I've been working to get more involved with, eg, mutual aid groups and other forms of local capacity and resiliency building over the last year - one thing that's stuck out to me is how many of these groups' public face is an Instagram site. That might not have been existential a couple years ago, but given what we're seeing now with, for instance, Paramount making a rival bid for Warner based solely on their coziness with the current administration, it doesn't feel like the corporate media ecosystem is going to be an even "squint and you can kind of pretend" neutral territory for organizing and information dissemination going forward.
For all that tools like PeerTube, Mastodon, etc are clunkier and more limited than things like YouTube, Bluesky, etc, I think that argument is increasingly going to be irrelevant to their value - we need to start ensuring our capacity to go from 0-1 on media distribution, not from 10-100 or 100+.
> For all that tools like PeerTube, Mastodon, etc are clunkier and more limited than things like YouTube, Bluesky, etc, I think that argument is increasingly going to be irrelevant to their value
Their value is going to stay limited if people don't want to actually use them.
Technically proficient people may overlook something being clunky if it suits their needs in other ways, but it's a harder sell for the average user. And really, it shouldn't be an issue. Good UX isn't trivial, but it's not especially complicated or budget-busting either.
Users are also happy with clunkiness if it gives them other things they value. Ask any Windows user. Also, video game modding.
My general experience is that clunky software is what made people tech literate, and now that everything has safety barriers and protects the user from everything tech literacy has fallen.
Cost isn't only money. In the case of linux it is time to learn to use it (which is a sunk cost on windows: already paid it). Then you need to download and install it - again windows comes by default so a sunk cost.
If somebody else admins your system. However if not there is a lot to learn. At least every distribution I've used needs manual updates from time to time. (though admittedly most people would replace the computer before I've seen anything hard happen)
Windows user here. It goes vastly further than that. I've been using Windows since version 3.0. I'm used to it to the point where it's second nature. Linux is foreign and difficult to comprehend, not least because it explicitly avoids being anything like Windows or accommodating habits people acquired from Windows. I don't like the direction Windows is going any more than anyone, and I'm avoiding Windows 11 for the time being, but as long as Linux people continue to believe that the only reason Windows users don't switch is because they don't know Linux exists, Linux will not be able to attract Windows users even as Windows goes full capitalist enshittification.
I don't remember the last time I've clicked on a Firefox icon. I've pinned it to the taskbar and I press Win+1 to use it, which is 100 times faster. I've been doing that for >10 years now.
This is acceptable. We now understand that privacy-focused solutions are not appropriate for individuals with average technological literacy, and we cannot depend on companies to self-regulate.
At present, the emphasis is on the potential of large language models (LLMs) and the related ethical considerations. However, I would prefer to address the necessity for governments or commissions to assume responsibility for their citizens concerning "social" media, as this presents a significantly greater risk than any emerging technology.
There are some technical barriers to approaching fediverse platforms, but I personally see the main barriers being cultural.
I'm a big proponent of Mastodon and still love using it, but the culture (especially early on) was exceptionally protectionist and lots of people got bullied off for very silly reasons. I think the attitude is less like a children's secret club and more chill generally.
All this to say, I think this is will get better, but the best way to help the fediverse is to join it, be active, and be chill.
I was talking into the void. I gave up after 6 months of getting no reaction and finding nobody of interest to follow.
(Worse, half of what I wrote is now gone because my instance shut down and Mastodon doesn't even have a feature to migrate any content to a new instance.)
I joined Mastodon early on and stuck around for a few weeks, before I got tired of constantly being messaged by neonazi gay furries who were very keen to show me how excited they were to talk to me.
When texting took off, it was the easiest (only) way to send instant text based messages between friends wherever you were, even if the phone system is now heavily used by spammers and there are better options.
When Facebook took off, every Myspace page was so full of garbage that they barely loaded on most people's computers, and Facebook was slick and shiny and easy. The real name policy made it super easy to connect with people you met IRL. Even if it's now confusingly slow and FB Messenger can't display your recent chats in the correct order for some reason, it was the easiest most obvious option at the time.
I don't really understand why people use Twitter (at its best it just seems like a worse version of RSS), but the site presumably loaded quickly at some point and was easy to use, even if it's presumably worse now.
And so on. They persist through momentum.
Some things continue to persist, some things get beat out and die. But if you start off more confusing than your alternatives, at least compared to when they started, you won't get picked up in the first place.
