically pay 10x the ad revenue of a video, and this wouldn't be affected by the platform, just the viewership numbers.
Big corporations that pay big creators millions per production are just normal studios like Disney and Paramount and nowadays Netflix and Prime. YouTube is the competitor to that. No matter how professional you think of your operation, you're not Christopher Nolan or even BBC Earth and neither is anyone else whose primary distribution channel is YouTube.
Good examples of more or less "free" content that fits PeerTube are cited in other comments, though. Conference footage, MIT OCW, archival footage of any kind of live event. Productions where the work is in putting on the event in the first place. Holding the conference, creating a course, putting on some kind of skateboarding competition, whatever it might be. Incidentally filming it and uploading the footage costs next to nothing in comparison, isn't expected to drive revenue compared to the live attendance, and it doesn't make much difference to the viewers if the footage is terrible. Shitty quality Feynman lectures is still watching Feynman lecture. It was really cool, for a recent example, that somebody found and uploaded phone footage of Caitlin Clark's fabled scrimmage against the Iowa men's team from however many years ago. Nobody cares about the quality of the video or who filmed it. Likely nobody subscribed to whatever channel it first ended up on, but how cares? People who wanted to see a rare real world event would still have been able to find it and it cost nothing to the person who pulled out a phone and turned it on while that event was happening.
As a side note 10-12 min is the ideal length for a non full feature documentary. I am growing tired of those 20+ minutes repeating and stretching the same topic without going into more depth.
Yes. "To understand this, we have to go back to..." 10 minutes of unnecessary retrospective, allowing insertion of three more ads. Usually you can skip that and get to the five minutes or so of new content.
>As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization.
That's the main benefit. Monetised content, and the people who make it, is despicable.
>and even I could not make this work if I didn't get at least $500-$1,000 per video on average, since it just takes so much time and money.
Have you considered getting a real job?
>Most channels with more than a million subscribers are likely founders working 60-80 hour weeks with multiple full-time employees supporting them.
Putting them out of business would be a fantastic turn of events.
>And yes, there are people who make content for free - most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video.
Cool and good.
>I think any real competitor to YouTube nowadays would have to be backed by a big corporation that can pay big creators million-dollar deals to make the switch.
That would be like paying a malware company to move from windows to apple.
The strongest endorsement for PeerTube is that it cannot sustain creators and thus will only either 1) freeboot off of platforms that do or 2) be flooded by low effort slop?
Virtually all of the content I watch on youtube does not fall into this category. The content I watch is a mixture of raw footage, a guy speaking to a camera with minimal editing for 10 minutes (think Rick Beato, for those who know him), edited down footage of people working (pool cleaning guys, chefs, etc) or people playing music.
Frankly I wouldn't care at all if all of your over-produced thumbnail-bait disappeared overnight.
This is just a great example of people who aren't in content creation fundamentally not understanding the ecosystem.
This isn't about "over-produced thumbnail-bait". This is about all high-quality media.
You mention Rick Beato. Do you really think Rick Beato sits down behind his laptop to edit his own videos? He has nearly 6 million subscribers and produces around 10 long-form videos per month. He has at the very least an editor (probably full-time) and a thumbnail designer (part-time), and I assume also a manager who sets up brand deals and contacts musicians for his interviews. He also records his videos on expensive cameras inside his well-lit studio, which also isn't cheap. It's very difficult to tell how much YouTube channels generate but I wouldn't be surprised if the Rick Beato channel is at this point a >$20K/month operation.
Edit: Also, do you really think Rick Beato making "The Secret Weapon Behind Dr Dre" or "The Real Reason Music is Getting Worse" is not clickbait? It's just clickbait, but for people like you. Part of good advertising is making people feel like they're not even being sold anything.
As a musician myself, and as someone who enjoys watching music and music theory content on YouTube, I can't stand watching Rick Beato because of stuff like this. There certainly are valid criticisms to be made against the music industry, but those videos are like 90% ridiculous cherry-picked comparisons and vague, superficial justifications. It's low-quality nostalgia-driven engagement bait that's optimizing for clicks and comments.
I really like this video by 12tone addressing Beato's schtick about modern music [0]. 12tone is an example of someone who I consider produces much higher quality content than Beato, and obviously puts a ton of time and effort into the videos (writing scripts, drawing the visuals, recording and editing, and making moderately-clickbaity titles and thumbnails). But I'd guess it's probably a one-person operation.
In comparison, Beato's channel strikes me as low-effort content (pick a topic and spend an hour talking unscripted in front of a camera) with a ton of money spent on production, editing, and algorithm hyper-optimization to maximize ROI. It's such a straightforward case of something that would not exist without YouTube's monetization system that it's rather ironic for the parent to use it as an example otherwise.
> It's such a straightforward case of something that would not exist without YouTube's monetization system
I find this to be very insightful.
I said above that Youtube itself created a generation that expects free videos, but it's also true that Youtube has created an industry that expect to make a living from their platform - to the extent that they literally cannot understand the point of view of the 'generation that expects free videos'.
There's obviously room for both since that's the world we live in, but it's interesting to see the two philosophically opposed 'bubbles' interacting with each other.
Beato doesn't do much hour-long unscripted talking to the camera. Those videos are typically only about 10 minutes long.
In any event, Rick Beato seems like a normal human being, albeit a somewhat goofy dad-rock oldie. 12Tone comes across as an aspie weirdo. I'd rather have more of the former.
> Beato doesn't do much hour-long unscripted talking to the camera. Those videos are typically only about 10 minutes long.
The videos are heavily edited with many cuts. So, I'd guess the production process is "have him talk for an hour, then edit it down to a 10 minute YouTube video".
> In any event, Rick Beato seems like a normal human being, albeit a somewhat goofy dad-rock oldie. 12Tone comes across as an aspie weirdo. I'd rather have more of the former.
And that's...kind of the point I'm making? The amount of effort put into the content of Beato's videos is quite low, with probably a couple hours at most of time put into research, coming up with talking points, and recording. But a lot of effort is spent on production, in order to make content that feels relatable and punchy and palatable to a mass market. It's junk food, and junk food sells well.
Indeed. Even streamers who just speak to the camera and play video games have a team of multiple people behind them, which some streamers discuss the economics of openly.
I think the problem is that the "act" of a lot of streamers and content creators is that they are relatable, in the sense that, part of watching a video game streamer is the appeal of, he's just a guy like me playing games in his bedroom. The problem is that this is all an act, or kayfabe as they would call it in wrestling. But it's an act so good that unlike wrestling, which everyone knows is fake, most people that are not at least adjacent to the content industry genuinely have no idea.
You can compare view counts of those channels to more clickbaity or professionally produced channels. And you'd also be surprised that many of those "head talking to camera" YouTubers also have production teams behind them, at a certain scale and revenue they're not editing their own videos.
Yeah, I think a lot of people on Hackernews fall into the "advertising never worked on me" or "I'm too smart for propaganda" camp.
Clickbait is not just big red arrows and "OMG" in the title. It certainly can be, for some demographics. For other demographics, clickbait can be a video titled "The Theorem That Changed Math Forever" and a blurred out formula in the thumbnail.
If you ever saw a video and just instantly had the urge of, "I have to see this", you successfully got clickbaited. If you dislike constant sound effects and transitions and just want to see someone speak - a lot of adult audiences feel the same way, which is why many big channels deliberately produce content in that way. It's still a similarly skilled editor who probably could make overproduced content if they wanted to - they're just making the choice to make the video more relaxed.
I mean, when you spin your own instance, because frankly, that's what the best option if you're a content creator, you can put whatever ads and monetization strategies you want. So basically the full income that gets generated gets to you, instead of splitting it with some third party that invests minimal effort. Yes, you'll have to pay someone to maintain and upkeep the server, but assumedly the people that can make the change will take that cost into account.
> a big corporation that can pay big creators million-dollar deals to make the switch.
I'm surprised by this. Isn't controlling your full production/distribution/revenue a good enough payback?
By charging it for content. Since HN doesn't like any form of Ads. /s
Sorry I have to write this out. But I am somewhat glad in the past 2 years HN has returned back to discussing monetization, money, business in a sane way.
Really? Thats the main issue? What about when they upload child porn and some of it ends up on your computer and they break down your door and you spend the rest of your life getting bungholed by Darnel. I would rate that higher than monetary rewards.
Decentralized system rely heavily on how much you trust other humans, I do not, so I hear them.say Decentralized and I run.
I was gonna say the same. Also copyrighted content like movies. In Germany you can easily get sued for hosting and distributing. That's why torrenting is quite unpopular there
It's a promising system, and I'd probably use it over a non-federated video hosting system if I wanted to run a video hosting site of some kind.
Yet it's currently hard to find a real usecase for it, since neither the content you want nor audience is there on PeerTube at the moment. If you're interested in open source software or data privacy you might find something here or there, but topics like gaming, music, sports or movies are very much underserved on the platform at the moment, and get almost no attention from viewers.
For example, I recently did a test search and found a let's play for the Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. The videos had something like 3-5 views on PeerTube, and about 10-15 times that on the creator's YouTube channel.
It's the same issue as on Mastodon and Lemmy to be honest, except exaggerated. If the majority of topics aren't well represented on these platforms, then the general public won't use them. And if the general public won't use them, then the creators that would bring the general public over won't use them either.
They need to figure out a way to encourage people outside of the 'hardcore tech nerd raised on Usenet' audience to use these platforms.
Has it normalized? When I first tried Lemmy it was mostly communists talking about communism. Then after some Reddit drama it seemed to be a bunch of people complaining about Reddit.
I generally like smaller sites, but those topics weren’t exactly engaging for me.
I got banned from some community for pointing out how shitty Soviet Union was in WW2, but learned to avoid that instance from that. It's a "federation", so you get all kinds.
I’ve been a regular lemmy user for a few years now and it’s gotten better. The communists (and fascist) platforms have been de-federated from the major platforms. It’s still full of Reddit complaining from ex redditors. I don’t think that will change.
My login server is lemmy.world, so if you sign up with something else ymmv.
Creators get 60% of youtube's ad revenue from youtube.
What does Peertube pay?
There is your answer. If people want good stuff, there needs to be money flowing to the source of it. The internet desperately needs to shed this "everything good is totally free" mindset, because what it actually manifests as is "I love taking without the requirement of giving".
Online video sharing doesn't have to exclusively mean professional "creators" who make content with hollywood-like budgets and expect massive returns. There are 100+ million accounts regularly uploading on Youtube and only around 2-3 million of them are in the partner program. The overwhelming majority get nothing.
The problem is that all of those accounts that don't earn money don't earn money because they get no views, because they make videos no one wants to watch. I don't know the exact statistics but a simple Google search says that 3% of videos on YouTube get 95% of the views. Remove the top 3% of creators, you remove 95% of views.
The top channels get all the views because they're the only ones making videos people want to watch, and they're monetized because making such content is really, really expensive.
The problem is that beyond creators with "hollywood-like budgets", even just making 1 good video a week is a full-time job. Most creators are not looking to get rich or get massive returns, they just want to survive and pay rent. Which means any channel of any value has to be able to generate at least few thousand dollars month.
> The problem is that all of those accounts that don't earn money don't earn money because they get no views, because they make videos no one wants to watch.
That's an absurd statement.
Every video I've uploaded has gotten some views. Very few videos get zero views.
People forget that historically, Youtube wasn't a place for "content creators", but really just for people to share stuff with friends. Easily 95% of uploaders are not trying to make any money.
i upload unlisted videos to share privately with a single family member. or as a backup so i dont have to store it on my phone etc. silly to assume that people post things because they want it to be seen by e v e r y o n e.
The matter of compensation or donation can be handled completely separately. Creators can be supported on other platforms like Liberapay, Patreon, Kofi, and many creators are supported that way.
If we are talking about clickbait and making money from getting unwanted ads in people's faces, no thank you we don't need more of that.
About as likely as opening a grocery store where people can pay through voluntary donations.
I'm a professional YouTuber. The problem with a "donation" system is that, unlike something like tweets or even blog posts which are either free or low-cost to produce, high-quality video is really. expensive. to produce. And people just will not pay if they don't have to.
A good 20-minute video can easily cost 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor to produce. That is, a whole week of labor. And that's not counting expensive equipment, software, licenses, etc.
I cannot run a business on people deciding to give me money for nothing out of the goodness of their heart. And I am still a one-person business, imagine having 5 full time employees. Even YouTubers with millions of subscribers and mature audiences with disposable income often struggle to clear like $5K/month on Patreon. Which, for a multi-person business, is simply not enough. Meanwhile, that same creator might be pulling $20K/month through ads and a similar amount through sponsorships.
YouTube is more similar to Netflix and HBO than Twitter or Reddit. Yes, in theory anyone can upload to YouTube, but the majority of content that is actually watched is at this point produced by full-time creators, some of which are solo self-employed while others are at this point running whole media production companies. And those are the people you need to make a service succeed.
No one donates money. It doesn't happen. Conversion rates across the board are around 1%. And then of those donations, most are the lowest tier/lowest increment.
It's the most annoying and persistent counterpoint brought up in these discussions, but it has no grounding in reality. The most popular contingent of viewers are ad-supported, close behind are ad-blocking, then the last 5% are your subscribers and donators.
Counter example: I supported and still support a little a few great creators. So "no one" is already wrong. It does happen. It might not amount to a high monthly salary. Most likely not. That's a point you can reasonably make, but you can only wrongly claim, that no one donates.
that works for people you regularly watch, but what about the people that put out the rare random great video. or a video on a topic when you're trying to fix something. People dont subscribe to those patreons, and thus those kind of creators rely on ad revenue.
What an absolutely bizarre thing to write in response to a link to a completely free software project with 541 contributors. Here you have hundreds of people who are exactly giving away highly skilled work for free.
Software has such a vibrant open source scene because software has probably the biggest impact-per-unit-time out of anything ever created and it has close to zero development cost and distribution cost. It's basically, skill+laptop+time. That's all you need to get a product in the hands of millions.
There is a reason why there is mountains of free software and comparative dust mounds of free media, free hardware, free services.
LLM progress in the last year notwithstanding, software is not cheap to develop. I wouldn't be surprised if e.g. this project had multiple millions of dollars of labor embedded in it.
Software, like media, is simply free to replicate, and there's a much stronger culture of "I made this for me, and it costs me nothing to give it to you too, so you can have it too." There is a lot of free media out there though: music, art, short films, games or game mods, etc. What they don't have is marketing.
Software is the cheapest of all engineering disciplines by far. Literally the only cost is time and a $20 computer.
Compare to open source hardware, where you need a lab with thousands of dollars in equipment, need to consume supplies to build stuff and need to pay manufacturers for prototyping.
Software benefits enormously from having zero dependance on the physical world. Its about as resource intensive as building houses in Minecraft.
Just like doctors' and lawyers' consultations are cheap? That time is extremely expensive if it's something you are buying. Companies spend over $200/hour for the time of a competent engineer. Like I said, I wouldn't doubt this project here "costing" 7-figures despite being free. Things like Blender or KDE are probably 8 figures.
Not really sure how people need to be explained this, but for whatever reason, this most basic of information is seemingly skipped over. Even if peertube wants to pay 65%, that's just a bigger percentage of nothing.
FOSS server software shouldn't be seen as a platform. It should be seen as software that can be used to create a platform. Federation makes it technically a platform but just barely. Mastodon is barely a platform - mastodon.social is, and kolektiva is a different one.
PeerTube is software you could use to make a video streaming website like Nebula.
To me the ideal use of PeerTube would be if studios adopted it as their publishing platform. Publish to their instance, syndicated globally. But, they are so hardcore on licensing that they will never adopt a platform that doesn't have complete control over where their media is distributed. The lack of a method for monetizing videos on PeerTube is also like the black mark for a video platform. But, the maintainers of PeerTube are ideologically opposed to monetization lest the toxin of advertisements taint the platform.
The legal landscape of media publishing is filled with antiquated deals from broadcast days for regional control. That has changed marginally with the adoption of streaming.
AAA studios will never just put their videos on the internet. This is a prime example of somebody ignoring the social and political aspects of a field and focusing only on the technology. The reason Disney doesn't put their videos on the internet for free-to-the-user viewing IS NOT because they lack server software.
You don't need (or likely even want, c.f. "eternal September") the general public. You just need your discussion group. e.g. if you want discussion of mathematics from world renowned experts like Terence Tao or Tim Gowers, you would use Mastodon.
I agree this is a real issue, however hopefully a solution is that creators will upload their videos to both sites (ie YouTube is their primary but also upload to peertube at the same time) which is pretty easy to do and eventually a site like peer tube might reach that critical mass with enough content
Supposedly there's a button to wholesale import your YouTube channel to PeerTube and keep syncing after, wonder if that's easy/reliable enough for people to do it just cause.
I am currently recording tutorial videos for an open source project. It's produced fully with Foss software (on Linux, obs, kdenlive) and about an open source project, so I wanted to host it with peertube (though YouTube might be used later on for its network effect, it was easier to publish with peertube as yt required an video of me and my ID).
It's going fine until now. I don't host peertube myself though, I use an existing instance, and embed the videos in the website.
It was a really good experience, so I'll continue that way.
PeerTube only performs the fourth, and maybe the third. It's not a flooding distribution system like BitTorrent. It's just a way for a large number of people to play the same video without overloading a modest hosting server. Playout load is distributed amongst the watchers browsers.
I put videos in PeerTube, tech demos of various rendering tests. Works fine.
No ad insertion, which is why I use PeerTube.
Peak view count is 2.3K.[1] Nobody is expected to discover them there. They're linked from various forums. Some are for a very tiny audience, such as "Second Life sim server EstablishAgentCommunication message bug", with 10 views, mostly from the devs who needed to see this.
Technically it works fine, but it's not going to displace YouTube. Unless, say, Taylor Swift decided to stream her wedding on it to avoid ad insertion.
