A bit paradoxal but it looks that all central platform (twitter, reddit, facebook…) are helping the spread of Fediverse. Recently we saw the impact with Twitter on Mastodon, myself I’ve discovered Lemmy even if I wasn’t a reddit user. And before that Facebook first spread friendica and diaspora. It looks next step will be around Youtube where Google try to lock more and more its user.
It’s honestly not that bad? Most of what’s being federated with PeerTube is just metadata related to the video, the video itself is hosted on whatever instance it’s hosted at, plus some peers spreading chunks of the data around.
I’ve been running PeerTube for years, and the compute / bandwidth / storage cost is way lower with things like S3-compatible Object Storage. It’s super cheap.
The biggest drain on compute power, weirdly enough, is transcoding video. Which can definitely suck if you’re running a big site, and everybody wants to have all kinds of different video resolutions. But even this can be delegated to external workers in an upcoming update.
The compute is getting cheap now too. By the end of this year, you’ll be able to slap a couple of these in a CoLo for a few grand, and then be able to transcode hundreds of videos at once.
https://www.servethehome.com/amd-alveo-ma35d-custom-anti-gpu-silicon-for-av1-era-video-transcoding/
You’d be able to compete with 2nd tier streaming services like Nebula or Floatplane at that level.
But yeah, it’s hard to get to Youtube/Netflix efficiency at a small scale, you just can’t get the specialized hardware needed to do all the hardware transcoding and DMA media serving that they do. But we’re getting there.