> I don't really understand why people use Twitter
The honest answer is that it isn't the content(RSS feeds), but the combat sport nature of the platform. It's the only place where you can tell a billionaire any kind of awful thing you can think of. It's also the only social media that drives important people insane. The wealthier they are, the more insane they'll be driven.
Facebook will drive your meemaw insane with AI generated ads of legless veterans being given a cake.
Twitter will drive the richest man on earth insane. It will drive every journalist at any paper of merit insane by interacting with the insane billionaires. Nearly every journalist who uses twitter enough will develop delusions of grandeur that their brand of psychopathy is the solution to the nation's woes. Since their bosses have also been driven insane via twitter, it's the kind of writing that gets published. This writing will take the insane delusions of the insane billionaires at face value. It will go along with conspiracy and never beg any question that actually needs answering.
Twitter drives them all insane the same way that we used to marvel at the way celebrities got driven insane by fame. The feedback is going straight to their heads and they are losing touch with reality isolated in their little bubbles the same way celebrities get isolated from reality through their wealth.
People moved on from Mastodon to Bluesky because it was more responsive to user needs. I encouraged people to move to Mastodon but then watched them move on.
It is what it is - but it's worth being clear-eyed about what it is.
FOSS just does not have the aggressive scaling mindset. Even success stories like Linux' game compatibility and Chromium can be traced to just regular tech companies, as opposed to non profits.
Many non open source apps do get critical mass but they eventually go bust. Emacs, git, Linux and I think even Mastodon have a slower uptake but do not seem to have such a high risk of collapse. While YouTube and Facebook et al seem to have an insurmountable moat and collection of users the reality is recent history is littered with boom to bust failures:
MySpace, Vine, Yahoo all the way back to GeoCities.
I would be patient and only worry if mastodon is actively dying.
For me it's the only social media app I have installed.
I have both Mastondon and Bluesky accounts and in my experience I find Bluesky is just simpler to use which attracted more of the types of accounts I wanted to follow. Nothing aggressive about that, just good UX resulting in a richer pool of accounts.
It has actually improved a lot since then. The UI has had changes, search is better, it has quote posts now. More usability enhancements are under active development.
> Their value is going to stay limited if people don't want to actually use them.
Namely, in the case of PeerTube, content creators. Youtube is convenient because it comes with builtin monetization. You can probably expect loud objections (rightfully so) from some of them if you download their stuff from Youtube to upload it to PeerTube.
If you don't have the content creators, you don't have content consumers and you cannot bootstrap a network effect (some services did bootstrap a network effect with plain and simple piracy, though).
I believe the UX is secondary to available content. People do make the necessary efforts if they think the benefit is worth it.
To me a fatal flaw in ActivityPub systems is that your identity is tied to a server. Yes you can port it, but it’s a hassle. That means the server ops become these little lords over little fiefdoms and a server just dying takes your identity with it.
This also means your reach and what you see depends on your choice of server. I very much don’t want that.
It’s also confusing to non-technical people. Join Mastodon! But which one? How do I pick one?
Technically speaking, Nostr is better. Your identity is a key. Servers are just dumb relays.
Unfortunately it seems to be nothing but crypto bros talking about crypto, or was last time I checked. Nobody uses it.
> That means the server ops become these little lords over little fiefdoms and a server just dying takes your identity with it.
Or that means that everyone can be their own little lord reigning over their own little server, to the point that it doesn't matter, because effectively, network nodes don't need to be "big" to be relevant in a federated ecosystem. I'm not so much into ActivityPub, but I run an XMPP server for my family. I'm not saying that this is for everyone, but close-enough.
Are you on Instagram?" is easy to understand for someone not on it; they search for "Instagram", install the client app, sign up and done.
"Are you on Mastodon?" doesn't work the same way as they would need to pick a server to sign up against, which seems like an important decision (what happens if I pick wrong? Do I have to pick the same server my friend has? And so on?).
You and I both know the answers to those questions; my point is that the average non-technical user does not and this presents significant extra friction that Instagram doesn't have.
(this kind of attitude of asserting technical superiority and blaming non-tech users for not understanding it and not willing to bother figuring it out is exactly why the free/libre software movement achieved zero impact with non-technical users; you have to meet your users where they are... or a competitor will happily do so.)
If you're not being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, you are welcome to search my username and "mastodon"/"fediverse" to see my thoughts on it in more detail and why it will never be a serious competitor to mainstream social media platforms. Happy to engage with serious arguments.