PeerTube has some interesting technology with the P2P sharing between users who watch at the same time. But with these kind of projects I think there are unfortunately social factors that impact their success as well as technical factors.
It's one thing to put a <video> element on a HTML page (or implement video over webtorrent), it's quite another to make people actually watch it instead of their TikTok feed.
It reminds me of the other social media type experiments, I applaud their efforts but the underlying technology just isn’t a huge selling point to viewers compared to the actual content.
On the contrary, I worry about the ability of these grassroots user-generated content distribution systems to withstand the barrage of generated slop uploaded by armies of autonomous agents. Fighting it off is an asymmetric battle that makes it increasingly hard to distinguish the legitimate users trying to share their work.
The problem is that YouTube isn't just a video hosting platform. We have many of those. The problem is that YouTube is a business platform that lets you makes money from your business, as long as your business is mainly comprised of publishing videos. No amount of open-source software quality can replicate thousands of dollars of ad money flowing into your pocket. It's like making a 3D-printable plan of an Indian restaurant, it can't ever become an actual Indian restaurant.
Small or hobby creators, who aren't making money anyway, could use small platforms - but then they forfeit their chance to ever become big and get that money - at best they could become big and not get that money.
Youtube's biggest threat ever died in the cradle because they foolishly thought users would volunteer money to them.
No one with capital and capability looks at youtube, looks at youtube's audience, and says "Yeah, 30-40% ad-blocking and 4.5% paying for premium, these are the people I want to build services for!".
Those ad-blocked viewers are important, which is why YT doesn't actually crack down on them.
Those are the people who will happily go to an alternative product. And while that product might start as a pirate YouTube, the one that nabs 30% of YT's traffic can certainly make a pivot to legit. If you're a content creator whose audience is mostly in that group, you're likely to start posting content directly on the competitor's site.
I'm guessing OP had their account banned for using a tool like yt-dl too aggressively. Then again, doing that does give a warning.
Youtube does crack down on them, all the time. Why do you think they are "important"? What are they contributing, and to whom? How does Google benefit?
They half-ass crack down on them. Not even that, it's dime-assed crackdown at best. You get that little "experiencing issues?" note that the bottom of the screen (which goes away after a few seconds), and an occasional 3-5s delay before video starts.
I explained exactly why I think they are important in that entire paragraph. And the evidence I'm right is the fact that YouTube could trivially prevent ad-blockers tomorrow, but they don't. They've tried it and quickly rolled back the changes. Presumably they lost a lot more audience than expected.
Though anytime I do land on actual YouTube, and not an invidious instance to watch a video, and am confronted how utterly crap the YouTube frontend and their video player is, I gotta wonder, whether the crackdown is half-assed, or simply the maximum of what they are capable of developing.
Youtube won the war on ad blocking when most views moved to TV and mobile. While I've seen some people have hacked clients to run on TV platforms, the average person just either watches the ads or pays for youtube premium. The friction for ad blocking has gone up to the point youtube makes enough money to not care about the rest.
In tech/engineering/video game categories, ad-blocking is still around 40% of viewers. Basically things that people who still use desktops/laptops are into.
I am still a bit upset that I got banned without even a warning. I tried to adhere to policies and figured if anything was wrong, I'd get a warning at least, and then I'd know better what the limits are. Unfortunately there is little recourse and even less feedback.
Even more annoying is that it terminates your YouTube account entirely, so now I can't even login to use it. And I was a premium subscriber, too!
The best thing about YouTube is their agreements with rights holders to allow music and revenue sharing easily, which makes it very simple for creators and remixers etc to not get their stuff removed via DMCA.
I like the idea of all of these federated services but why does the UX always feel like an afterthought when it is the most important factor for adoption?
Same reason why the Linux desktop often suffers on the UX/UX front: people naturally drawn to these projects tend to lean heavily technical, and highly technical circles have a bad habit of driving out less technical contributors through devaluation of their work and lack of agency within the project among other issues.
That sort of work also tends to be less well-compensated than that of SWEs which makes it more important to be paid for work (which most FOSS project cannot do).
UX work is often also a lot heavier and more subjective than the plumbing.
I might open a pull request to support some new video code, and that might only require a few dozen lines over a few files. That's easy to review, and it either works or it doesn't. Worst case they say "our convention is to register codecs as a subclass of X class, but you subclassed Y class" or something equally straightforward.
Let's say instead I wanted to change the workflow to register an account. Now I'm changing a bunch of JavaScript, CSS, templates, I'm adding pages, and I also need to update the backend. Even if someone is that into frontend work, it might take forever to even get reviewed by the maintainers because it's a massive PR.
Plus, now we've moved into subjectivity land: "I'm used to the old workflow," (because they designed it) "The last one was really easy" (for an engineer), "I think we should focus on the backend before we work on the UI," "I don't like this font because the license isn't free as in freedom" etc.
Even if you just mockup something on Figma or whatever, unless you're a maintainer it's probably going to just get ignored as a feature request. Because there's also the psychological aspect of basically being told that the UI you wrote is implicitly bad, if you're the maintainer reviewing the mockup.
I know many developers who make at least some open source contributions, be it to an existing project or by open sourcing their own.
It has never, ever happened to me that a UI/UX person opened a PR saying "here, I made a logo for your project because I know how".
I think that there is a cultural thing, where UI/UX people don't consider that they have to work for free on the Internet, and software developers have a tendency to believe they should, "for their CV" or something.
Or maybe there is no universally better UX and people who work for free want to create what works for themselves and not some top down designers vision. After all most mainstream software completely ignores the needs of power users.
Is it possible to just vaguely gesture at everything?
The spacing of every component feels wrong, the font choices are off, the text is too small, there is way too much white space, the "other video" section looks like its just jammed off to the side. The overall feel of the website is very amateurish.
Yeah, it's pretty simple. When I go to YouTube.com, I have access to all of the videos on that platform, sorted based on what I'm subscribed to and other things like what I watch. The first thing I see are videos. I'm off to the races.
When I go to https://joinpeertube.org, I'm met with a double hero section that tells me about PeerTube, which is ultimately meaningless to 99% of the population.
When I get to actual content on that page, it's not an aggregate of all of the most popular videos across the federation, it's a description of the types of videos you can find on federated sites with links to the sites and not video embeds. You're telling me on the front page that I have to do legwork to find the videos I want to watch. You're already not competitive. You already lose.
Creators go where users go. If you don't build the platform to attract users, you will not get the volume of content that is required to hold people's attention. There's a reason why people come to YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News, Reels, etc. There are almost no clicks between the user and the content, and the content is plentiful.
Every time I try to use PeerTube, I have to try to find where to find the videos. As someone who's been chronically online since 1995, it's not that big of a deal. I can find them eventually. But that UX sucks, even for me, so it's probably utterly untenable for the vast majority of casual users.
You are trying to compete with slot machines by inventing a machine that makes the user read a bunch of stuff between each pull of the lever. It's not super difficult to see why that is a competitive disadvantage.
And the thing is that you don't even necessarily need to make a new slot machine to compete with the old slot machine. A lot of people hate the slot machine-ness of the old slot machine. They hit a button on their Chrome extension/Greasemonkey remote to turn off the flashing lights and loud attention-grabbing sounds and whatnot. So, if your new machine doesn't have those, maybe that's all for the better. Maybe your new machine gives players more control over how they play, and doesn't try to trick them into never getting up to get some water or go to the bathroom or whatever. Maybe there's no jackpot, just a chill or educational time. Maybe you get rid of the randomness of the outcomes, so that it's easier for people to just find what they're looking for. I dunno. There are a lot of ways it could go.
But, boy, I do know this: when I sit down, I better be able to just pull the lever and start.
This is like complaining that when you go to nginx.org, you aren't shown a bunch of websites or a search box to discover anything, so this web thing is garbage UX compared to the Facebook app. There's no "the federation". There are various sites that run peertube, some of which are federated with each other. Others have nothing to do with each other. Some are probably completely private.
An example of federation might be that a bunch of universities run their own instances where they post colloquia, and they federate with each other to make it easy to subscribe to departments in your field from another university, or to comment on their videos. IMO state universities should be posting their material online like this, and on a platform that does not require the public to watch ads (something fundamentally against the mission of an educational institution), or agree to some random company's terms.
I agree with you, but I was speaking to PeerTube's own claim that it is an alternative to YouTube, rather than the narrow use case you're describing. For the vast majority of the people on the planet, it is not an alternative to YouTube because it's very difficult to discover content. When I go to YouTube, I can find videos immediately. If I want to find videos via PeerTube, it's a journey. It's the same journey that has shifted the majority of Internet users away from forums to aggregators. PeerTube feels like a bygone way to do things.
> PeerTube is a tool for sharing online videos developed by Framasoft, a french non-profit.
> PeerTube allows you to create your own video platform, in complete independence.
I think it's pretty clear that it's software for running your own video sharing platform? Sure, people are used to monopolies and consolidation now, but surely you can wrap you head around the idea that some people might want to host their own site? Like why are you here and not on reddit? Is this site a bygone way to do things? Or is it just... its own thing?
As I said above, I think entities tied to governments should be using something like this, not youtube. The obvious place to look for e.g. recorded meetings from your city would be your city website. Likewise with schools. And government functions like that absolutely should not be monetized and should not have ads attached.
I am both here, and on Reddit, and also on YouTube. I can be in many places at the same time because this is all made of light and there are lots of interesting places to go. I'll probably find myself on Reels before too long. I'm not on PeerTube because I cannot find content that is interesting on PeerTube, which again is the crux of my argument.
> PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform developed as an alternative to other platforms that centralize our data and attention, such as YouTube, Dailymotion or Vimeo.
The original PeerTube launch I saw on this platform several years ago very much sold it as a replacement for YouTube. I'm not sure what exactly you think I'm saying or trying to do here, but what I've said has absolutely nothing to do with the use case you're defending. It's a good use case and it makes sense. It's fine for hosting your own stuff or in coursework or something where the videos are directly linked to from a CMS. Some people want to host their own stuff. Some people should host their own stuff.
You are not "on peertube" because there's no such thing as a peertube to be on. What I'm trying to convey is that your words literally don't make sense. There is no "everybody else" for the UX to suck for. You're complaining that it doesn't try to be the opposite of what it is.
If you're interested in Debian, you go to Debian's peertube which is part of Debian's website, where the Debian foundation hosts their videos. If you're interested in Blender, you go to Blender's peertube which is part of Blender's website. It's always worked this way. There's also activitypub federation if you want the social parts with a single account so that cooperating instances can interact. Like email, it's an open protocol so any servers can federate. Like email, they can also choose who they accept traffic from.
There is also a search engine that indexes a bunch of instances, but just as Google is not the web, their search engine is not the peertube. "The web" is just the sum total of all of the websites out there. The thing you seem to think has bad UX, the peertube, is just the sum total of all of the peertube instances out there.
There's no giant overlay or mesh network like gnutella or IPFS. There's just people running their own servers, like the web or email.
It's an alternative to youtube for people who just want to share videos in the same way that an email server is an alternative to gmail for people who just want to send emails to each other. Or a web server is an alternative to Facebook for someone who wants a website. It's understood that those monopolies are then distinct and generally incompatible.
You're being pedantic while also just kind of continuing to make my point for me because you're describing a regressive user experience over and over again. The Internet at large has evolved beyond forums and IRC for a reason.
Users have become used to having quick and easy access to a lake of content. When I go to PeerTube's website, I should see content first, and if I'm a creator, I want a guarantee that my content isn't going to suddenly disappear. YouTube can make these guarantees. BlueSky is the only such federated alternative that has gained any degree of traction with normal users because they ripped off the UX of Twitter verbatim.
If you're on episcodon.net and you want your friends and colleagues to join you there, what does that look like? Your answer invariably resides at the end of a labyrinth of shit UX, including the legwork you have to do first to know wtf episcodon.net even is.
People use GMail because it makes email easy to use and there is an implicit guarantee that the emails they have access to today will be there in 10 years because there are an army of engineers being paid to maintain the service. The UX is good and that's why it's popular.
To advertise yourself as an alternative to a popular social media platform, you must address why those platforms are popular in the first place or you are not competitive as a default state.
> Users have become used to having quick and easy access to a lake of content. When I go to PeerTube's website, I should see content first,
Peertube's website is not for consumers. It is for publishers. They're quite clear about that when they advertise that you can run your own platform. Again, you are basically complaining that nginx.org doesn't list some cool websites to get started browsing the WWW (except peertube even goes so far as to actually even point to a couple instances).
It's not a regression if your goal is not "create content"/"find and consume content". Like if you actually have interests, and e.g. are a Blender user, and you already visit blender.org for news about the Blender project, then it makes sense that they might say "here are some videos about our project". And of course they offer RSS so you can use your preferred subscription software.
> if I'm a creator, I want a guarantee that my content isn't going to suddenly disappear.
Then install peertube and post your videos? This is what various organizations that don't want their information to disappear like Debian or Blender have done.
> shit UX, including the legwork you have to do first to know wtf episcodon.net even is.
So your criticism is that it's not literally the current monopoly that everyone already knows.
What do you even mean "join you there"? Sharing a peertube video is the same as sharing a youtube video: you select the address, copy, and paste into a message. There's no commitment. You either just... click a link and watch a video, or if you also want to post, you put in your email/password to sign up. I have hundreds of saved logins in my browser, including Google/youtube (who are more onerous and require e.g. a phone number to sign up, or back in the day, required an invite). Peertube is somehow uniquely shit for... not literally being Google?
Is there an actual criticism here that isn't "videos aren't literally recommended on youtube and I'm not literally already logged in via youtube and subscriptions aren't literally managed within youtube"?
That's fine if that's your goal, but don't expect anyone to adopt it then. 99% of people aren't flocking to video platforms for ideological nor technical reasons.
I tried to find some videos by starting at the URL you linked.
I clicked on "Browse content", because that's exactly what I wanted to do: I wanted to browse content.
All I got from that was a needless introduction to an entirely unnecessary cuttlefish named Sepia, and a search box. There was no content to browse; I was lied to.
But there's a note at the bottom about "Peertube instances" with a literal "CLICK >HERE<" cursed-abomination-style link.
That click lead to a list of... 25 "Peertube platforms", in one column on the right, even though I clicked >HERE< for "Peertube instances".
There's a written suggestion that I can add filters to find more of these, but that's exactly the opposite of the way that filters have always worked in my world: Filters are reductive, not additive.
Finally, in the left-hand column, is another CLICK >HERE< style link that is supposed to take me to "videos or channels" -- you know, the stuff I'm looking for.
That link brings me back to the stupid page with Sepia, the iconic cuttlefish, and a search box.
Having been lied to twice (thrice?), I gave up. At this time, I have not yet seen any videos.
You say that you're genuinely interested, but chances are that any given maintainer is not. Willingness to actually listen to UI/UX critique is what separates the Blenders from the GIMPs.
Look at the installation instructions. <https://docs.joinpeertube.org/install/any-os> They are very onerous. Yes, I've seen worse, but the ratio between manual labour in service of non-essential complexity and the provided value is still quite bad.
Peertube covers the enterprise use case, but makes unreasonable demands from hobbyists, single users, tinkerers. Kids, gather around and learn from the Peertube design mistakes that an experienced and well-meaning software designer would refuse to subject his users/operators to. Why is this important? Because the number of hobbyist operators is much greater than the number of enterprise operators, given the intended target audience of people who are interested in decentralisation and federation. Peertube engineers and product managers should sit down with the intention to make a smart market move, and expend the next half month of effort to optimise for the majority of operators who make up the long tail, not the minority, so that hurdles to entry are demolished and the stated goal shown on the homepage of "community-owned" becomes attainable for many more people than is the case right now. The resulting network effect would be tremendous.
1. Packaging. Peertube is not packaged by the major players. <https://repology.org/project/peertube/versions> Real-life experience shows that this is almost always because of a circumstance which frustrates a distro packager. Other NPM-conformant libraries and software are packaged nearly automatically, there is good support in the distros to create specfile/RPM package, control file/Deb package, etc. from an Nodejs library tarball with just one command. Peertube must investigate why it is so exceptional and difficult to package and demolish the hurdles.
2. Configuration. Peertube must as the installation step make effective an usable configuration that has some sensible defaults, or perhaps auto-configure at install time or run time. A user should be able to install the software (from a distro package, or a git checkout/unpacked tarball and build step), run it, and immediately use it. It is okay when some features are not working until configured. It is not okay for a software to refuse to work altogether until each and every operator spends time and brain power to figure out what are essential configuration options and what are not, and make decisions about them. The reason why I say it is not okay is because this is a clear abdication of responsibility from the Peertube software devs and an externalising of mental burdens onto the many Peertube operators.
3. Database. Peertube should work with Sqlite by default. An enterprise user can configure PostgreSQL additionally when the need arises.
4. Web server. Peertube should work with the Node.js Web server (possibly express.js or a work-alike) by default. An enterprise user can configure Nginx additionally when the need arises.
5. Cache. Peertube should work with a simple file system cache or no cache at all by default. An enterprise user can configure Redis additionally when the need arises.
If you find those few instances that have those few uploaders that interest you, the content can be good.
However it does certainly suffer from the fact that all federated instances can't pull in videos from other platforms in some reproducible way (so that all instances would be able to serve the same content).
I'm sure some YouTubers would allow mirrors if they didn't have to pick an instance and keep it running.
Would be pretty incredible to see decentralized federated media individual accounts and aggregators implement the x402 payment protocol (https://x402.org) as a way for creators to get paid, and thus continue to create.
Im envisioning a spotify replacement. You could pay for your streams directly to artists or platform the artist hosts on. Allowing for a more free market of creators and consumers.
The 'Explore' part, would basically just be like Mastadon or Bluesky
I didn't estimate the cost but server-wise it's less than 30 EUR/month. What's demanding is transcoding but with the new architecture https://docs.joinpeertube.org/contribute/architecture#remote... there are ways to optimize, e.g. do nightly batch transcoding on a cheaper spot instances.
