I don't think it's the software that's keeping it in the background. The instances I visit have seemed very functional. I think it's the simple fact that hosting large amounts.of video is really expensive in terms of storage space, bandwidth, and processor time (for transcoding). For a recreational self-hosting individual, it's just too much.
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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tchncs.de hosts instances for tons of different fediverse services and they say peertube is the most expensive to host, by far.
Thats very interesting. Thanks for sharing.
That and without an income source, you can't pay content creators, so you can't attract them to the platform in the first place. People dislike YouTube for running ads, but the ads are what pays for the videos.
No, our data pays for the videos. The ads are for profit.
our data is used for the ads
Its also quite confusing to use and hard to find interesting videos.
If I were to be a content creator, I would host my own peertube to serve it and make sure it's available. I would also share it with people I know and trust, and generally use it for my personal use so it caches what I watch and whatnot.
But hosting videos for other people? Yeah no, apart from being hugely expensive, it's also a legal nightmare because someone will start posting shows and movies on it and I just don't feel like taking the legal burden of some random anonymous users.
Same reason my Lemmy is invite only, I can be somewhat confident my users will behave because I know them all (and also legally, I can just send the cops their way if they do bring legal trouble).
I'd really love if PeerTube could become a standard, but it needs a catalogue of back content, better discoverability, and most of all, to offer financial incentive to move over. As much as I hate to say it, I think something crypto backed like odysee/lbry is more likely to become major.
There's no payout for putting videos on peertube, and there's not enough audience to get sponsorships. If you really want to make peertube a success, that's where it has to start. No amount of technology will make people go from making some money to making none money.
The whole landscape changes, of course, when Youtube gets put behind a paywall or goes under. This is a when, and not an if situation; video streaming with perpetual archival is not a working business model, and YouTube's never churned out a profit in the 18 years its been online. But twitch and tiktok will likely be where creators move to. I don't see large swaths of people moving to even odysee in the current online climate.
To contrast with the popular sentiment here, it seems to me like the missing piece in the peertube puzzle is actually creator coops as an organization. I think these probably look a little like some of the more creator based streaming services out right now (think dropout and nebula) but could just as easily be organized around things like influencer houses once there's a clear model to emulate.
At this point YT is more like TV: you make some content, YT uses it to show ads, you get part of the profits. If you just want to share some content with people there are many ways to do it. If you want earn money doing it there's really just the ad supported big social networks. Open source solutions have their uses but can't really compete with YT.
Very often progress is blocked by culture, not software. When we coordinate to discover our shared interests we can better target our action to change this culture in our communities and achieve greater software freedom.
This is well said and beautifully put
Framasoft has 1 full-time dev dedicated to it, there is a roadmap of upcoming features but honestly, hosting costs is what is preventing most youtubers from trying it