To me it just looks like some kind of fear of a new thing, because technically there is nothing really complicated about Mastodon. Still, I do understand that switching to a new platform corresponds to some non-negligible effort and one would have to substantiate it with sufficient benefits. We, technical people, should not feel superior but explain that the benefits are stronger than the downsides and switching is worth it in the long term, especially due to the ongoing enshittification of all popular for-profit platform managed by megacorps.
Moving to another mastodon instance is simple. It takes 2-3 clicks and off you go. I think what you say was probably true in the past, but today, nothing could be simpler than taking your stuff to another instance.
Just to say that I'm using NOSTR on my apps, most people using those apps don't even know about NOSTR at all but they all enjoy the quick login procedure without emails nor phones.
I've tried some of the libraries for Java, didn't like the way the author programmed them so just ended up using the most relevant part which was the NPUB/NSEC key pair generation and the function to verify signatures on the JSON messages.
The rest of the protocol isn't difficult since you basically just need to send JSON back and forth. The advanced options are complex but they're basically exotic cases for the most part.
I've enjoyed NOSTR a lot but feel that the definition of "relay" has been lost in recent times and NOSTR relays are today a set of huge servers that host data and act as databases, rather than the original goal of just connecting people in P2P style.
For my apps I'm developing a platform where relays go back to the original definition of "relay" and devices connect to each relay as a connecting bridge to engage in P2P between themselves using webRTC and bluetooth.
The problem is that everyone is reading Instagram.
I don't understand why. I made an account recently in order to access a specific thing. I can confirm the app is 100% pure garbage. The home feed is garbage and navigation is awful (to keep you on the home feed). I uninstalled it after they were caught bypassing the permission system to spy on you, by binding localhost ports that web ads would access. The web app is no better garbage-wise (but it can't bind ports).
And it's the subcultures that you'd expect to be the most untied from corporate shackles, that are the ones most on Instagram. I don't get it.
I think it's two aspects - one is that Insta started out as the "not-facebook" platform and Meta's somehow managed not to fuck that up, and the other is there's a massive network effect - every tattoo artist, venue, and band are on instagram now, and it all becomes very self-reinforcing.
They're trying... They finally released a native iPad version of the app this year (after so many years), and its default pane is not the one that includes people you actually follow (like the phone app) - it's just reels, and you have to go looking for the right page in the menu to see anything from people you care about.
It's very revealing about where they wish they could have taken the app already, where you don't follow anyone, just trust the algorithm to force-feed you content. Doing that too quickly would instantly kill it, so it's been years of boiling the frog.
The 'Snooze suggested content in feed for 30 days' thing is already bad enough, if they stopped letting you do that Instagram would be insufferable to use.
On Android you can't make a network service permissioned. And when you make a binder service permissioned it's up to the app itself to specify with what permission a caller needs in order to be able to use the service, or the service can choose to be unpermissioned. Either way apps on Android are free to host unpermissioned services that other apps on the system connect to. Chrome connecting to such a service did not have to bypass a permission since there was no permission protecting it.
What they were caught doing was opening some local port via TCP sockets (let's say localhost:9000) and then advertisements would connect to localhost:9000 to add themselves to your advertising profile even if you were in a private browser, had cookies blocked, or anything like that. Both Facebook and Instagram apps were caught doing it. Now, if they were formally caught by the legal system, they'd go to prison (,in countries other than the USA) so as soon as it made front page HN, they removed it from the apps.
Incognito mode is about not saving data or browser history to your computer. Sites can still identify you if you login or even just from your IP. It's not meant to make you anonymous. This is a common misconception which is why these modes show a big warning explaination when you enable them.
>they'd go to prison
That's for the courts to decide. The Facebook and Instagram apps may have already gotten consent from the user to share this information.
I don't understand your defense of Instagram. It's not even a very good defense. The fact that Facebook removed the code as soon as they were caught means they also think they would be in serious trouble.
Unauthorized use of a computer is broadly illegal in many jurisdictions, including the USA federally. In Europe, misinformed consent is not consent. "Authorization" generally refers to a reasonable person's expectation of giving consent, and does not refer to any technical property such as Android permissions.
This is a bit of a harsh take. These same groups use Signal for all their internal messaging - by and large the will is there, but they're not tech savvy and we haven't given them viable alternatives.