My business model is showcase and archival of my prototyping work. I'm the only account on my instance so there is no surprise with suddenly someone abusing the instance.
They can't shut down the service because there is no single service. They can go after individual servers, and that is fine. The admin is responsible for what happens on their server.
Why would an admin run a server if they might have the feds knocking at their door? Sure, people might run nodes that host only their content, but they sure are disincentivized from running any sort of shared service.
This is the same problem as TOR exit nodes and why 3 letter agencies run most of them.
This is the same problem as why an admin would run a forum if the feds might knock at the door, or why an admin would run a website about cats if the feds might knock at the door. It's an overblown fear.
People do host those things, so clearly they don't need convincing. I'm replying to you because you are the one who said it on Hacker News, and I'm concerned that people might read the FUD on Hacker News and it might stop them from hosting something.
Isn't the design of peertube that you can view videos originally uploaded by other instances? So unless you decide to not federate, you are responsible for every video on every instance.
Yes, but you can federate selectively, as in choosing which other instances you want to. And, yes, federating turns you responsible for the content of the other instance (IMHO; not legal advice or even fact checked).
Someone is still hosting the content and paying for resources just like with every other service distributed or not so it doesn't really add anything new to the equation.
For an example of a quite vibrant local PeerTube instance, there is https://vhsky.cz/ running in the Czech Republic.
(And no, it is not spelled "VH SKY" - it's a pun on the VHS video format - in Czech to say "multiple VHS casettes - you would say "vhsky", hence the name. :) )
I spent 10 minutes figuring out how I could just follow a few instances without having to run a docker container on my machine or keeping N tabs open all the time.
Not a chance to figure that out (I am no mastodon user, so hard for me to guess).
These platforms are promising, but they need to remember that the average user will turn away immediately if there is no clear guidance on how to do the basic things.
I've been deeply invested in YT and YT Music for about 20 years now. This month I was forced to cancel my subscription. They recently jacked up the price and really ruined the apps. I can't even understand how to operate the apps anymore; nobody will document it; nobody will support them. So I'm unable to monetarily support an unsupported app ecosystem.
Sadly I cannot leave the platform. The network effect is far too strong. PeerTube, and Vimeo, and Spotify are all well and good, like any other, but the network effect means that YouTube is where the channels are. The official channels that I follow and watch every day, for news, for updates, for the most important things in my hobby and my daily life. I cannot simply stop watching those things.
Call me an addict or something; I don't know. I have no TV, no family; I need some kind of time-chewing entertainment that is mostly passive. I wish I could curl up with books and knitting or crafts or something, but my eyes are still glued to these screens.
Personally, I find the lack of videos to watch on PeerTube a huge plus. I tremendously reduced my weekly video watching time and I don't feel like missing out on something important. My favorite instance is makertube.net, but I visit few others too.
Thank you, I'd not come across makertube.net. Is there some website that collects all of these instances together? I thought peertube.tv would do that, but there are loads more content on makertube.net so clearly not.
I used it a few months ago but there was lag and things not working.
I keep on saying we need to eliminate Google for real. I mean it too.
But the services NEED TO BE FLAWLESS if you want to have a chance against
Google. I don't understand why people don't seem to understand it. Software
can often be better. PeerTube's software was disappointing and really poorly
implemented compared to Google. There is no way to win here that way against
Google. That's not realistic.
It's not possible for FOSS to compete with Google in Google's niche — try it and you'll see why. It's possible to find a different niche and expand there.
Last time I tried it the federation was whitelist based, that is you could only follow people on instances added by the admin of your instance. This made content discovery difficult.
I wonder if peertube could be used as backend infra for a security camera system, the tech seems promising. Also with all these instances hosting their own content, what do they do to combat cgnat? do individuals need to upload to an instance that has a public ip at a bare minimum. And what about directory listings for content, users would expect to be able to browse available videos and then burrow down to instances that host them no?
Hasn't cared about PeerTube for a long time, but this software is getting really impressive. Maybe it's time to move towards the next step: getting publishers on board.
I could totally see myself hooked if I can watch news on it. Can someone from a proper news agency, such as BBC, DW, Reuters, NYT etc test the software and maybe make a pitch? If these agencies are hosting their own PeerTube instances, that would be a major win.
No, I mean just let them host the instance themselves, and they can decide to do whatever.
Many of these publishers already got a podcast/video publishing routine anyways and they just put ads directly in the podcast/video. I guess maybe it's not that hard for them to add another publishing channel.
Getting one of the proper news agencies on board is very beneficial for the PeerTube network, because currently there's not much good quality content on it. News videos maybe a good baseline to keep user engaged (as long as they're not too political).
If PeerTube is my software, I'll probably pay my own money to get the agencies on board. I'll even host their site myself if it needs to (at least for the first few years, to demonstrate the value of the software).
If you only seed videos you have full legal rights to (creative commons [as long as you follow the license terms properly], public domain, or videos you personally created yourself, therefore own all rights to outright), then where's the worry? If you choose to seed copyrighted videos, well then that's all on you to handle the legality of (or lack thereof) I'd suppose... :shrug:
The biggest problem I see is that you need to search for videos. If this is going to work you need a YouTube like home page with videos on it and a different webpage talking about the tech. Using a search page to find videos instead of being presented with one is a non starter.
1. Chunk one inside a YT video
2. Chunk two inside a TikTok video
3. Chunk three on an X thread
And then just post the manifest somewhere that can be read by a client, that then pulls the data in (video, doc, anything)
Obv, not meant for speed or good UX, but if we’re going down the route of decentralization, we can probably leverage social platforms to host chunks of data.
I'm giving this an honest try to post some music I made, cause Google randomly banned me yesterday for "bot activity" and wants an appeal. I'm not mad or anything, just thinking they won't let me use YouTube anymore.
User generated content: check, comment section: check.
How do people running an instance not fall foul of all the protect the children UK legislation? Will peers also be done by the UK regulator, or only hosts?
I've tried a few of these alternative sites, and it's just not a fun place to go find videos from interesting people working on projects, etc. A lot of unpleasant extremist videos, a lot of slop, with no good ability to filter out just what I want to see. Sure, YouTube has these too but I can manage to keep it at bay.
It does have some ability to filter. I am subscribed to a few channels on the Makertube instance and regularly watch some videos there.
You can mute channels or entire federated instances so they don't appear in feeds or search results. It does get tiresome to always have to do this when you see unwanted video's, but they do stay gone, unlike Youtube's system of "Not Interested"/"Don't recomend this channel".
All in all i've been watching less Youtube lately and starting to watch some Peertube videos and finding the grassroots nature of it very refreshing.
As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization.
I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch. This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram. Even a decent 20-minute video can easily take 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor.
I have a pretty small channel (~100K subscribers) with no employees and relatively low upkeep costs (a few hundred dollars a month), and even I could not make this work if I didn't get at least $500-$1,000 per video on average, since it just takes so much time and money.
Most channels with more than a million subscribers are likely founders working 60-80 hour weeks with multiple full-time employees supporting them. You cannot do that in the hopes of viewers donating $5 here and there.
And yes, there are people who make content for free - most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video. And the difference between a million views and a hundred is 10,000x. You cannot create a platform without big users.
I think any real competitor to YouTube nowadays would have to be backed by a big corporation that can pay big creators million-dollar deals to make the switch. Otherwise it's just dead in the water.
You can publish to both and even better your own domain that simply points to your video hosting provider. Long term you want to own your distribution channel as much as possible, while using YouTube as your lead generation tool to drive true believers to your site and premium distribution channel not owned by YouTube. Otherwise, you will always be subject to platform risk via YouTube's whims which has destroyed many content creators. That's the long term winning play IMO and it doesn't preclude tools like FreeTube.
Realistically, how many viewers will be retained should YT shut the OP down? Right now, that number rounds to 0. Practically speaking, YT is free internet video streaming for long-form videos on the US market.
Nobody is going to go to OP's personal site to watch videos. They are going to fire up YT and eat what the algorithm feeds them.
The reason PeerTube and Nebula are important is it provides the potential for a true alternative destination for people looking for videos. Once these platforms have an enough content to draw an audience naturally, then content creators will be able to survive a post-YT world.
For people like the OP, it's probably best to follow the model video games do with DRM. Post on YT first, to get the ad revenue, then repost on other platforms after some time to build up an alternative subscriber base. Presumably, in-video sponsorships will pay for these views as well, even if there's no direct ad-sense like revenue model.
> Nobody is going to go to OP's personal site to watch videos.
Counterpoint: Channels with Patreons with uncensored and pre-release content.
Youtube can't be unseated as the main platform, but you're wildly wrong about the order of operations for what to do beyond your lead audience. No, you want to post on other platforms first, at a premium, and on youtube second. And should Youtube somehow magically evaporate, you just unlock your past premium content so people can find it and you have some degree of word of mouth as content that survived the apocalypse, as a lifeline.
> Nobody is going to go to OP's personal site to watch videos
Unfortunately, I agree. It's not the algorithm for me, though. Rather, it's the capabilities of the platform. I use the cast feature almost exclusively. I rarely watch a video on a computer screen and never on a mobile device. YouTube's casting feature is constantly broken, but it's the only thing that even barely works. I have no idea how many others see it this way, but I don't think I'm particularly distinct.
I've been following https://github.com/futo-org/fcast for a bit, but it doesn't really have a viable receiver implementation that I know of.
> Realistically, how many viewers will be retained should YT shut the OP down? Right now, that number rounds to 0. Practically speaking, YT is free internet video streaming for long-form videos on the US market.
People have been following this strategy of creating their own mini-brands for years and have their own following. YT doesn't even have all of the their content, and YT is just one lead gen channel. Frankly, Ad Revenue from YT is pitiful, and it's an open secret the real money is made as I've described (although it is a long term play).
I don't disagree with you about PeerTube and the like, but it is a two-sided marketplace and you need to prime both sides of that pump (content creators and viewers).
Nebula is invite only, as far as I can tell, for creators.
Nebula's value proposition for invited creators is dubious at best, too.
They also require an off-YouTube exclusivity contract, which was especially no bueno for me.
Isn't it possible for creators to release on YouTube some time after the Nebula release?
I know of a couple channels that do that, though it seems like there's a requirement to add a little extra bit on the end for the Nebula side.
I’ve seen both “Nebula first, YouTube later” and “bonus/longer content on Nebula only” as a common pattern.
Examples: Adam Neely, Tom Scott
Jet Lag videos release on YT one week after they premiere on Nebula.
A bootstrap problem. No one goes until there's enough content and no one posts because there are no viewers.
What is needed is a way to ingest YouTube video through peertube or through a client that treats peertube as a primary destination and YT as a fallback.
This client then gives multihosting a single UI and blurs YT branding.
Maybe?
Do people go looking for videos?
I think I go to YouTube because it has interesting content, and the fact it's in video form isn't particularly relevant. Some content must be in video form but not all of it. I also follow several blogs, and Hacker News. I used to use Reddit when it was less enshittified, the way I use YouTube now. I don't know why I don't follow Nebula - I have a subscription because I want to support more independent platforms.
> Long term you want to own your distribution channel as much as possible, while using YouTube as your lead generation tool to drive true believers to your site and premium distribution channel not owned by YouTube.
This reads like MBA advice but the reality is not that simple. For a variety of reasons, relatively few people have the ability to produce durable revenue over the long term by pushing their YouTube audience to owned platforms.
The most successful YouTubers get a lot of attention but the reality is that outside of the 1%, there is no "long term winning play" for most of these people. The average YouTuber who finds some success building an audience tries to milk it for as long as they can before they're supplanted by new faces, they burn out, their category loses appeal, algorithms change, etc.
Alright, you're hosting on FreeTube (paying for hosting & bandwidth costs) - how are you making money? Most YouTubers don't want to run their own ad network or sell a physical product. Sponsors make deals conditional on YouTube engagement metrics.
There are lots of strategies how to make money and it will vary based on your specialty. It could be premium content, premium services, exclusive engagement with your fans, merchandising (e.g., many cooking YouTubers sell their own brand of cooking utensils that they have designed themselves). It requires some thought, but the idea is to deepen the authenticity and engagement by building an actual community and your own personal micro-brand. The offering needs to feel organic and huge value to your community in some way. Many many people have done this on YT and now are making way more money than what's possible with the pittance that is YT monetization. YT then becomes just one part of your funnel intake strategy once you get big enough.
Edit: Of course, you do need to have enough demand/scale to make it worth your while, but that will depend on your audience size and how engaged/invested they are in your content AND you personally to an extent. Perhaps be creative and start out with small experiments. Not too hard with LLMs nowadays.
Selling get rich quick schemes, workout plans, etc?
A bit more like Kevin Powell, who publishes lots of free CSS videos [0], has some good basic CSS Training Courses for free, but charges money for the advanced ones [1]. His videos are not only available on his site, but they're also on Front End Masters, which is a well known training site.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@KevinPowell
[1] https://www.kevinpowell.co/courses/
While I can't speak specifically to this person's earnings, I suspect you're overestimating just how much money average YouTubers make from owned platforms when they try to push their audiences to them.
It's very difficult to do this in a way that produces sustainable, durable revenue, and I suspect that people doing technical educational content are finding it increasingly difficult in the age of AI.
Trends for his YouTube channel look pretty much like what I expected given the general trends in the marketplace.
https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UCJZv4d5rbIKd4QHMPkc...
> It could be premium content, premium services, exclusive engagement with your fans, merchandising
To address the elephant in the room, except for "premium content", you're asking to pay for something the users didn't come for and most probably don't want.
So if you're not into mild grifting, the only way your content is directly monetized is paywalls, and that's an utterly complicated business as you need to show enough to entice, but not too much, while dealing with freebooting and custome support. It can be alleviated by joining a paywalled community like Nebula's, but it comes with it's own issues.
As you point out it's not impossible by any mean, it's just a huge PITA that will make no business sense for most creators compared to ad ridden platforms.
> You can publish to both and even better your own domain that simply points to your video hosting provider.
That one is likely the best use case while one monetizes on YT waiting for FreeTube to gain more popularity. Worth also for keeping a safer online accessible backup in case things go south with the YT channel being taken down for any reason, be it bogus copyright claims or else. What I'm not sure of though is how long until Google changes YT rules to disallow linking or even mentioning competing, or perceived as such, services. Companies always do that: I'm a Ebay user since 2008, 100% feedback both as seller and customer, hundreds of positives not a single negative or neutral in 18 years, but a while ago Ebay in their infinite wisdom blocked a listing of mine because I added the links of the documentation needed to use the device I was selling; no way to appeal successfully or have it restored, they evidently either used a monkey or AI to detect what they identified as an attempt to contact the customer outside of Ebay, for a €30 item nonetheless. Years ago they didn't enforce such idiotic limitations, so I wouldn't put any trust on YT to remain consistent with their current rules.
> they evidently either used a monkey or AI to detect what they identified as an attempt to contact the customer outside of Ebay, for a €30 item nonetheless
Dunno if they’ve caught on, but just send what you need to send in a .png
Probably goes through a not-hotdog test, but that’s about it.
long term he doesn't want his own distribution though. youtube offers you new viewers constantly. peertube only makes sense if it has a viewerbase and an ad network, and at hte point we're back to google but they're going to pay more since they have a larger user base and more ads which means their monetization rate is going to be much higher.
disrupting youtube is super hard, you basically need to bring your own audience from something else to do it, or have a platform already existing that you expand into the us.
Well said. So do prepublish to peer tube post it to my domain and then post to YouTube and link back to my domain ?
Does the order matter as long as I hit both?
Would having bonus content on the peertube version make sense ?
Or even more extreme do I want the YouTube bid to be a teaser to the peertube version?
People don’t really want another step in the already arduous process of making videos - especially when the return on investment will be $0. This website will die off in a couple years and everyone who wastes time on it will be worse off for it.
You need to build a product so good that my statement above sounds INSANE. Not just “I think he’s wrong” but “dude absolutely no way. Everyone will want this. Are you stupid?”
And this is not that product.
Edit: yeah. I was curious so I went searching for ASMR videos. The default search brought some (terrible-looking) ones up, but half of them were in French? I sorted by views instead, and even though I literally only searched for “ASMR”, there were no longer any ASMR videos near the top of the results. For something trying to compete with YouTube, this is a very mid experience. Nobody is going to waste time migrating.
Your use of the word "product" here reminds me of the now infamous McDonald's video.
It's a decentralized, open source, video sharing platform. It's not a product. It's okay for products to exist, but not everything needs to be one.
In Youtube, you are the product...
Sure, but as I explained, it doesn’t really work well anyways, so who cares?
Exactly, but good luck convincing a horde of morons of it
> This website will die off in a couple years
While that might be true, it's worth noting that the project has been running for seven years already.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube
It's hard to discuss things online because the dumb people will make stuff up, then when you correct it they disappear but leave the wrong info up, confusing even more dumb people. Like an idiot-tsunami growing ever larger
this isn't an appropriate response on HN, please read the guidelines on how to conduct yourself https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think for most people you're right, they just want to upload their videos, and maybe make a couple of bucks on the side. I was referring to folks who are truly committed to making this their career and want to have their own brand. Many, many people are already doing this, so it isn't something theoretical. Most YouTubers are automating their production pipeline, so another upload step isn't too hard, especially nowadays where it is easier than ever to build a bespoke, deterministic pipeline with agents writing scripts and programs.
> I think for most people you're right, they just want to upload their videos, and maybe make a couple of bucks on the side.
Sadly, those won’t make a couple bucks anymore. You can’t get a cut of the revenue until you have 1000 subscribers.
The couple bucks a month from my 1 video that was more useful than professional was nice until the moved that goalpost.
