I don’t believe one exists, correct me if i am wrong. I believe something like this should be worked on as i sense youtube is going to tighten down soon, too. Would it even be possible?
Peertube is one of the oldest federated software projects. It’s a lot less sustainable than ActivityPub platforms because storing HD video is much much more expensive than what Lemmy instances currently do. Lemmy as a platform with a few federated home servers could feasibly replace Reddit, Mastodon could feasibly replace Twitter, but if PeerTube ever got mainstream enough to handle even 0.01% of YouTube’s traffic/hosting footprint it’d be impossible to deal with the associated costs.
Not as much as you might think. Depending upon the type of video The actual encoded files can be rather small comparatively. The big thing in heavy lifting the platforms like YouTube etc do is the multi-rencoding for different resolutions. And then hopping between them on the fly to try to keep the stream as real time as possible.
If peer tube has lag and doesn’t support high definition / multiple resolutions per video, it’ll never get enough popularity that storage / bandwidth become issues.
Using WebRTC it won’t lag. At least not for popular streams. For obscure content that no one watches. It might. But that isn’t some deal breaker. It supports high resolution just fine. But honestly we don’t need a ton of different resolutions for every video. It’s a luxury and a convenience. Realistically with modern codex today the difference in bandwidth while not insignificant. Again is not a deal breaker. The distribution isn’t all through a single entity. It is highly distributed.
Personally I had not messed with any peer tube instances for a year and a half or so. So the other night I installed it on an Android device and the experience has come leaps and bounds. If the content were there. And loading up as all the content that I did watch did. I could absolutely see myself using it. The issue will be content. And perhaps monetizing it. Though there is a lot of content that for one reason or another can’t be monetized. Which would be perfectly happy on a service like this.
It’s not only a storage problem, but bandwidth cost too.
It uses WebRTC. It’s not going to be that big of a bandwidth issue.
It’s still bandwidth. If every single video viewed uses (for example) 2Mbps, 10.000 video viewed simultaneously would need 20Gbps.
From who? It’s federated and distributed. Everyone watching it also re-streams it. You don’t need a massive data center in the cloud. The more people who are watching it. The more bandwidth there is for more people to watch it.
Everyone watching is also restraining? Is that really how Peertube works? I didn’t know! Does it works using chunks form different people or video is fully uploaded by a single user?
Yes WebRTC is highly similar to BitTorrent. You have your initial uploader who seeds. Every person that then downloads a chunk to watch it is also then capable of sending that chunk back out. Thereby the more people that watch the more people that can watch. Even back in 2012 with the Kodi piracy plugins. You could click on watching a show. And within a minute or two you would be watching the show in decent quality. Though at the time they were actually using straight up bit torrent just tuned to send the first chunks first so you could watch it as it streamed. So as far as bandwidth on storage requirements are concerned is pretty minimal. Unless of course you’re trying to run a large public instance. Then you are still on the hook for some basic storage.
Yeah open-source alternative youtube would look bleak without some sort of reliable (and heavy) funding. I suppose if they could get the eu to fund them, then maybe but yeah it looks a bit bleak if i am being honest
If funding enters the picture, capitalism means that it’ll eventually shift towards profit (or in some cases “not operating at a severe loss”). Something based on BitTorrent might be one of the only capitalism-proof solutions for handling video, but that of course has its own problems (most people that create video content like to be able to delete it, for example)
That’s what peer tube basically operates on. Not exactly. But it’s a very similar concept.
It isn’t federated but LBRY is a project that is kind of similar to federation (but not really). The code is open source, videos are shared p2p (mostly? I think there are still servers involved, honestly not 100% up to speed with the technology) and you can have different apps which can offer different curated experiences (which is kind of more like federation in that sense I guess) with Odysee being the main one. You can see some of the stuff built on top of it here.
Peertube is nice, it works well
The content on the competitors has been lacking/conspiratorial/right-leaning also fyi just in case those aren’t your cup of tea
Generally speaking , you can find open source alternatives here.