>> We need to start ensuring our capacity to go from 0-1 on media distribution, not from 10-100 or 100
And a dozen pirate networks stand ready to fill that void at a moment's notice. From oldschool torrent, to cyberlockers, to the dark webs of Tor and FreeNet ... there is an entire ecosystem of hardened video distribution schemes out there. Youtube was aguably born from piracy and fights in the courts to this day. The next thing, whatever replaces youtube, will likely also come from shadows.
This situation is so frustrating to me, and despite my attempts, nobody seems to get why it's problematic. I still have a Facebook account from over a decade ago that I use occasionally to access stuff that is only visible on Facebook, but by the time Insta kicked off I had already decided social media was bad, so I never got one, and it didn't seem like a great loss because I wasn't that interested in looking at other people's photos anyway.
Except now, apparently - and I'm still not exactly sure how - business owners and activist groups and event promoters communicate everything about what is going on via... photos?! I suppose it's the digital version of flyers, except you could see flyers posted up all over town, in all the record stores or cafes you already frequented, friends could hand you them when they saw you out and about, you'd get bombarded with them when you left related events... And none of those situations forced you to enter a heavily-surveilled gated community owned by a spectacularly wealthy foreign company notorious for enabling genocide, live streaming murder etc.
I was at some event a couple weekends ago and an organizer came up to me saying that there was going to be an after and just check the Insta for the address, and I'm like... But I don't have that? Can't you tell me now? And because the site is login-walled even when at some point later in the day the thumbnail did appear, trying to click on it to see the details resulted in the login block and so I missed out.
But I am well aware that I am a teeny tiny minority of people involved in this boycot and so I'm only really hurting myself. The way I've heard it described by activists is that using Insta (or X or YouTube) is like tacitly accepting that we already live in a panopticon and thus all resistance has to take place within full view of the authorities, it just needs to be smart and present itself as something that isn't actually resistance, or that works around censorship using codewords, or this, or that, "just like how it's done in China". And it's like, great, the new generation of western activists who actually still live in a society which grants them some civil liberties have decided they're all doomed to exist under the totalitarian jackboot and practice their resistance accordingly. After all, you can't build a movement out there on the actually free fediverse or the small web where there's only a smattering of nerds.
I don't know if I should be depressed or just suck it up and get that stupid Insta account.
I'm on the same boat as you. Trying to find word about where the good local popup restaurants are, and apparently the only way to do it is to follow a bunch of random Instagram accounts. I finally tried to relent and make an account just to be able to read that stuff, but they wanted me to take a video of myself holding my government ID in order to prove my... identity, I guess? Not sure why that's necessary for an account I never even plan to post with, but it was enough of a barrier for me that I said nevermind. Now I just mention it whenever I'm chatting with organizers/proprietors, but I'm never exactly sure what to suggest as an alternative.
Email newsletters are easy until you want to self-host and between Gmail, live, etc only 2/3 of providers will receive your messages at all and this one guy uses a corporate email address for everything for some reason and their antivirus blocks half the messages you send out despite none of them having attachments or suspicious links, even the ones that have no links at all. Then someone finds your personal email address to tell you that every time they try to confirm their email address by sending back the broken string, your server refuses the connection, so they can't even with up, and they've been trying for months. Meanwhile, someone's spamming people with fake emails sent (spoofed) from your server and opf rules are causing a transactional email sent to your own inbox for every rejected email, and you've given up on trying to respond to any real messages because you just can't find them.
It's depressing to me at least. I guess with things like this it works well if you fully buy in and don't understand or care about the privacy violations and psychological tricks they use. But even if I tried to ignore it, I just end up annoyed by the interfaces or workflows or stuff like that. I guess it's just the curse of having really non-standard preferences
Facebook simultaneously makes it hard for you to access anything without an account (connecting the world?) while also having been known to change people's privacy settings from Friends to Friends of Friends or Public
Zuck, you do not deserve to be spoken of in the same breath as actual internet pioneers
I have seen organizers get stuck in the dopamine loop of focusing on inspiring content that "increases engagement" and getting fixated on moderating trolls that it actually gets in the way of doing impactful work. I definitely on the depression train on this front. It's far worse than digital versions of flyers, people aren't incentivized to focus show up when they can just keep scrolling for their fix.
I "trade" my content in kind -- garbage in, garbage out style -- combining my short form renders on my commute with songs I think will match the rhythm then publish as a music video.