In case you were wondering why every bloody publisher, big or small, asks you to subscribe, even if, well, why would you subscribe to a channel that helped you fix your phone one day but their next video couldn’t be more unrelated?
Meanwhile in my “blogging” days, that first couple cents/bucks a month from Adsense convinced me to spend more time on it & make $20/month, then $200. Was $2000/month for a while. Now they expect you to work for free to prove yourself?
It doesn't have to be for your use-case. e.g. KDE has their own instance, as does Blender. It would perhaps be a good fit for MIT to host their OCW videos, or for Khan Academy to host their material, or people sharing conference talks, or governments, or quick home DIY videos, or vlogs and idle musings, or hobbyists showing/discussing their thing they like, etc. Videos that are meant to help people to better themselves or collaborate fit better on a platform that doesn't try to be a constant sales funnel.
There are many people who believe everything must be a grind to get rich. I wish more people stepped back and did things online because they were fun or educational, not because it was monetized.
they need a day job to pay the bills then, which does cut down on the scope of videos you can make
if we could have less working hours or cheaper rent or less expensive bills more people could do hobby stuff again ofc. but right now is tricky for that
Generally speaking, that's how hobbies work. You do them for fun or enrichment and do something else for money. People who try to turn hobbies into a day job seem to get this weird idea that they're somehow critical to the hobby when in fact they're just hyper focused on getting attention and crowding out actually sincere people so they can sell stuff.
e.g. this thread. Here you have people making software for themselves to host their own videos without being beholden to the likes of Google. Absolutely nothing to do with OP. So why is OP criticising them? Where in the README does this free software project discuss monetization (other than mentioning it's ad-free)? Why is the topic even slightly germane?
Can you imagine having a hobby and not trying to monetize it? I really think we've completely lost the plot.
If it's tricky for people in software engineering (those still holding a job continue to have big salaries compared to most other industries) to have hobbies they are willing to pay for themselves, it's probably them finding excuses instead or living beyond their means.
Nope, there are still people doing this stuff to share what they are excited about, and they will continue to be people like that.
Economy has nothing to do with this — as mentioned, a lot of this comes out of university students and low rung staff, and they were never best paid.
Anything and everything starts costing money when done at a high level. And since you have dedicate yourself full time if you want to be among the best at what you do, you're also forfeiting other sources of income. So you need to make money on your craft. It's not necessarily about getting rich, but getting by.
And there is no audience interested in seeing average things online.
Do you ever think about the fact that if you're making $500 - $1000 per video on average that means Google is making $5000 - $10,000 on each of your videos on average? I mean its working for you, and that's great. I am a student of information asymmetric markets and the whole 'Ad supported' business that Google runs on all of its properties is perhaps the largest one in the current time frame.
The point being that building a production company to produce videos is a known thing, Peertube is a distribution network, and historically this is a remarkable mirror of 'independent' theaters and 'studio owned' theaters. It was a characteristic of that time that the big studios would use their monoply power to force small studios to give them their work at a discount that allowed the studio to get most of the income. They made it just enough that the small studios didn't feel motivated to build a competitive system.
When I read your comment it struck me that perhaps "$500 - $1000 average per video" was the number Google has determined to be 'just enough'.
Google splits with the creator 50-50. If you got paid $1000, so did Google. And given their hosting infrastructure, network, and other tools, I would say it's a miracle they don't charge to upload.
Not a miracle if the math works out such that their margins cover the infrastructural fixed costs. Just simple economics.
You clearly don't work in AI:)
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What Google makes is irrelevant to the content prouducer. What matters to them is what they could make on alternate platforms, and the answer is no where near that amount. The slice Google keeps is only relevant to Google and potential competitors who may try to move into the space.
> What Google makes is irrelevant to the content producer.
Is it though? Let's say I weave a basket out of reeds I've spent the weekend picking from the shores of a local creek. I take the basket to a guy who pays me $20 for it. Then that same guy takes it to a swap meet that he runs in town and sells it for $200.
That's just market economics, until you try to set up your own smaller swap meet on the route to this guys market and sell your baskets there, and this guy calls the police and has them shut down your "illegal swap meet." So you go to city hall for a permit and they say, "We don't sell permits unless you can prove that at least 1,000 people will go to your swap meet and every week you'll have at least 10 new products to show." See where I'm going with that?
Asymmetric markets are ones where a single individual or small group of individuals can exercise control over the entire operation of the market. You can think of then as nascent monopolies or perhaps price fixing cartels. In the US, after experiencing the Great Depression, as a result of unregulated markets, the US made it government policy to regulate market abuses as no single participant (or even a set of participants) could hope to compete with the monopoly or cartel.
Information markets, or non-real property markets like video content, did an end run around controls in an effort to capture the value that is associated with a product you can manufacture instances of for pennies, but sell for dollars. Games, Office processing suites, Videos, Musical recordings, can all be "sold" for 100 to 1000x the cost to produce them. It is an area that is under studied in my opinion.
What's preventing anyone from trying to launch a YouTube competitor? Or content producers monetizing and hosting their own videos?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...
There platforms like this. I subscribe to Nebula, for example.
It says "at least"... on many channels there's videos with just a few views and videos with tons of views with much more than 10x difference
That's fair, Google admitted in the DoJ trial where it was convicted of being a monopolist that the revenues that it paid out were roughly 10% of the revenues it collected. If you have fewer than a requisite number of subscribers they keep 100% of the monetization proceeds. I was simply struck by the parallels between the way YouTube has grown up and how the whole movie industry grew up.
Because Google is losing money for those videos, they're collecting 100% of the revenue and shouldering 100% of the costs and 100% of the net loss. Perhaps they should split the net loss 50-50 with those users, but then no one would use YouTube.
Goog’s monetization requirements make no sense: requiring regular posting of new videos costs them money. You have people posting crap just to keep their monetization active.
More subscribers to a channel doesn’t save Google money at all.
Requiring X hours of views encourages posting longer videos, which costs them more to store and process.
They just want more content. They don't care about quality - the algorithm does a good job of sifting through all the content to find the good quality content. The definition of good quality being something that generates more money and keeps more eyes fixed to the screen!
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Wow, how many subscribers does one need to have?
1000 subscribers, 4000 hours in the last 12 months, and you must have uploaded 3 videos I think in the last 3 months to be allowed to apply for monetization.
There is a different requirement if you only post shorts.
Also worth pointing out that they’ve demonetized people after meeting the old monetization requirements and then not meeting their new requirements. No grandfathering.
I shed a tear (and subscribe) when I encounter an incredibly useful video but they have “only” a few hundred subs.
"As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is lack of monetization."
As a computer user I see that as the main advantage
No third party intermediary
No advertising
Computer users need peer-to-peer options for sharing video with each other that do not use third party advertising companies, e.g., posing as "search engine" or "social media", to transfer the bits
Whether PeerTube works well, I do not know. I know that overlay networks I have tested work well enough
I made a video today. It cost me nothing
There are some people to whom I'd like to send it
But I'm not uploading it to YouTube's servers
the 3rd party isn't an intermediary, youtube content is fantastic because it found a way to pay people to produce something for every niche, and reward the ones doing well with more viewers and more money.
ofc you would prefer high quality content delivered directly to you for free, because you're ignore the producers perspective.
Youtube rewards producers who use any dark pattern they can think of to get more views. This results in videos that are extremely awful to watch if your brain hasn't already been turned to pulp.
And if they dare touch controversial topics it demonitises them automatically. I find it hilarious that people self censor or invent new terms (like euphemisms for suicide).
If YouTube was not an intermediary then it could not claim Section 230 immunity
https://compliancehub.wiki/section-230-the-backbone-of-the-i...
The problem with this is that creating the content you watch costs a lot of money and labor.
As a user I would see a grocery store where everything is free as an advantage... utill the products inevitably run out and no food supplier is willing to stock the shelves for free.
It's not a problem though. There is absolutely no need for “quality content” whose sole or primary purpose is to monetize it. What we’re all missing is hobby content created out of passion, free of ads and all the nonsense that plagues the modern internet. And another thing - there’s absolutely no need to explain here the basic fundamentals of how money and the economy as a whole work, as if it were some kind of revelation. It’s actually better to think about why this approach is in fact problematic. Look at what it did to the world.
There are 100M+ channels uploading on YouTube regularly and only 2-3M of them are monetized. Not everyone wants to upload videos on the internet with the explicit goal of making money. Professional creators are a very tiny minority, and a platform like YouTube will always be better suited for them (your "small" channel with 100K subscribers is actually in the top 0.5-0.1% of YouTube). There is no reason for Peertube to go after this specific demographic.
Yet those 2-3M channels get the lions share of the views. It is a two-sided system. And if you want to attract viewers, you need what they want to watch. Looking on the front page of peertube the most viewed video I see has 29 views. If I sort by hot, the "hottest" video has 692 in a month. If the intent is to publish videos to have people watch it, PeerTube is clearly not the place to do that.
> what they want to watch
What does that even mean? Not everything published has to be with the purpose of entertaining. This is a more recent mindset that came with the advent of the "Content Creator" (think Mr.Beast). But it needs not be this engineered. Historically, some of the more interesting channels on YouTube have been people organically sharing something that was genuinely dear to them. Offered with little concern as to whether it's "what people want to watch". They make you want to watch it, because it's a passion that they manage to convey. By contrast, people who are particularly concerned about eyeballs seem to publish with the purpose of meeting the audience's interest as a main guiding factor. And yes, maybe for those, YouTube is a better fit. But I also know many for whom moving to a reliable alternative (tech wise) would be a step up.
If for instance your goal is to share educational content for free, provided that the hosting platform is sound, your main concern as far as your audience finding your content should be that of discoverability. Which is an easy enough kink to iron with current search technology.
>> what they want to watch
> Not everything published has to be with the purpose of entertaining.
1. Why do you assume that people would “want to watch” something only for entertainment reasons, instead of for educational reasons, etc. GP commenter did not seem to even imply any focus on entertainment like your assumption that entertainment is the only reason someone could ‘want to watch’ something.
2. As far as what GP commenter meant by want to watch, they provided some specifics in their post - the most watched video on the home page had 29 views, so that presumably is the sun of people who wanted to watch it (whether for educational, etc reasons), accidentally viewed it, were required to view it as part of an educational program, etc.
The word "entertain" quickly came to mind in that sentence because attracting the audience as a primary concern is typical of the entertainment industry, regardless of the content being educational, news, or otherwise. If we get stuck on that choice of a word, it's admittedly a bit narrow for the point I was making, but I think the rest of my post successfully got things across.
> Yet those 2-3M channels get the lions share of the views.
...because they're directly tied to YouTube own revenue.
As someone who creates a fair bit of content, and am fortunate enough not to have to worry about the revenue from that, I deliberately try to minimize monetization because it ultimately becomes the main driving force behind your content creation.
Monetization as the only model for content creation leads to an incredibly safe and boring world while simultaneously meaning every piece of content you interact with is trying to extract money from you the viewer.
No, it is because that is the content that people want to watch. I too create content that has been widely watched and don't include video ads or any of the other monetization features they push. But I create videos because I want people to watch them. I don't do it for the sake of myself and pushing it out into the void. I don't follow whatever the trends are, I create what I believe will be the most useful as I make educational content. And it works. But I post to YouTube because that is where people will find it.
If I were to self-host my videos or put it on PeerTube if I wanted anyone to see it I would actively have to go out and promote it myself. YouTube does that for me.
I'm confused, why are you arguing about this? Stick with YouTube. This isn't for you.
It's even in the name. PeerTube. Peer. Your talking about 'consumers' of a product you produce vs a way to share videos that isn't YouTube with your .. PEERs.
Not 100k views videos. Think you should step back and think what your actually trying to debate or argue. It comes off kinda like your misunderstanding the software and conflating a lot of things that don't relate and not relevant to PeerTube.
>No, it is because that is the content that people want to watch.
No, that's not a given. It would be more accurate to say it is content people will watch, and not necessarily want to watch. I mean people will watch porn, I'm not sure they want to watch porn.
If you asked someone before vine or tiktok whether you wanted to watch an unending carousel of thirty second videos from nobodies for four hours straight I'm not sure a lot of people would say yes.
Am I the only one who sees ragebait titles to youtube videos that do not contain a modicrum of the rage that is advertised in the title?
I don't think we need to conflate algorithmic nudging with the conscience preference of the user frankly.
If you want real numbers start selling hard drugs. You don't have to "serve the people". YouTube is a cesspool.
Then there's even less reason to host outside of YouTube, why would I want to host a server that costs money if I'm not making any money from the videos? It works for those who want to own their content and verify its safety, or for ideological reasons such as supporting OSS but I'm not sure why the average user would care about PeerTube.
I guess you also never contribute to any potluck where you're not strictly required to?
You are required to contribute to potlucks by definition, false analogy.
The problem is that big creators have many subscribers, because they're the only ones making videos people want to watch.
If a channel has 100 subscribers - (except if it's a brand new channel) - it's because people saw the videos and decided, no, I don't want to see this, I'm not going to subscribe.
Put all of those people on a platform together, you will just end up with a platform with more creators than viewers.
So? Why is that a problem? My wife occasionally watches this old lady who's vlogged every day for over 14 years straight. She averages 150-200 views. The people who try to build a brand end up getting outsized attention so it seems like that must be what anyone would want, but most people actually aren't trying to do that.
Well, do you want a platform people watch videos on, or a platform people simply upload videos to, never to be seen?
It's not an either-or, but generally speaking, a platform centered around getting more people to watch is probably worse to have in the world than one centered around people just expressing themselves to a handful of e.g. family/friends/small communities. Especially if the former is really just a conduit for ads.
The answer is not that obvious as you might see or imply it.
I understand where you are coming from, and if monetization is your primary reason for being on a platform, it's likely that PeerTube is not for you, unless your videos help you move your own product or service.
That said, I'm also okay with there being platforms out there where monetization is difficult or impossible. I want there to be places where creators can get paid, but I am also nostalgic for a less commercial internet.
I heard that main source of income for some professional YouTubers are Patreon and sponsorships. Ad revenue is dead last and very unstable. Also, if you are building your business on single platform, which one day might decide that your content does not adhere to their rules - that's a high risk to take.
Sponsorships are definitely the highest if a youtuber actively engages in them, ad revenue vs patreon depends highly on if you have i.e. a small but highly active fanbase of core fans, versus a wider more general audience that you entertain a bit.
I think people should be more aware of the perverse incentive of YouTubers saying, "my guaranteed source of income is very little and unstable guys, I need you to also subscribe to my patreon" where - could YouTubers perhaps have a reason to act like their ad revenue is very little? In my experience, while ad revenue isn't great, for any decent-size YouTuber its still enough to live on and in any case it always stays a significant income stream.
Do you think those creators pay YouTube for bandwidth, storage and transcode servers? Where do you think money for that comes from?
Streaming video is very expensive, even in 2026 and ignoring that someone is paying the main business expense of those creators is not very honest.
Dunno about the storage side, but fly by night operators seem to be constantly available to stream every movie and tv show and somehow afford the bandwidth, transcoding and all other costs while being shunned from the general ad industry…
How about you actually look at the costs and try setting up a streaming website yourself and see how true your bs is? :)
You say your target is $500-$1000 per video and let's assume you do videos weekly. That would mean your optimistic goal is $4500 a month. Let's say you create a voluntary donation subscription at $5 per month for people willing to support your work. That means you would need 900 true fans, patrons, or whatever other label you want to give them to hit your $4500 goal. That's a 0.9% conversion rate from subscribers to donators. Doesn't seem that impractical when looked at in those terms. This is often the default monetization model for small podcasts because RSS feeds don't have built in ad revenue the way YouTube does.
Voluntary donations are practically impossible. Sure, you get the odd straggler, but it’s so, so rare.
I have the most popular NSFW LoRA (actually a LoKR but whatever) for at least one major text to image model on CivitAI.
Once it blew up I made a Patreon, maybe 6 months ago? I get $50 a month from it. I doubt that even covers my electricity costs for training.
Podcasts and videos do have the advantage of being able to ask for people to donate with every podcast/video, but people just aren’t inclined to give their money away when they don’t have to. It’s a rare trait.
> aren’t inclined to give their money away when they don’t have to
vtuber culture proves that this is categorically wrong
Right, I suppose I should have mentioned the caveat of desperate men hoping to get a glimpse of attention from a woman.
Quite frankly, I don't think you can compare image generation, let alone NSFW image generation, with YouTube and podcasts. You are simply operating in a medium in which this is going to be dramatically tougher, primarily because most people who consume your content are likely there for the content and unlikely to have any relationship to you specifically. But either way, "It's a rare trait" isn't disagreeing with what I said. The successful conversion rate in my last comment was below 1%.
At that point I'd just make a Patreon (that offers various benefits including exclusive videos not on YouTube) while also monetizing via YouTube ads and sponshorships.
Yes, there is a reason I said "you would need 900 true fans, patrons, or whatever other label you want to give them". I'm not claiming this is a new concept, I was making specific allusions to Patreon and the idea of 1000 true fans[1].
[1] - https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
Here's my dilemma:
The Youtube experience has always sucked for me - right from the first year Youtube launched. I just don't like the interface, web site, layout, etc. It's why I didn't have a Youtube account until I needed to share a video with someone, and even then, I never log into it (so I don't follow[1], rate, etc).
And then over the last few years, the ad situation has gotten astronomically worse. I'm not exaggerating when I say that old school cable TV with its ads was a significantly better experience.
I do a search for something specific. I start clicking videos to see if it has the content I want. But very often, on my Roku or similar device, I won't be able to see anything of the video unless I watch 15-60s of ads.
Only to find out the video is not useful for me. Click next video. Repeat the pain.
I think this is what leads a lot of people to just plain hate Youtube. It's what leads me not to care if suddenly no one can make money on Youtube (even the folks I like). It's why I want Youtube to just die.
If they made the site much more pleasing, and found a way to allow 3rd party interfaces (while still serving ads), and weren't anywhere near as annoying with the ads, I'd like the platform.
Regarding monetization: For the folks who have well established viewers, and who make most of their money via embedded ads in the video, I don't think they'll lose anything by switching to Peertube - as long as the Peertube infrastructure can handle the load. The major fans will know where to find the content.[2]
The real problem with Peertube is discovery. How can a new content creator be noticed? And then how can they show accurate viewership numbers to get those sponsors?
[1] Well, I may follow via other means: Manually, or via RSS, etc.
[2] Incidentally, some of the "popular" content I watch on Youtube exclusively gets monetized via embedded ads. Youtube demonetized that whole category a while ago. So embedded ads is totally viable.
I miss old, grass-roots youtube. I used to be a 'youtuber' back in the very very early days where it was just a case of sharing yourself doing dumb things.
I completely get that it's your job now... But the fact it's become a job for people is probably why I don't like it so much anymore. With all the ads and such too, it's now just television. But worse.
> most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video.
I get your point, but many of them fail to hit some hundreds of views due in large part to all of the large, professional channels that are spending hundreds of man hours as week producing content.
If the production was less professional do you think total viewership hours would drop significantly, or would it be distributed across more channels?
Is the argument that such a world is possible to create, where the audience does not have the choice of the ‘professional’ looking content so can't choose it?
It would still be a great alternative for the original YouTube. The one with video replies and all that, that was basically just people video blogging at each other or into the ether.
> And yes, there are people who make content for free - most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video.
Where is the "fail" though? Some of those videos take exactly as long to make is it does to watch them. If they don't get monetized (maybe for speaking normal English instead of saying "unalive" and "to grape"), then someone else doesn't make a lot of money from even the little effort it took them by showing ads [0] to people. If all you want to do is talk at a camera and maybe with some people, then all that is a plus.
[0] Speaking of ads, some of the stuff on youtube is wild. Like, honestly gross and disturbing to me.
If you are looking to make money of it, sure, starting with peertube only would be nonsense. If you just wanna make videos, do it! Upload the best ones to youtube and mention peertube, so you maybe get some audience. Then if you really get into it, and make better stuff, spend more effort than just "start record, say things, upload as is", you can upload everything to youtube, too. After having livestreamed the whole thing on Twitch, just to use every part of the buffalo.
> As a professional YouTuber
Well, there's your problem.
You want the numbers that come from mass consumption, which means catering to the lowest common denominator thus producing shit with gold plating while then complain the gold plating is bloody expensive.
Some people just are knowledgeable and want to share with the rest of us mortals like say someone like Terrence Tao. Putting someone like him on "YouTube" is a goddamn travesty. We need an alternative and yes, you won't make money and no, it's not for you then.
> which means catering to the lowest common denominator
At some point that becomes saturated, and you're better off catering to a niche that is poorly served.
Your issue is assuming that this is trying to replace YouTube for those who wish to try and make money from this. I suspect this is much more closer to a Google videos or YouTube back in the day which was pretty much just random videos, plus lots of conferences on there (which don't get enough views to monetize). This can easily replace that and is something I would support. YouTube hasn't always been monetising and it is good if we have a competitor against it.
It's not about people "trying to make money", it's about viewers wanting to see high quality videos.
High quality videos just cost a lot of money and labor to produce. There is simply no way around this. Any platform which doesn't let creators monetize effectively will be stuck with what people produce in their free time. Which will essentially always be worse, because the competitors will have creators with actual budgets and time to work.
They don't necessarily. e.g. I'd consider Ravi Vakil's Algebraic Geometry videos[0] among the highest quality videos on youtube, and its just him talking over a screen share. Fields medalist Richard Borcherds likewise has posted a ton of lectures of him just talking while he writes on paper.
In fact, I'd expect the highest quality videos to have a relatively low viewership. Most people seem to want Mr Beast or whatever.
[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=WTEZjR5aNjw&list=PLoaXcYRr65txn8...
High quality doesn't just mean production values, it can relate to any aspect of the video. High quality could simply reflect the quality of content. I would much prefer if PeerTube became a far easier to browse version of Archive along with creators producing items of creative and knowledge value. We don't need to replace YouTube as it likely can't be replaced. However switching a significant number away with a different approach to what is hosted there would be a positive.
The cost of cross posting your professional YouTube video is basically nil.
That's the thing; not everything has to be or should be monetized. The thing I miss the most are the funny dumb amateur videos.
There are several YouTube channels I love; Folding Ideas, hbomberguy, Kurtis Conner, Contrapoints, etc... but I see those essentially as semi professional / professional variations on television. Once I got into their content via YouTube, YouTube of course drove me away with horrid vile ads, and I moved on to supporting those creators on Patreon.
And that's all good - the digital medium needs places like YouTube. But that doesn't mean there isn't a huge amount of value in the amateur unmonitized video landscape. Pairing those with some niche phpbb style forums was, for me, the last time I truly enjoyed the experience of actually being on the internet.
YouTubers are now blurring out women's cleavage.
Not bare breasts. Cleavage. Nearly all of Pamela Anderson's notable body of work would need to be censored to avoid risking loss of that precious, precious monetization. It's like fucking Iran.
And of course you can't say "die", "kill", "suicide", etc. You have to talk like a parody of 80s cartoon censorship—literally. (The neologism "unalive" came from Deadpool in an animated series called Ultimate Spider-Man, who realized he was in an animated show but thought it was 80s Saturday morning fare and constantly minced his intent to kill by saying he was going to "unalive" his target.)
Monetization has had a chilling effect on the kind of content people put on YouTube. I do not mourn its lack, at least on alternative video platforms.
Where are you located? I'm looking as we speak at a bunch of YT videos of women with cleavage, or promoting fashion that involve stripping down to their underwear.
If they're getting sponsorships or just engagement-baiting gooners to get OnlyFans signups, maybe they don't care that much about video monetization. The ones that do are starting to censor cľeavage.
Understood your situation, but personnaly I'm not watching so much professional content on YT; actually, I'm not watching YT as much as I used to when the service was young and unprofessional.
What I want from such a platform is authenticity... and curation.
That’s what I find silly about YouTube.
Through effective search, Google enabled mass deportalization. The best link would win. Your crappy but good blog about how to fix an issue could become top in the results.
Now YouTube favours entertainer-mechanic making subscribeable but generic videos instead of… the one specific to your vehicle by some gruff but knowledgeable mechanic.
Like, c’mon buddy, the bolt only comes off like that in the studio after 3 practice runs.
its fine for the genre of video thats just someone narrating while filming with there phone and almost no editing. if someone is doing something interesting, i prefer this to something well produced, its more candid and relatable, and lacks the artifice most projects designed for youtube have
But isn't know most of the money they make from direct sponsors instead of adsense? I have seen a few creators putting their income sources and most of the money comes from direct sponsors instead of adsense. So if these sponsors would continue to sponsor them in other platforms, it can take YouTube monopoly away. The problem now is that those others video platform don't have the eyeballs as YouTube
> This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram
Low key shitting on other content creators? Some of IG content creator easily match professionalism you are describing. I know you are probably partially venting your frustration, but that doesn't paint you in a nice light.
> You cannot do that in the hopes of viewers donating $5 here and there.
But then how does twitch work? Genuinely asking, whats the difference?
Yeah reminds me of how Kick seems to be winning over the Twitch creators. Now Kick isn't a shining beacon by any means, its got gambling issues for one, but I do think this is one area the big companies are vulnerable in: Rev share.
If a new incumbent can raise some money, offer creators some money and a path to a higher cut than their competitors, they can win big.
I think this is the only way for new platforms to ever rise in this space.
A video sharing website is not a social media platform, it's a streaming platform. The real competitors to YouTube are not PeerTube or whatever, it's Netflix and HBO.
This is why Nebula also managed to find a niche and be relatively successful: the issue is not ads or a monthly subscription or something, the only problem is: people want to watch high-quality content. Find a way to get them high-quality content. If you cannot do that, everything else is meaningless. In Nebula's case, even a few high-profile YouTubers in the same niche uploading exclusives on a platform is better than a thousand nobodies uploading low effort content.
>You cannot do that in the hopes of viewers donating $5 here and there.
But you can do that in hopes of youtube sharing a percentage of fluctuating ad revenue? Certain things can get you de-monetized, you can get strike-bombed, falsely accused of copyright infringement via automated systems, etc, and unless you are a very big channel owner, you will receive a minimal droplet of support likely involving no humans in the loop.
There are sustainable creators getting much more revenue by collecting direct subscription money from their patrons while providing exclusive or first-hand content to them which is then re-uploaded to youtube for reaching a wider audience. They can run their own integrated ad-campaings without google deciding what they are advertising or which content they can or cannot produce.
This is a feature. The golden age of YouTube ended roughly around the time they made monetization more available.
To put a finer point on it, I recognize there are a lot of good creators on YouTube and I'm glad it can support their work. But the overall trend has been for the worse, at least for the target audience I belong to. The change in the average title card tells a story. I believe it would be fantastic if there was a competitor that captured the original motivation.
And there is Asmongold doing a video of him watching someone else making a video with commentary like “absolutely”, “outrageous”, “bold” and having it all monetized with literally ZERO effort.
So yea.. it takes a lot of effort -> if you are nobody.
For eatablished streamers just slapping something from stream on ytb is enough.
Having your own distribution has it's benefits as a fall back or alternatives, in addition to publishing elsewhere like youtube.
The cost of creating and editing videos going to come way down, there's already ways to do it in the past few years.
this is exactly right, people dont realize that they're getting a great deal on youtube. if you want to disrupt youtube you need to do it by winning over the creators which is a difficult thing to do since no new platform can subsidize to the scale of what youtube offers already due to its size, the only ones who really could are meta since they have the ad network and users already to funnel to it, or another company willing to eat a loss for a long time. The issue with eating hte loss, is video is a pretty painful loss to eat compared to text, so why not go into every text market first for places like meta.
Great deal except when you get demonetized for partisan reasons
Sure, but compare that to all other television and streaming services, where all independent creators are demonetized and banned by default. If you don't have the right contacts you're not allowed to put your video on Netflix.
demonization has nothing to do with viewers value from youtube you just have been radicalized to inject talking points into every single conversation.
No, not really. I haven't been "radicalized" into anything. Go look at what Youtube actually does to content creators
As a professional watcher, I consider the lack of monetization a feature. I'd much rather see genuine videos from amateurs than commercialized crap with sponsored segments and undisclosed sponsorships and product placement and filler to keep up release schedules and please like and subscribe and whatever other dark patterns commercially motivated video producers come up with on "free" platforms. And of course also without the ads the video platform adds on top of all that. Not everything needs to be a viable job.
Monetization is the easy part, a plugin that adds advertisements, paid subscriptions, or some other form of monetization could easily be made if there was a demand for it.
The real barrier issue is that of network effect. There's simply (almost) no audience, which means there are (almost) no creators, which means there is (almost) no audience.
I've been publishing my videos on my own peertube instance for a while and I really do appreciate it as a platform, but I don't think that the technical aspects of it alone will ever be the key to its potential success.
Interesting, I thought the major issue with PeerTube was the high latency due the decentralized nature and that they don't have the backing of Google infrastructure.
What you state sounds more like a chicken and egg problem. You'll publish content only when there are enough viewers but there can be viewers only when you publish content.
Like others have said, There's not much effort to publish in both platforms; good way to hedge against the algorithmic risks.
> As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization.
As a video watcher, the main issue I have with YouTube is the presence of monetization.
Because people are expected to spend their time, effort and money to provide content for you for free, of course. Seems like the only explanation.
They're not. No one asked OP to use peertube. This is software for people who want to share videos. Coming in and declaring you won't use it because you can't make money from your videos should just get an "okay?" Interjecting into a FOSS space and complaining they are not paying you is beyond bizarre. Doubling down when people basically say "actually I'm specifically looking for non-commercial groups, so your absence is appreciated" is crazy.
If you want to make money in something, you're not part of the group who doesn't. There's already a giant platform for you. Why would you say hobbyists are entitled?
> As a video watcher, the main issue I have with YouTube is the presence of monetization.
I was replying to that. This commenter is not a hobbyist making video, he watches some hobbyists video, and them getting paid is the issue he has.
The issue he has is he wants to find/communicate with hobbyists, and instead runs into people trying to turn it into a profession. It becomes difficult to find like-minded people when every topic is infected by grifters. Injecting money into a leisure activity will inevitably ruin it and the people participating.
The reason why is on full display here: this entire thread has been derailed by people asking how you're supposed to make money with it, denigrating people who "only" have 100 subscribers (imagine 100 people regularly coming to watch you give a talk or demo or performance out of pure interest!), etc.
In a hobby or leisure space, appreciation or encouragement alone is valuable. Monetizing leisure leads to some crazy ideas. Like completely turning the perspective around: "content creators" think what they're doing is interesting enough that not only will I give them my attention, but that I should somehow compensate them for it? Crazy.
> The issue he has is he wants to find/communicate with hobbyists, and instead runs into people trying to turn it into a profession.
To me that is in line with my original quote. He actively seeks work people put in while haivng an issue with them getting compensated for it.
Whether YT has monetization or not people's incentives are the same. Imagine that YT has no ads, people would put stuff behind paywalls or upsell aggressively.
> denigrating people who "only" have 100 subscribers (imagine 100 people regularly coming to watch you give a talk or demo or performance out of pure interest!), etc
I would never denigrate those people. But if you work hard enough and put in enough work that people watch 4000 hours of your videos in last year, and eventually you want to quit the job you don't like and just get paid by creating for people like that guy, and that guy says "monetization is the problem I have", it's kind of sociopathic. Drawing this line between work and hobby, like you have to do stuff you hate for money and god forbid you start getting paid for doing stuff you like
My assertion is that he's not actively seeking work people put in; he's actively seeking people. The sociopathic thing is exactly reducing people, interests, and interactions into something transactional like this. He's looking for people who don't think that way. So putting things behind paywalls is fine; it makes those people disappear. Upselling remains annoying. It recasts every interaction into a sales pitch.
What that guy is telling OP is that he's not creating for him. OP came into a thread about a platform for freely sharing video, not for getting a job in the entertainment industry. There's already at least 3 major platforms for that, and the monetization is what that user said he doesn't like about youtube [in contrast to this]. It's like commenting in a thread about a package repo complaining that the problem with FOSS communities is lack of monetization. If you want a job in the field, go somewhere where people are looking for help and will pay you to do things for them. Not places where people are having fun so you can try to upsell.
And yes there should be a line between work and hobby. Hobbies are things you do for you. Work is something someone else wants and pays you to do. You are doing it for them. e.g. with making software, work should not be fun. It should be boring. Making it "fun" is just a pain for your colleagues. Conversely, leisure should be fun. Making it into a money-making endeavor makes it unenjoyable for everyone else. There is supposed to be a line.
> The sociopathic thing is exactly reducing people, interests, and interactions into something transactional like this
Saying that people need to have money to survive and that it's great to be getting paid for doing something they love (while making stuff that's free for you to watch) is sociopathic and reducing them?
> OP came into a thread about a platform for freely sharing video, not for getting a job in the entertainment industry
Yes. But it's pretty silly to not think it will be compared to youtube. It's even called PeerTube, pretty obviously. youtube became so popular to inspire peertube in the first place thanks to its monetization. So it's a very obvious thing to bring up.
> And yes there should be a line between work and hobby. Hobbies are things you do for you. Work is something someone else wants and pays you to do
You keep that masochistic distinction if you want but please don't impose it on others
Yes, requiring payment to do things you love is sociopathic. It's the same as "keeping score" in a relationship. It will only make you and your counterparty grow to hate each other. This is exactly the "they just want something for free" dynamic. One or both parties thinks the other is an entitled freeloader and one or both thinks the other is an entitled dickhead.
You take payment to do things that are acceptable to you, that the other person needs, and that you are capable of. You don't tie emotions into it. Certainly not strong ones.
Of course they compare themselves to youtube, but via contrast. Specifically, that you control your own platform and (out of the box) there's no ad ecosystem. For people who want to share videos without making people watch ads, that's perfect. The entire point is that it's not youtube. And if you want "not youtube but still full of shills and grifters" there's also Instagram and TikTok. The "monetized 'content'" space is very well served already.
Masochism is turning the things you love into a grind, recontextualizing them such that they're now always carrying a question of economic utility (and therefore optimization) as you do them so that you can no longer just enjoy them for what they are.
> Yes, requiring payment to do things you love is sociopathic
I rest my case.
Do you really not understand that people might want to do things for reasons other than money?
If you read my comments you can provide an actual counter argument instead of claiming i don't understand something
I read all your comments and as far as I can see they presuppose that people are making videos to make money and would not otherwise make them.
'if you work hard enough and put in enough work that people watch 4000 hours of your videos in last year, and eventually you want to quit the job you don't like and just get paid by creating for people like that guy, and that guy says "monetization is the problem I have", it's kind of sociopathic. Drawing this line between work and hobby, like you have to do stuff you hate for money and god forbid you start getting paid for doing stuff you like' did you read that part?
'But it's pretty silly to not think it will be compared to youtube. It's even called PeerTube, pretty obviously. youtube became so popular to inspire peertube in the first place thanks to its monetization. So it's a very obvious thing to bring up.' or that
it makes it clear what I think about people being able to get paid for their work and 'they would not otherwise make them' is bullshit i never said. they would never make the videos that in recent years made youtube the place it is nowadays, but they would make some other stuff.
> they would never make the videos that in recent years made youtube the place it is nowadays, but they would make some other stuff.
Yes, that's exactly it. What I'm saying is I'm fine with not having the videos that in recent years made youtube the place it is nowadays, and I'm fine with the other stuff.
The place it is nowadays is the place you go to watch videos. You literally wrote "as youtube watcher".