And I'm not chasing clicks, likes, nor monetization on that platform; I was fortunate to ignore FB's SSO with IG as I deleted that account a decade or longer ago.
I wish you were right, but you're wrong. It's a wishful thinking that I have been participatory in for decades. However, it will not come to fruition. Why? It's very simple: we, as a people and as a society, are not willing to give up convenience.
Secondly, the corporate media have been straight up propaganda centers for decades now and anyone who has been paying attention has known that for a long time now. That is not something that we are on the edge of our seats waiting to happen. It happened a long time ago.
Remember when CNN was meeting with the Pentagon so that the Pentagon could approve their stories during the Iraq War? Remember when the media constantly lied to us during COVID? Remember when they told us Biden's health was in pristine condition and that he was never better?
Don't try and politicize this issue in one way or the other. Anyone paying attention can see that there is no savior on the left or the right. It's the corrupt politicians vs. us.
peertube is in that weird space where the software is good technically but is overkill for home users and small entities[1] and moderation, bandwith and storage cost makes it a bit difficult and expensive to host large public shared instances unless you find a way to monetize it.
I guess it is more an alternative for Microsoft Stream than youtube really as it is more likely to be used as an internal video communication platform for a company than a public video streaming platform.
[1] if the audience is small, you are just fine sharing vids using the html video tags
From hosting a peertube instance solely for my own stuff for several years, I've come to appreciate just how difficult self hosting a streaming video platform is. As you say, bandwidth and storage requirements are significant; another less obvious one is transcoding. When a user uploads an HD video file, it needs to be transcoded into lower resolutions if you want there to be a hope of people streaming it. While Peertube itself is perfectly happy running on 2-4 vcpu cores on a cheap cloud vm, if you use those cores to handle transcode jobs it can take huge amounts of time (like 20+ hours) to transcode even medium length 1080p videos. So you really need either a lot of CPU that sits mostly idle, or hardware acceleration, both of which are expensive when purchased from cloud providers. Or you can use remote transcoding to offload transcode jobs onto your home gaming pc or whatever, which works well, but can be complicated and a bit touchy to set up properly, and now you have a point of failure dependent on your home network...
And then, people watching videos are used to the YouTube experience with its world class CDN infra enabling subsecond first frame latencies even for 4k videos. They go on Peertube and first frame takes like 5 seconds for a 1080p video...realistically, with today's attention spans most of them are going to bounce before it ever plays.
Since you seem like you have practical knowledge here, I hope you don't mind me asking:
Would it change the equation, meaningfully, if you didn't offer any transcoding on the server and required users to run any transcoding they needed on their own hardware? I'm thinking of a wasm implementation of ffmpeg on the instance website, rather than requiring users to use a separate application, for instance.
Would you think a general user couldn't handle the workload (mobile processing, battery, etc), or would that be fairly reasonable for a modern device and only onerous in the high traffic server environment?
> Would it change the equation, meaningfully, if you didn't offer any transcoding on the server and required users to run any transcoding they needed on their own hardware?
I think the user experience would be quite poor, enough that nobody would use the instance. As an example a 4k video will transcoded at least 2 times, to 1080p and 720p, and depending on server config often several more times. Each transcode job takes a long time, even with substantial hwaccel on a desktop.
Very high bitrate video is quite common now since most phones, action cameras etc are capable of 4k30 and often 4k60.
> Do you think a general user couldn't handle the workload (mobile processing, battery, etc), or would that be fairly reasonable for a modern device and only onerous.
If I had to guess, I would expect it be a poor experience. Say I take a 5 minute video, that's probably around 3-5gb. I upload it, then need to wait - in the foreground - for this video to be transcoded and then uploaded to object storage 3 times on a phone chip. People won't do it.
I do like the idea of offloading transcode to users. I wonder if it might be suited for something like https://rendernetwork.com/ where users exchange idle compute to a transcode pool for upload & storage rights, and still get to fire-and-forget uploads?
I really appreciate you walking through that; it's an eye-opener! It seems like you not only deal with a considerable amount of five-minute-or-greater videos, but much higher quality than I was expecting, too.