The existence of ad bucks is what made people create better and better productions, which attracted more viewers, and that is why youtube became the default place for people like you to go for video stuff. You can't just remove that feature and have the rest.
I'm sure you didn't talk to every single creator whose video you watch and ask them if they did it without hoping for some YT ad bucks and whether they would have done it if there were no YT bucks. You can say they would but don't kid yourself we live in a capitalism and most people don't have enough money
Thank you. It is a bit bizarre reading this thread.
> Seems like the only explanation.
Youtube itself is responsible for an entire generation expecting the videos to be free.
The monetisation and injection of advertising into roughly-everything is only a relatively recent development. Free-until-monopoly.
> Youtube itself is responsible for an entire generation expecting the videos to be free.
True, it did create this weird world. But then think about all of the amazing high production value work we enjoy because someone once did it for fun, got paid and then decided to keep doing it and make a nice living off it while you still don't pay them a cent. Sadly it's probably impossible for YT to have that original atmosphere.
I don't really expect anything. All the people who want to make money from YouTube can just stop making stuff if money is what's motivating them.
> I don't really expect anything.
You are a self described youtube watcher. Unless you pay for youtube premium, you expect free content literally every time you open youtube. By definition.
> All the people who want to make money from YouTube can just stop making stuff if money is what's motivating them.
I don't know how old are you but after certain age things are not so black and white. We don't live in severance where we can slave away at a denigrating unethical job we hate just to earn money. People prefer to do something they love AND earn money from it. If they don't do the latter they starve and go bankrupt. Guess what then they can't provide free content for you.
I guess you never used YouTube in the early days. It was a site for posting and watching random home made videos and recorded broadcasts. Just for fun. Revenue streams for creators came after Google bought it, I think. Along with the ads.
This might simply revive a platform that no longer exists. It might not be about paying creators or collecting ad revenue. It's peer to peer, after all.
>I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch.
This is something I always thought to be extremely funny. Producing videos is a hobby. If you made it your job, go figure out how to monetize your material yourself. Nobody prevents you from taking sponsorships.
Would you mirror your videos to something like Peertube if it included automated pay-per-view (via something like x402 API)?
Seems advertising could be a third-party service on top of the video streaming service. Just like there are ad platforms that plugin to web pages. If that grows, you get your monetization.
Maybe the purpose of Youtube going forward is to be a quarantine for content whose purpose is to be monetized.
If YouTube becomes a quarantine for high-quality content, then it will also become a quarantine for viewers.
the fundamental issue a lot of people here don't seem to get is that high quality videos that people want to watch are expensive to create. Besides the huge amount of high-skill labor, there's also just production costs, software, equipment, upkeep, etc.
At the very least, ignoring all other costs, a single person making good videos somewhat regularly is a full-time job. People who make entertainment also need to eat and pay rent, the money has to come from somewhere.
I believe most people here "get" that.
They have a problem with high quality production (more engaging due to production), low value content that proliferates on platforms like YouTube, and would rather see more high value content regardless of production quality, and Internet, in general enabled that if not for people starting to think about (ad supported) revenue first.
Not everyone is a "professional Youtuber" like you, and that includes a lot of Youtube who upload videos without any expectation of income, for who Youtube is mainly a free video hosting service that also allows them to reach a wider viewership.
Thr one solution I see to that is sponsorships, the number I've heard is they typically pay 10x the ad revenue of a video, and this wouldn't be affected by the platform, just the viewership numbers.
Big corporations that pay big creators millions per production are just normal studios like Disney and Paramount and nowadays Netflix and Prime. YouTube is the competitor to that. No matter how professional you think of your operation, you're not Christopher Nolan or even BBC Earth and neither is anyone else whose primary distribution channel is YouTube.
Good examples of more or less "free" content that fits PeerTube are cited in other comments, though. Conference footage, MIT OCW, archival footage of any kind of live event. Productions where the work is in putting on the event in the first place. Holding the conference, creating a course, putting on some kind of skateboarding competition, whatever it might be. Incidentally filming it and uploading the footage costs next to nothing in comparison, isn't expected to drive revenue compared to the live attendance, and it doesn't make much difference to the viewers if the footage is terrible. Shitty quality Feynman lectures is still watching Feynman lecture. It was really cool, for a recent example, that somebody found and uploaded phone footage of Caitlin Clark's fabled scrimmage against the Iowa men's team from however many years ago. Nobody cares about the quality of the video or who filmed it. Likely nobody subscribed to whatever channel it first ended up on, but how cares? People who wanted to see a rare real world event would still have been able to find it and it cost nothing to the person who pulled out a phone and turned it on while that event was happening.
This is exactly why TikTok won. It is so much cheaper to iterate ideas on 10” videos.
You make non interesting 20’ YT video? Well too bad your 80 labor hours & equipment time are lost.
As a side note 10-12 min is the ideal length for a non full feature documentary. I am growing tired of those 20+ minutes repeating and stretching the same topic without going into more depth.
Yes. "To understand this, we have to go back to..." 10 minutes of unnecessary retrospective, allowing insertion of three more ads. Usually you can skip that and get to the five minutes or so of new content.
TikTok won? YouTube is significantly larger, with over 2.7 billion monthly active users compared to TikTok's 1.6 billion.
Even if you count TikTok's higher average watch time per user, YouTube's broader demographic more than makes up for it.
>As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization.
That's the main benefit. Monetised content, and the people who make it, is despicable.
>and even I could not make this work if I didn't get at least $500-$1,000 per video on average, since it just takes so much time and money.
Have you considered getting a real job?
>Most channels with more than a million subscribers are likely founders working 60-80 hour weeks with multiple full-time employees supporting them.
Putting them out of business would be a fantastic turn of events.
>And yes, there are people who make content for free - most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video.
Cool and good.
>I think any real competitor to YouTube nowadays would have to be backed by a big corporation that can pay big creators million-dollar deals to make the switch.
That would be like paying a malware company to move from windows to apple.
Why couldn't you post it after it's got its money worth?
Or is that the clause of YouTube "you must not post elsewhere"?
> As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization.
That's a feature, not a bug.
Thanks for the insight. Do you think something like nebula could ever be feasible?
It's simple. If I want to support you, I buy your merchandise.
this is the strongest endorsement of peertube I've seen so far
The strongest endorsement for PeerTube is that it cannot sustain creators and thus will only either 1) freeboot off of platforms that do or 2) be flooded by low effort slop?
I'm not sure the difference between low-effort slop and high-effort slop is as significant as you seem to assume.
People who spam slop are exactly the ones who chase after monetization.
I use adblocker for youtube but will still subscribe via pateron
Why can't they build an advertiser network into this?
Virtually all of the content I watch on youtube does not fall into this category. The content I watch is a mixture of raw footage, a guy speaking to a camera with minimal editing for 10 minutes (think Rick Beato, for those who know him), edited down footage of people working (pool cleaning guys, chefs, etc) or people playing music.
Frankly I wouldn't care at all if all of your over-produced thumbnail-bait disappeared overnight.
This is just a great example of people who aren't in content creation fundamentally not understanding the ecosystem.
This isn't about "over-produced thumbnail-bait". This is about all high-quality media.
You mention Rick Beato. Do you really think Rick Beato sits down behind his laptop to edit his own videos? He has nearly 6 million subscribers and produces around 10 long-form videos per month. He has at the very least an editor (probably full-time) and a thumbnail designer (part-time), and I assume also a manager who sets up brand deals and contacts musicians for his interviews. He also records his videos on expensive cameras inside his well-lit studio, which also isn't cheap. It's very difficult to tell how much YouTube channels generate but I wouldn't be surprised if the Rick Beato channel is at this point a >$20K/month operation.
Edit: Also, do you really think Rick Beato making "The Secret Weapon Behind Dr Dre" or "The Real Reason Music is Getting Worse" is not clickbait? It's just clickbait, but for people like you. Part of good advertising is making people feel like they're not even being sold anything.
> "The Real Reason Music is Getting Worse"
As a musician myself, and as someone who enjoys watching music and music theory content on YouTube, I can't stand watching Rick Beato because of stuff like this. There certainly are valid criticisms to be made against the music industry, but those videos are like 90% ridiculous cherry-picked comparisons and vague, superficial justifications. It's low-quality nostalgia-driven engagement bait that's optimizing for clicks and comments.
I really like this video by 12tone addressing Beato's schtick about modern music [0]. 12tone is an example of someone who I consider produces much higher quality content than Beato, and obviously puts a ton of time and effort into the videos (writing scripts, drawing the visuals, recording and editing, and making moderately-clickbaity titles and thumbnails). But I'd guess it's probably a one-person operation.
In comparison, Beato's channel strikes me as low-effort content (pick a topic and spend an hour talking unscripted in front of a camera) with a ton of money spent on production, editing, and algorithm hyper-optimization to maximize ROI. It's such a straightforward case of something that would not exist without YouTube's monetization system that it's rather ironic for the parent to use it as an example otherwise.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tODG4Xt45bU
> It's such a straightforward case of something that would not exist without YouTube's monetization system
I find this to be very insightful.
I said above that Youtube itself created a generation that expects free videos, but it's also true that Youtube has created an industry that expect to make a living from their platform - to the extent that they literally cannot understand the point of view of the 'generation that expects free videos'.
There's obviously room for both since that's the world we live in, but it's interesting to see the two philosophically opposed 'bubbles' interacting with each other.
Beato doesn't do much hour-long unscripted talking to the camera. Those videos are typically only about 10 minutes long.
In any event, Rick Beato seems like a normal human being, albeit a somewhat goofy dad-rock oldie. 12Tone comes across as an aspie weirdo. I'd rather have more of the former.
> Beato doesn't do much hour-long unscripted talking to the camera. Those videos are typically only about 10 minutes long.
The videos are heavily edited with many cuts. So, I'd guess the production process is "have him talk for an hour, then edit it down to a 10 minute YouTube video".
> In any event, Rick Beato seems like a normal human being, albeit a somewhat goofy dad-rock oldie. 12Tone comes across as an aspie weirdo. I'd rather have more of the former.
And that's...kind of the point I'm making? The amount of effort put into the content of Beato's videos is quite low, with probably a couple hours at most of time put into research, coming up with talking points, and recording. But a lot of effort is spent on production, in order to make content that feels relatable and punchy and palatable to a mass market. It's junk food, and junk food sells well.
Indeed. Even streamers who just speak to the camera and play video games have a team of multiple people behind them, which some streamers discuss the economics of openly.
I think the problem is that the "act" of a lot of streamers and content creators is that they are relatable, in the sense that, part of watching a video game streamer is the appeal of, he's just a guy like me playing games in his bedroom. The problem is that this is all an act, or kayfabe as they would call it in wrestling. But it's an act so good that unlike wrestling, which everyone knows is fake, most people that are not at least adjacent to the content industry genuinely have no idea.
We understand your "ecosystem" well enough to despise it.
Honestly I found that the videos I come to Youtube to watch are either personal, non-monetized hobby video, or just a head talking to camera.
That's great, but you represent 1% of viewing patterns.
According to another comment, youtube gets ~2.7B MAU. Then that 1% would mean 27M people are looking for that kind of thing.
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You can compare view counts of those channels to more clickbaity or professionally produced channels. And you'd also be surprised that many of those "head talking to camera" YouTubers also have production teams behind them, at a certain scale and revenue they're not editing their own videos.
Yeah, I think a lot of people on Hackernews fall into the "advertising never worked on me" or "I'm too smart for propaganda" camp.
Clickbait is not just big red arrows and "OMG" in the title. It certainly can be, for some demographics. For other demographics, clickbait can be a video titled "The Theorem That Changed Math Forever" and a blurred out formula in the thumbnail.
If you ever saw a video and just instantly had the urge of, "I have to see this", you successfully got clickbaited. If you dislike constant sound effects and transitions and just want to see someone speak - a lot of adult audiences feel the same way, which is why many big channels deliberately produce content in that way. It's still a similarly skilled editor who probably could make overproduced content if they wanted to - they're just making the choice to make the video more relaxed.
Easy solve; PeerTube should launch ads and the rev share with creators is 99% (platform take 1% fee to keep platform up)
> lack of monetization
I mean, when you spin your own instance, because frankly, that's what the best option if you're a content creator, you can put whatever ads and monetization strategies you want. So basically the full income that gets generated gets to you, instead of splitting it with some third party that invests minimal effort. Yes, you'll have to pay someone to maintain and upkeep the server, but assumedly the people that can make the change will take that cost into account.
> a big corporation that can pay big creators million-dollar deals to make the switch.
I'm surprised by this. Isn't controlling your full production/distribution/revenue a good enough payback?
> this is the lack of monetization.
By charging it for content. Since HN doesn't like any form of Ads. /s
Sorry I have to write this out. But I am somewhat glad in the past 2 years HN has returned back to discussing monetization, money, business in a sane way.
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Really? Thats the main issue? What about when they upload child porn and some of it ends up on your computer and they break down your door and you spend the rest of your life getting bungholed by Darnel. I would rate that higher than monetary rewards.
Decentralized system rely heavily on how much you trust other humans, I do not, so I hear them.say Decentralized and I run.
I was gonna say the same. Also copyrighted content like movies. In Germany you can easily get sued for hosting and distributing. That's why torrenting is quite unpopular there
Darnel? Am I missing a reference?
It's a promising system, and I'd probably use it over a non-federated video hosting system if I wanted to run a video hosting site of some kind.
Yet it's currently hard to find a real usecase for it, since neither the content you want nor audience is there on PeerTube at the moment. If you're interested in open source software or data privacy you might find something here or there, but topics like gaming, music, sports or movies are very much underserved on the platform at the moment, and get almost no attention from viewers.
For example, I recently did a test search and found a let's play for the Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. The videos had something like 3-5 views on PeerTube, and about 10-15 times that on the creator's YouTube channel.
It's the same issue as on Mastodon and Lemmy to be honest, except exaggerated. If the majority of topics aren't well represented on these platforms, then the general public won't use them. And if the general public won't use them, then the creators that would bring the general public over won't use them either.
They need to figure out a way to encourage people outside of the 'hardcore tech nerd raised on Usenet' audience to use these platforms.
> Yet it's currently hard to find a real usecase for it, since neither the content you want nor audience is there on PeerTube at the moment.
The same use case as Youtube in its early years.
You upload a video, and send your friends a link (or post/embed on your blog).
That's good enough. It's totally OK if search is not useful.
Of course, the elephant in the room is the cost to run one of these servers...
Lemmy is pretty ok actually. The lack of big user base is more of a feature than a bug.
I've found the same with Mastadon. It has a pre-eternal-September feel to it.
Any communities (subreddit equivalents) you would recommend?
I mainly visit my country's community, news and browse comics/memes. More niche topics could be more active, I admit.
Has it normalized? When I first tried Lemmy it was mostly communists talking about communism. Then after some Reddit drama it seemed to be a bunch of people complaining about Reddit.
I generally like smaller sites, but those topics weren’t exactly engaging for me.
I got banned from some community for pointing out how shitty Soviet Union was in WW2, but learned to avoid that instance from that. It's a "federation", so you get all kinds.
There's discussion on all topics these days.
That was one of the first instances lemmy.world. You can ignore that one because it's very drama-filled. Other Lemmy servers are more chill.
I’ve been a regular lemmy user for a few years now and it’s gotten better. The communists (and fascist) platforms have been de-federated from the major platforms. It’s still full of Reddit complaining from ex redditors. I don’t think that will change.
My login server is lemmy.world, so if you sign up with something else ymmv.
Every instance is its own thing. You probably need to filter out hexbear/lemmygrad
The commies are a smaller voice these days and can be easily filtered out.
Creators get 60% of youtube's ad revenue from youtube.
What does Peertube pay?
There is your answer. If people want good stuff, there needs to be money flowing to the source of it. The internet desperately needs to shed this "everything good is totally free" mindset, because what it actually manifests as is "I love taking without the requirement of giving".
Online video sharing doesn't have to exclusively mean professional "creators" who make content with hollywood-like budgets and expect massive returns. There are 100+ million accounts regularly uploading on Youtube and only around 2-3 million of them are in the partner program. The overwhelming majority get nothing.
The problem is that all of those accounts that don't earn money don't earn money because they get no views, because they make videos no one wants to watch. I don't know the exact statistics but a simple Google search says that 3% of videos on YouTube get 95% of the views. Remove the top 3% of creators, you remove 95% of views.
The top channels get all the views because they're the only ones making videos people want to watch, and they're monetized because making such content is really, really expensive.
The problem is that beyond creators with "hollywood-like budgets", even just making 1 good video a week is a full-time job. Most creators are not looking to get rich or get massive returns, they just want to survive and pay rent. Which means any channel of any value has to be able to generate at least few thousand dollars month.
> The problem is that all of those accounts that don't earn money don't earn money because they get no views, because they make videos no one wants to watch.
That's an absurd statement.
Every video I've uploaded has gotten some views. Very few videos get zero views.
People forget that historically, Youtube wasn't a place for "content creators", but really just for people to share stuff with friends. Easily 95% of uploaders are not trying to make any money.
> Easily 95% of uploaders are not trying to make any money
While we’re making up statistics, easily 99.9% of viewers are trying to watch content that does.
> People forget that historically, Youtube wasn't a place for "content creators", but really just for people to share stuff with friends.
Utterly useless statement.
i upload unlisted videos to share privately with a single family member. or as a backup so i dont have to store it on my phone etc. silly to assume that people post things because they want it to be seen by e v e r y o n e.
That's not true.
Some of those accounts get a lot of views...
by posting pirated content.
The matter of compensation or donation can be handled completely separately. Creators can be supported on other platforms like Liberapay, Patreon, Kofi, and many creators are supported that way.
If we are talking about clickbait and making money from getting unwanted ads in people's faces, no thank you we don't need more of that.
About as likely as opening a grocery store where people can pay through voluntary donations.
I'm a professional YouTuber. The problem with a "donation" system is that, unlike something like tweets or even blog posts which are either free or low-cost to produce, high-quality video is really. expensive. to produce. And people just will not pay if they don't have to.
A good 20-minute video can easily cost 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor to produce. That is, a whole week of labor. And that's not counting expensive equipment, software, licenses, etc.
I cannot run a business on people deciding to give me money for nothing out of the goodness of their heart. And I am still a one-person business, imagine having 5 full time employees. Even YouTubers with millions of subscribers and mature audiences with disposable income often struggle to clear like $5K/month on Patreon. Which, for a multi-person business, is simply not enough. Meanwhile, that same creator might be pulling $20K/month through ads and a similar amount through sponsorships.
YouTube is more similar to Netflix and HBO than Twitter or Reddit. Yes, in theory anyone can upload to YouTube, but the majority of content that is actually watched is at this point produced by full-time creators, some of which are solo self-employed while others are at this point running whole media production companies. And those are the people you need to make a service succeed.
Dude, these guys are player haters. Don't waste your time here.
No one donates money. It doesn't happen. Conversion rates across the board are around 1%. And then of those donations, most are the lowest tier/lowest increment.
It's the most annoying and persistent counterpoint brought up in these discussions, but it has no grounding in reality. The most popular contingent of viewers are ad-supported, close behind are ad-blocking, then the last 5% are your subscribers and donators.
Counter example: I supported and still support a little a few great creators. So "no one" is already wrong. It does happen. It might not amount to a high monthly salary. Most likely not. That's a point you can reasonably make, but you can only wrongly claim, that no one donates.
(I deem periodic support as donations.)
>Conversion rates across the board are around 1%. And then of those donations, most are the lowest tier/lowest increment.
Then what is this: https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators/video
Not the most common way to make money from videos, for sure, but it's not "nobody", and they need hosting.
If you are talking about "conversion rates" then yes donations aren't for you. Go somewhere else.
that works for people you regularly watch, but what about the people that put out the rare random great video. or a video on a topic when you're trying to fix something. People dont subscribe to those patreons, and thus those kind of creators rely on ad revenue.
What an absolutely bizarre thing to write in response to a link to a completely free software project with 541 contributors. Here you have hundreds of people who are exactly giving away highly skilled work for free.
Software has such a vibrant open source scene because software has probably the biggest impact-per-unit-time out of anything ever created and it has close to zero development cost and distribution cost. It's basically, skill+laptop+time. That's all you need to get a product in the hands of millions.
There is a reason why there is mountains of free software and comparative dust mounds of free media, free hardware, free services.
LLM progress in the last year notwithstanding, software is not cheap to develop. I wouldn't be surprised if e.g. this project had multiple millions of dollars of labor embedded in it.
Software, like media, is simply free to replicate, and there's a much stronger culture of "I made this for me, and it costs me nothing to give it to you too, so you can have it too." There is a lot of free media out there though: music, art, short films, games or game mods, etc. What they don't have is marketing.
Software is the cheapest of all engineering disciplines by far. Literally the only cost is time and a $20 computer.
Compare to open source hardware, where you need a lab with thousands of dollars in equipment, need to consume supplies to build stuff and need to pay manufacturers for prototyping.
Software benefits enormously from having zero dependance on the physical world. Its about as resource intensive as building houses in Minecraft.
Just like doctors' and lawyers' consultations are cheap? That time is extremely expensive if it's something you are buying. Companies spend over $200/hour for the time of a competent engineer. Like I said, I wouldn't doubt this project here "costing" 7-figures despite being free. Things like Blender or KDE are probably 8 figures.
I’d prefer 60% of millions and millions of viewers over 200% of the 8 people on peertube. Percentages aren’t that important here.
Peertube pays 100%
Not really sure how people need to be explained this, but for whatever reason, this most basic of information is seemingly skipped over. Even if peertube wants to pay 65%, that's just a bigger percentage of nothing.
FOSS server software shouldn't be seen as a platform. It should be seen as software that can be used to create a platform. Federation makes it technically a platform but just barely. Mastodon is barely a platform - mastodon.social is, and kolektiva is a different one.
PeerTube is software you could use to make a video streaming website like Nebula.
To me the ideal use of PeerTube would be if studios adopted it as their publishing platform. Publish to their instance, syndicated globally. But, they are so hardcore on licensing that they will never adopt a platform that doesn't have complete control over where their media is distributed. The lack of a method for monetizing videos on PeerTube is also like the black mark for a video platform. But, the maintainers of PeerTube are ideologically opposed to monetization lest the toxin of advertisements taint the platform.
The legal landscape of media publishing is filled with antiquated deals from broadcast days for regional control. That has changed marginally with the adoption of streaming.
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/1586#issuecomm...
AAA studios will never just put their videos on the internet. This is a prime example of somebody ignoring the social and political aspects of a field and focusing only on the technology. The reason Disney doesn't put their videos on the internet for free-to-the-user viewing IS NOT because they lack server software.
You don't need (or likely even want, c.f. "eternal September") the general public. You just need your discussion group. e.g. if you want discussion of mathematics from world renowned experts like Terence Tao or Tim Gowers, you would use Mastodon.
I agree this is a real issue, however hopefully a solution is that creators will upload their videos to both sites (ie YouTube is their primary but also upload to peertube at the same time) which is pretty easy to do and eventually a site like peer tube might reach that critical mass with enough content
Supposedly there's a button to wholesale import your YouTube channel to PeerTube and keep syncing after, wonder if that's easy/reliable enough for people to do it just cause.
I.e, network effects are hard to overcome
I am currently recording tutorial videos for an open source project. It's produced fully with Foss software (on Linux, obs, kdenlive) and about an open source project, so I wanted to host it with peertube (though YouTube might be used later on for its network effect, it was easier to publish with peertube as yt required an video of me and my ID). It's going fine until now. I don't host peertube myself though, I use an existing instance, and embed the videos in the website.
It was a really good experience, so I'll continue that way.
If you want to check out the videos: https://www.asfaload.com/videos/
With adblocker enabled: error loading dynamically imported module: https://exquisite.tube/client/standalone/videos/assets/peert...
Toggling ubo allowed the videos the load
Thanks for reporting it! I'll have a look
There are four functions here:
- Discovery (as in search)
- Monetization (as in ads)
- Hosting (as in storage)
- Playout (as in data distribution)
PeerTube only performs the fourth, and maybe the third. It's not a flooding distribution system like BitTorrent. It's just a way for a large number of people to play the same video without overloading a modest hosting server. Playout load is distributed amongst the watchers browsers.
I put videos in PeerTube, tech demos of various rendering tests. Works fine. No ad insertion, which is why I use PeerTube.
Peak view count is 2.3K.[1] Nobody is expected to discover them there. They're linked from various forums. Some are for a very tiny audience, such as "Second Life sim server EstablishAgentCommunication message bug", with 10 views, mostly from the devs who needed to see this.
Technically it works fine, but it's not going to displace YouTube. Unless, say, Taylor Swift decided to stream her wedding on it to avoid ad insertion.
[1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/7usCE3v2RrWK6nuoSr4NHJ
PeerTube has some interesting technology with the P2P sharing between users who watch at the same time. But with these kind of projects I think there are unfortunately social factors that impact their success as well as technical factors.
It's one thing to put a <video> element on a HTML page (or implement video over webtorrent), it's quite another to make people actually watch it instead of their TikTok feed.
yeah video social media is way ahead with algorithms and content. I still think they need to exist and keep pushing for this idea
It reminds me of the other social media type experiments, I applaud their efforts but the underlying technology just isn’t a huge selling point to viewers compared to the actual content.
The P2P stuff will take off once AI slop is done destroying the current web, like a new ecosystem emerging out of the carcass of a dead whale
On the contrary, I worry about the ability of these grassroots user-generated content distribution systems to withstand the barrage of generated slop uploaded by armies of autonomous agents. Fighting it off is an asymmetric battle that makes it increasingly hard to distinguish the legitimate users trying to share their work.
No, unfortunately P2P's glory days are behind us. Shame, because it was a really cool technology.
Youtube has been incredibly frustrating for many many reasons and is evidently evil in many axes now. We really need competition in video hosting.
The problem is that YouTube isn't just a video hosting platform. We have many of those. The problem is that YouTube is a business platform that lets you makes money from your business, as long as your business is mainly comprised of publishing videos. No amount of open-source software quality can replicate thousands of dollars of ad money flowing into your pocket. It's like making a 3D-printable plan of an Indian restaurant, it can't ever become an actual Indian restaurant.
Small or hobby creators, who aren't making money anyway, could use small platforms - but then they forfeit their chance to ever become big and get that money - at best they could become big and not get that money.
Then start loading ads.
Youtube's biggest threat ever died in the cradle because they foolishly thought users would volunteer money to them.
No one with capital and capability looks at youtube, looks at youtube's audience, and says "Yeah, 30-40% ad-blocking and 4.5% paying for premium, these are the people I want to build services for!".
Those ad-blocked viewers are important, which is why YT doesn't actually crack down on them.
Those are the people who will happily go to an alternative product. And while that product might start as a pirate YouTube, the one that nabs 30% of YT's traffic can certainly make a pivot to legit. If you're a content creator whose audience is mostly in that group, you're likely to start posting content directly on the competitor's site.
I'm guessing OP had their account banned for using a tool like yt-dl too aggressively. Then again, doing that does give a warning.
Youtube does crack down on them, all the time. Why do you think they are "important"? What are they contributing, and to whom? How does Google benefit?
They half-ass crack down on them. Not even that, it's dime-assed crackdown at best. You get that little "experiencing issues?" note that the bottom of the screen (which goes away after a few seconds), and an occasional 3-5s delay before video starts.
I explained exactly why I think they are important in that entire paragraph. And the evidence I'm right is the fact that YouTube could trivially prevent ad-blockers tomorrow, but they don't. They've tried it and quickly rolled back the changes. Presumably they lost a lot more audience than expected.
A good way to spot someone you can safely ignore is when they say "X could trivially Y" in regards to a Y you know is extremely non-trivial.
Though anytime I do land on actual YouTube, and not an invidious instance to watch a video, and am confronted how utterly crap the YouTube frontend and their video player is, I gotta wonder, whether the crackdown is half-assed, or simply the maximum of what they are capable of developing.
Youtube won the war on ad blocking when most views moved to TV and mobile. While I've seen some people have hacked clients to run on TV platforms, the average person just either watches the ads or pays for youtube premium. The friction for ad blocking has gone up to the point youtube makes enough money to not care about the rest.
In tech/engineering/video game categories, ad-blocking is still around 40% of viewers. Basically things that people who still use desktops/laptops are into.
He was on premium, paid for ad blocker.
I am still a bit upset that I got banned without even a warning. I tried to adhere to policies and figured if anything was wrong, I'd get a warning at least, and then I'd know better what the limits are. Unfortunately there is little recourse and even less feedback.
Even more annoying is that it terminates your YouTube account entirely, so now I can't even login to use it. And I was a premium subscriber, too!
The best thing about YouTube is their agreements with rights holders to allow music and revenue sharing easily, which makes it very simple for creators and remixers etc to not get their stuff removed via DMCA.
I like the idea of all of these federated services but why does the UX always feel like an afterthought when it is the most important factor for adoption?
Same reason why the Linux desktop often suffers on the UX/UX front: people naturally drawn to these projects tend to lean heavily technical, and highly technical circles have a bad habit of driving out less technical contributors through devaluation of their work and lack of agency within the project among other issues.
That sort of work also tends to be less well-compensated than that of SWEs which makes it more important to be paid for work (which most FOSS project cannot do).
UX work is often also a lot heavier and more subjective than the plumbing.
I might open a pull request to support some new video code, and that might only require a few dozen lines over a few files. That's easy to review, and it either works or it doesn't. Worst case they say "our convention is to register codecs as a subclass of X class, but you subclassed Y class" or something equally straightforward.
Let's say instead I wanted to change the workflow to register an account. Now I'm changing a bunch of JavaScript, CSS, templates, I'm adding pages, and I also need to update the backend. Even if someone is that into frontend work, it might take forever to even get reviewed by the maintainers because it's a massive PR.
Plus, now we've moved into subjectivity land: "I'm used to the old workflow," (because they designed it) "The last one was really easy" (for an engineer), "I think we should focus on the backend before we work on the UI," "I don't like this font because the license isn't free as in freedom" etc.
Even if you just mockup something on Figma or whatever, unless you're a maintainer it's probably going to just get ignored as a feature request. Because there's also the psychological aspect of basically being told that the UI you wrote is implicitly bad, if you're the maintainer reviewing the mockup.
Not that I disagree, but I find it a bit harsh.
I know many developers who make at least some open source contributions, be it to an existing project or by open sourcing their own.
It has never, ever happened to me that a UI/UX person opened a PR saying "here, I made a logo for your project because I know how".
I think that there is a cultural thing, where UI/UX people don't consider that they have to work for free on the Internet, and software developers have a tendency to believe they should, "for their CV" or something.
Or maybe there is no universally better UX and people who work for free want to create what works for themselves and not some top down designers vision. After all most mainstream software completely ignores the needs of power users.
Maybe some devs in OSS are married to their horrid idea of how things should work?
Do you have precise suggestion of what to improve? I'm genuinely interested.
Is it possible to just vaguely gesture at everything?
The spacing of every component feels wrong, the font choices are off, the text is too small, there is way too much white space, the "other video" section looks like its just jammed off to the side. The overall feel of the website is very amateurish.
Yeah, it's pretty simple. When I go to YouTube.com, I have access to all of the videos on that platform, sorted based on what I'm subscribed to and other things like what I watch. The first thing I see are videos. I'm off to the races.
When I go to https://joinpeertube.org, I'm met with a double hero section that tells me about PeerTube, which is ultimately meaningless to 99% of the population.
When I get to actual content on that page, it's not an aggregate of all of the most popular videos across the federation, it's a description of the types of videos you can find on federated sites with links to the sites and not video embeds. You're telling me on the front page that I have to do legwork to find the videos I want to watch. You're already not competitive. You already lose.
Creators go where users go. If you don't build the platform to attract users, you will not get the volume of content that is required to hold people's attention. There's a reason why people come to YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News, Reels, etc. There are almost no clicks between the user and the content, and the content is plentiful.
Every time I try to use PeerTube, I have to try to find where to find the videos. As someone who's been chronically online since 1995, it's not that big of a deal. I can find them eventually. But that UX sucks, even for me, so it's probably utterly untenable for the vast majority of casual users.
You are trying to compete with slot machines by inventing a machine that makes the user read a bunch of stuff between each pull of the lever. It's not super difficult to see why that is a competitive disadvantage.
And the thing is that you don't even necessarily need to make a new slot machine to compete with the old slot machine. A lot of people hate the slot machine-ness of the old slot machine. They hit a button on their Chrome extension/Greasemonkey remote to turn off the flashing lights and loud attention-grabbing sounds and whatnot. So, if your new machine doesn't have those, maybe that's all for the better. Maybe your new machine gives players more control over how they play, and doesn't try to trick them into never getting up to get some water or go to the bathroom or whatever. Maybe there's no jackpot, just a chill or educational time. Maybe you get rid of the randomness of the outcomes, so that it's easier for people to just find what they're looking for. I dunno. There are a lot of ways it could go.
But, boy, I do know this: when I sit down, I better be able to just pull the lever and start.
This is like complaining that when you go to nginx.org, you aren't shown a bunch of websites or a search box to discover anything, so this web thing is garbage UX compared to the Facebook app. There's no "the federation". There are various sites that run peertube, some of which are federated with each other. Others have nothing to do with each other. Some are probably completely private.
An example of federation might be that a bunch of universities run their own instances where they post colloquia, and they federate with each other to make it easy to subscribe to departments in your field from another university, or to comment on their videos. IMO state universities should be posting their material online like this, and on a platform that does not require the public to watch ads (something fundamentally against the mission of an educational institution), or agree to some random company's terms.
I agree with you, but I was speaking to PeerTube's own claim that it is an alternative to YouTube, rather than the narrow use case you're describing. For the vast majority of the people on the planet, it is not an alternative to YouTube because it's very difficult to discover content. When I go to YouTube, I can find videos immediately. If I want to find videos via PeerTube, it's a journey. It's the same journey that has shifted the majority of Internet users away from forums to aggregators. PeerTube feels like a bygone way to do things.
> An alternative to Big Tech's video platforms
> PeerTube is a tool for sharing online videos developed by Framasoft, a french non-profit.
> PeerTube allows you to create your own video platform, in complete independence.
I think it's pretty clear that it's software for running your own video sharing platform? Sure, people are used to monopolies and consolidation now, but surely you can wrap you head around the idea that some people might want to host their own site? Like why are you here and not on reddit? Is this site a bygone way to do things? Or is it just... its own thing?
As I said above, I think entities tied to governments should be using something like this, not youtube. The obvious place to look for e.g. recorded meetings from your city would be your city website. Likewise with schools. And government functions like that absolutely should not be monetized and should not have ads attached.
I am both here, and on Reddit, and also on YouTube. I can be in many places at the same time because this is all made of light and there are lots of interesting places to go. I'll probably find myself on Reels before too long. I'm not on PeerTube because I cannot find content that is interesting on PeerTube, which again is the crux of my argument.
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
> PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform developed as an alternative to other platforms that centralize our data and attention, such as YouTube, Dailymotion or Vimeo.
The original PeerTube launch I saw on this platform several years ago very much sold it as a replacement for YouTube. I'm not sure what exactly you think I'm saying or trying to do here, but what I've said has absolutely nothing to do with the use case you're defending. It's a good use case and it makes sense. It's fine for hosting your own stuff or in coursework or something where the videos are directly linked to from a CMS. Some people want to host their own stuff. Some people should host their own stuff.
For everybody else... The UX sucks.
You are not "on peertube" because there's no such thing as a peertube to be on. What I'm trying to convey is that your words literally don't make sense. There is no "everybody else" for the UX to suck for. You're complaining that it doesn't try to be the opposite of what it is.
If you're interested in Debian, you go to Debian's peertube which is part of Debian's website, where the Debian foundation hosts their videos. If you're interested in Blender, you go to Blender's peertube which is part of Blender's website. It's always worked this way. There's also activitypub federation if you want the social parts with a single account so that cooperating instances can interact. Like email, it's an open protocol so any servers can federate. Like email, they can also choose who they accept traffic from.
There is also a search engine that indexes a bunch of instances, but just as Google is not the web, their search engine is not the peertube. "The web" is just the sum total of all of the websites out there. The thing you seem to think has bad UX, the peertube, is just the sum total of all of the peertube instances out there.
There's no giant overlay or mesh network like gnutella or IPFS. There's just people running their own servers, like the web or email.
It's an alternative to youtube for people who just want to share videos in the same way that an email server is an alternative to gmail for people who just want to send emails to each other. Or a web server is an alternative to Facebook for someone who wants a website. It's understood that those monopolies are then distinct and generally incompatible.
You're being pedantic while also just kind of continuing to make my point for me because you're describing a regressive user experience over and over again. The Internet at large has evolved beyond forums and IRC for a reason.
Users have become used to having quick and easy access to a lake of content. When I go to PeerTube's website, I should see content first, and if I'm a creator, I want a guarantee that my content isn't going to suddenly disappear. YouTube can make these guarantees. BlueSky is the only such federated alternative that has gained any degree of traction with normal users because they ripped off the UX of Twitter verbatim.
If you're on episcodon.net and you want your friends and colleagues to join you there, what does that look like? Your answer invariably resides at the end of a labyrinth of shit UX, including the legwork you have to do first to know wtf episcodon.net even is.
People use GMail because it makes email easy to use and there is an implicit guarantee that the emails they have access to today will be there in 10 years because there are an army of engineers being paid to maintain the service. The UX is good and that's why it's popular.
To advertise yourself as an alternative to a popular social media platform, you must address why those platforms are popular in the first place or you are not competitive as a default state.
> Users have become used to having quick and easy access to a lake of content. When I go to PeerTube's website, I should see content first,
Peertube's website is not for consumers. It is for publishers. They're quite clear about that when they advertise that you can run your own platform. Again, you are basically complaining that nginx.org doesn't list some cool websites to get started browsing the WWW (except peertube even goes so far as to actually even point to a couple instances).
It's not a regression if your goal is not "create content"/"find and consume content". Like if you actually have interests, and e.g. are a Blender user, and you already visit blender.org for news about the Blender project, then it makes sense that they might say "here are some videos about our project". And of course they offer RSS so you can use your preferred subscription software.
> if I'm a creator, I want a guarantee that my content isn't going to suddenly disappear.
Then install peertube and post your videos? This is what various organizations that don't want their information to disappear like Debian or Blender have done.
> shit UX, including the legwork you have to do first to know wtf episcodon.net even is.
So your criticism is that it's not literally the current monopoly that everyone already knows.
What do you even mean "join you there"? Sharing a peertube video is the same as sharing a youtube video: you select the address, copy, and paste into a message. There's no commitment. You either just... click a link and watch a video, or if you also want to post, you put in your email/password to sign up. I have hundreds of saved logins in my browser, including Google/youtube (who are more onerous and require e.g. a phone number to sign up, or back in the day, required an invite). Peertube is somehow uniquely shit for... not literally being Google?
Is there an actual criticism here that isn't "videos aren't literally recommended on youtube and I'm not literally already logged in via youtube and subscriptions aren't literally managed within youtube"?
Have a good weekend
That's fine if that's your goal, but don't expect anyone to adopt it then. 99% of people aren't flocking to video platforms for ideological nor technical reasons.
I tried to find some videos by starting at the URL you linked.
I clicked on "Browse content", because that's exactly what I wanted to do: I wanted to browse content.
All I got from that was a needless introduction to an entirely unnecessary cuttlefish named Sepia, and a search box. There was no content to browse; I was lied to.
But there's a note at the bottom about "Peertube instances" with a literal "CLICK >HERE<" cursed-abomination-style link.
That click lead to a list of... 25 "Peertube platforms", in one column on the right, even though I clicked >HERE< for "Peertube instances".
There's a written suggestion that I can add filters to find more of these, but that's exactly the opposite of the way that filters have always worked in my world: Filters are reductive, not additive.
Finally, in the left-hand column, is another CLICK >HERE< style link that is supposed to take me to "videos or channels" -- you know, the stuff I'm looking for.
That link brings me back to the stupid page with Sepia, the iconic cuttlefish, and a search box.
Having been lied to twice (thrice?), I gave up. At this time, I have not yet seen any videos.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48764717
You say that you're genuinely interested, but chances are that any given maintainer is not. Willingness to actually listen to UI/UX critique is what separates the Blenders from the GIMPs.
Look at the installation instructions. <https://docs.joinpeertube.org/install/any-os> They are very onerous. Yes, I've seen worse, but the ratio between manual labour in service of non-essential complexity and the provided value is still quite bad.
Peertube covers the enterprise use case, but makes unreasonable demands from hobbyists, single users, tinkerers. Kids, gather around and learn from the Peertube design mistakes that an experienced and well-meaning software designer would refuse to subject his users/operators to. Why is this important? Because the number of hobbyist operators is much greater than the number of enterprise operators, given the intended target audience of people who are interested in decentralisation and federation. Peertube engineers and product managers should sit down with the intention to make a smart market move, and expend the next half month of effort to optimise for the majority of operators who make up the long tail, not the minority, so that hurdles to entry are demolished and the stated goal shown on the homepage of "community-owned" becomes attainable for many more people than is the case right now. The resulting network effect would be tremendous.
1. Packaging. Peertube is not packaged by the major players. <https://repology.org/project/peertube/versions> Real-life experience shows that this is almost always because of a circumstance which frustrates a distro packager. Other NPM-conformant libraries and software are packaged nearly automatically, there is good support in the distros to create specfile/RPM package, control file/Deb package, etc. from an Nodejs library tarball with just one command. Peertube must investigate why it is so exceptional and difficult to package and demolish the hurdles.
2. Configuration. Peertube must as the installation step make effective an usable configuration that has some sensible defaults, or perhaps auto-configure at install time or run time. A user should be able to install the software (from a distro package, or a git checkout/unpacked tarball and build step), run it, and immediately use it. It is okay when some features are not working until configured. It is not okay for a software to refuse to work altogether until each and every operator spends time and brain power to figure out what are essential configuration options and what are not, and make decisions about them. The reason why I say it is not okay is because this is a clear abdication of responsibility from the Peertube software devs and an externalising of mental burdens onto the many Peertube operators.
3. Database. Peertube should work with Sqlite by default. An enterprise user can configure PostgreSQL additionally when the need arises.
4. Web server. Peertube should work with the Node.js Web server (possibly express.js or a work-alike) by default. An enterprise user can configure Nginx additionally when the need arises.
5. Cache. Peertube should work with a simple file system cache or no cache at all by default. An enterprise user can configure Redis additionally when the need arises.
It'd help if you explain the problems you see in the UX.
I picked a random instance and played a video - did not see any problems.
And Youtube: I've hated their UX since they launched. It shouldn't be hard to make something with better UX than Youtube.
Yeah, form is the most important factor. Function isn't necessary./s
Does it have good content? I explored it a bit in the past, but was a bit underwhelmed with content I could find there.
Edit: in the past
If you find those few instances that have those few uploaders that interest you, the content can be good.
However it does certainly suffer from the fact that all federated instances can't pull in videos from other platforms in some reproducible way (so that all instances would be able to serve the same content).
I'm sure some YouTubers would allow mirrors if they didn't have to pick an instance and keep it running.
Would be pretty incredible to see decentralized federated media individual accounts and aggregators implement the x402 payment protocol (https://x402.org) as a way for creators to get paid, and thus continue to create.
Im envisioning a spotify replacement. You could pay for your streams directly to artists or platform the artist hosts on. Allowing for a more free market of creators and consumers.
The 'Explore' part, would basically just be like Mastadon or Bluesky
The first thing I noticed is that clicking on "browse" does not allow browsing but requires search: https://joinpeertube.org/browse-content
Been running my instance for more than 5 years now, feel free to ask questions.
How much does it cost you? what is your business model to substain it?
I didn't estimate the cost but server-wise it's less than 30 EUR/month. What's demanding is transcoding but with the new architecture https://docs.joinpeertube.org/contribute/architecture#remote... there are ways to optimize, e.g. do nightly batch transcoding on a cheaper spot instances.
My business model is showcase and archival of my prototyping work. I'm the only account on my instance so there is no surprise with suddenly someone abusing the instance.
Stupid question: when people inevitably use this for pirate content, and the feds try to shut the service down ... what's the plan?
They can't shut down the service because there is no single service. They can go after individual servers, and that is fine. The admin is responsible for what happens on their server.
Why would an admin run a server if they might have the feds knocking at their door? Sure, people might run nodes that host only their content, but they sure are disincentivized from running any sort of shared service.
This is the same problem as TOR exit nodes and why 3 letter agencies run most of them.
This is the same problem as why an admin would run a forum if the feds might knock at the door, or why an admin would run a website about cats if the feds might knock at the door. It's an overblown fear.
You don't have to convince me, you have to convince all the would-be hosts who would rather not take the chance.
People do host those things, so clearly they don't need convincing. I'm replying to you because you are the one who said it on Hacker News, and I'm concerned that people might read the FUD on Hacker News and it might stop them from hosting something.
it's a safe harbor. If the admin unlists videos when they get a DMCA takedown they are in the green.
believe it or not, YT too gets a crapload of copyrighted content uploaded hourly yet they exist
Believe it or not, the RIAA does not care, and YouTube has four orders of magnitude more lawyers than you do
RIAA can't do nothing unless you ignore DMCA. it's called safe harbor
Maybe the live where the feds can't get them?
The feds will go after the instance admin that is sharing pirate content.
Isn't the design of peertube that you can view videos originally uploaded by other instances? So unless you decide to not federate, you are responsible for every video on every instance.
Yes, but you can federate selectively, as in choosing which other instances you want to. And, yes, federating turns you responsible for the content of the other instance (IMHO; not legal advice or even fact checked).
Someone is still hosting the content and paying for resources just like with every other service distributed or not so it doesn't really add anything new to the equation.
The plan is the same as it always has been. It's no different than running an open FTP server.
I am gonna guess it's similar to torrenting and seeding?
For an example of a quite vibrant local PeerTube instance, there is https://vhsky.cz/ running in the Czech Republic.
(And no, it is not spelled "VH SKY" - it's a pun on the VHS video format - in Czech to say "multiple VHS casettes - you would say "vhsky", hence the name. :) )
Browsing the main page, none of the videos crack even 100 views. Many under 10 views. I don't know if one could call this vibrant.
I spent 10 minutes figuring out how I could just follow a few instances without having to run a docker container on my machine or keeping N tabs open all the time.
Not a chance to figure that out (I am no mastodon user, so hard for me to guess).
These platforms are promising, but they need to remember that the average user will turn away immediately if there is no clear guidance on how to do the basic things.
I've been deeply invested in YT and YT Music for about 20 years now. This month I was forced to cancel my subscription. They recently jacked up the price and really ruined the apps. I can't even understand how to operate the apps anymore; nobody will document it; nobody will support them. So I'm unable to monetarily support an unsupported app ecosystem.
Sadly I cannot leave the platform. The network effect is far too strong. PeerTube, and Vimeo, and Spotify are all well and good, like any other, but the network effect means that YouTube is where the channels are. The official channels that I follow and watch every day, for news, for updates, for the most important things in my hobby and my daily life. I cannot simply stop watching those things.
Call me an addict or something; I don't know. I have no TV, no family; I need some kind of time-chewing entertainment that is mostly passive. I wish I could curl up with books and knitting or crafts or something, but my eyes are still glued to these screens.
Help?
Personally, I find the lack of videos to watch on PeerTube a huge plus. I tremendously reduced my weekly video watching time and I don't feel like missing out on something important. My favorite instance is makertube.net, but I visit few others too.
Thank you, I'd not come across makertube.net. Is there some website that collects all of these instances together? I thought peertube.tv would do that, but there are loads more content on makertube.net so clearly not.
I think https://peerseek.video is sort of aggregator website, not sure how much instances it covers, though.
It is unfortunate that in french « peer » reads as « pire » which translates to « worse-tube »
It's developed by a french company, so that confusion can't be that critical.
Snarky lemma: In French, is the trend of things going worse to worse?
Let's go for "PearTube" then.
PèreTube. Just videos about golf, lawn care, cars, and Fox News clips.
PearTube (PoireTube) would just have the Fox News clips.
Pierre-tube
I used it a few months ago but there was lag and things not working.
I keep on saying we need to eliminate Google for real. I mean it too. But the services NEED TO BE FLAWLESS if you want to have a chance against Google. I don't understand why people don't seem to understand it. Software can often be better. PeerTube's software was disappointing and really poorly implemented compared to Google. There is no way to win here that way against Google. That's not realistic.
It's not possible for FOSS to compete with Google in Google's niche — try it and you'll see why. It's possible to find a different niche and expand there.
Last time I tried it the federation was whitelist based, that is you could only follow people on instances added by the admin of your instance. This made content discovery difficult.
It's not a platform, it's server-side software for creating a platform.
I wonder if peertube could be used as backend infra for a security camera system, the tech seems promising. Also with all these instances hosting their own content, what do they do to combat cgnat? do individuals need to upload to an instance that has a public ip at a bare minimum. And what about directory listings for content, users would expect to be able to browse available videos and then burrow down to instances that host them no?
Hasn't cared about PeerTube for a long time, but this software is getting really impressive. Maybe it's time to move towards the next step: getting publishers on board.
I could totally see myself hooked if I can watch news on it. Can someone from a proper news agency, such as BBC, DW, Reuters, NYT etc test the software and maybe make a pitch? If these agencies are hosting their own PeerTube instances, that would be a major win.
Publishers won't get on board until you can work out how to sort out advertising, paid subscriptions, and blocking ad blockers.
No, I mean just let them host the instance themselves, and they can decide to do whatever.
Many of these publishers already got a podcast/video publishing routine anyways and they just put ads directly in the podcast/video. I guess maybe it's not that hard for them to add another publishing channel.
Getting one of the proper news agencies on board is very beneficial for the PeerTube network, because currently there's not much good quality content on it. News videos maybe a good baseline to keep user engaged (as long as they're not too political).
If PeerTube is my software, I'll probably pay my own money to get the agencies on board. I'll even host their site myself if it needs to (at least for the first few years, to demonstrate the value of the software).
is it bulletproof ? I don't think peertube has fixed that massive legal liability to the "seeders"
same situation that bitorrent found itself in
If you only seed videos you have full legal rights to (creative commons [as long as you follow the license terms properly], public domain, or videos you personally created yourself, therefore own all rights to outright), then where's the worry? If you choose to seed copyrighted videos, well then that's all on you to handle the legality of (or lack thereof) I'd suppose... :shrug:
The biggest problem I see is that you need to search for videos. If this is going to work you need a YouTube like home page with videos on it and a different webpage talking about the tech. Using a search page to find videos instead of being presented with one is a non starter.
Random idea…
1. Chunk one inside a YT video 2. Chunk two inside a TikTok video 3. Chunk three on an X thread
And then just post the manifest somewhere that can be read by a client, that then pulls the data in (video, doc, anything)
Obv, not meant for speed or good UX, but if we’re going down the route of decentralization, we can probably leverage social platforms to host chunks of data.
I'm giving this an honest try to post some music I made, cause Google randomly banned me yesterday for "bot activity" and wants an appeal. I'm not mad or anything, just thinking they won't let me use YouTube anymore.
User generated content: check, comment section: check.
How do people running an instance not fall foul of all the protect the children UK legislation? Will peers also be done by the UK regulator, or only hosts?
PeerTube: we don't recommend cat videos. Also PeerTube: 10 cat videos on the front page
The main advantage of PeerTube and alike is that they keep the “professional content creators” and their crappy content away.
Because of their unique monetisation feature.
My recent experience with PeerTube was to click on the OpenMW released video and the video didn't load. Is that a regular occurrence on PeerTube?
Is there any moderation? how long until it's filled to the top with nsfw stuff?
I guess each instance does its own moderation. Peertube has been around for years and still no one watches it.
I've tried a few of these alternative sites, and it's just not a fun place to go find videos from interesting people working on projects, etc. A lot of unpleasant extremist videos, a lot of slop, with no good ability to filter out just what I want to see. Sure, YouTube has these too but I can manage to keep it at bay.
It does have some ability to filter. I am subscribed to a few channels on the Makertube instance and regularly watch some videos there.
You can mute channels or entire federated instances so they don't appear in feeds or search results. It does get tiresome to always have to do this when you see unwanted video's, but they do stay gone, unlike Youtube's system of "Not Interested"/"Don't recomend this channel".
All in all i've been watching less Youtube lately and starting to watch some Peertube videos and finding the grassroots nature of it very refreshing.
Does it allow streaming?
Docs:
https://docs.joinpeertube.org/use/create-upload-video#publis...
https://docs.joinpeertube.org/admin/configuration#live-strea...
This does: https://safebots.github.io/Safecloud
I designed it in order to stream videos and get paid without worrying about getting deplatformed
Two weeks ago it was covered in a respected security publication: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/06/19/safecloud-browser...
It's coming out soon, but if you're adventurous, you can try it on GitHub already.
Edit: I posted it on HN right now as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48763565
You forgot to say the magic words (shameless plug)
Yes. But a click on the link will provide a more detailed answer.
I'm not affiliated with peertube...but yes it does enable/support streaming: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube#video-streaming-even-...
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