I also like the idea of user-transcoding because, honestly, I think it's better for everyone? I would love if every place I uploaded video or audio content offered an option to "include lower-quality variants" or something. Broadly, it's my product; I should have the final say on (and take responsibility for) the end result. And for high-quality stuff, the people who make it tend to have systems equipped to do that better anyway. So they could probably get faster transcoding times by using their own systems rather than letting the server do it. Seems like a win-win, even outside of the obvious benefits of "make a whole lot of computers do only the work they each need done, instead of making a few computers do the work that everyone needs done". With the only slight downside of the "average user" having some extra options that they don't understand which cause them to use it wrong and then everyone hates your product. Yay, app development.
I think offering client side transcode as an option, with server side transcode available for those who don't want to do it client side, is compelling. I would probably do it, as I have a powerful home system that can transcode much faster than my cloud host (I do use the remote transcoding feature in Peertube though).
That's very much not what transcoding is for. You don't want transcoding so a client can render the video in a comfortable resolution. You need transcoding to save bandwidth. If you want the client to do transcoding, you must send them the full raw video file. Either end of the connection may not have enough free bandwidth for that. The client may not be able to teanscode depending on size and format.
You of course, can do this anyway. PeerTube allows you to completely disable transcoding. But again that means you're streaming the full resolution. Your client may not like this.
If realtime performance is your concern I think PeerTube allows you to pre-transcode to disk. If there is a transcoded copy matching the client request, the server streams that direct with no extra transcode.
To answer your question: shifting transcode onto the client won't improve performance and will greatly increase bandwidth requirements in exchange for less compute on the server. You almost certainly do not want this.
Yep. As OP said: I meant the user could transcode the various versions on their machine and then upload each to the server. Sorry about the wording; I can see that it's vague.
The funny thing is that YouTube has now enshittified to the point where people routinely DO wait well over 5 seconds to watch the video they actually wanted to watch while interstitials and other commercials are jammed in. Even with adblock enabled, the latest YouTube code won't unlock the first frame of the actual video till some period of ad time has passed so you just sit there looking at a black screen. This on its own definitely isn't enough to get people to leave the platform, but it's still notable how much worse the experience has gotten compared to a few years ago.
On what setup? All YouTube videos load and start playing instantly for me. Every time I've experienced otherwise in the last couple years, it's been my first indication that e.g. AWS is exploding that day
I wonder if it depends what country you are in. I only notice it occasionally when the video won't play in FreeTube or PipePipe (which always has the pause at the start since the last few months) and I'm forced to open an incognito browser tab to watch, and then I realize just how many ads other people are being subjected to before they can even watch the video.
I bet you're using Chrome. Open a video in Chrome and the video is immediately playable, load the same video on the same machine in Firefox and you can expect to wait 5+ seconds for the video to be playable.
I suspect that non-Chrome browsers are being intentionally hobbled
I did a pretty low rigor test and just pulled up one of those 4K videos with the swirling ink in Firefox on my M1 Mac and it seemed to load just as fast. The only difference was that it didn't autoplay the video (because I'm logged out I think) but I clicked it as the page loaded and it played instantly.
I don't doubt at all that Google hobbles their sites on Firefox but at least on my machine they aren't doing a great job of it
I do pay for premium but my impression of the parent was that this was independent of ads. The test I did in the other comment didn't trigger an ad for some reason even though I was logged out, which may be why it loaded so fast.
Ah. The parent mentioned several frustrations that I am not familiar with (presumably since I also pay for premium and don’t block the ads), but my impression was that the delay was caused by the code refusing to play the video until the time slot for the ad had completed even if the ad failed to load (as would happen when blocking the ad http request)
FreeBSD + Waterfox, or Firefox for that matter. YouTube really likes to strangle those who are not in their domain.
If I set my user agent to something like Linux/Ubuntu, it loads just fine. If I set my user agent to some unheard Linux distro, it lags as the same with FreeBSD.
I shove 1080p mp4s onto a very cheap server and I get 2 seconds of load time there versus somewhere between 1 and 2 seconds on youtube. And looking at network requests, the first chunk of the file loads in well under a second so I'd expect something with the metadata preloaded could start playing at that point. So if peertube takes 5 seconds, I really wonder why.
Is it inconvenient to transcode before/during upload?
I've experienced B2 throwing a wrench into the dream of low latency, but some object stores are very fast. And more importantly you only need the first couple megabytes of each video to be on fast storage.
I'm using B2, so maybe that's it. I have the instance configured to serve video directly from B2 rather than proxying it. Peertube has no facilities to keep the first few mb of each video local to the server that I am aware of.
What value do you get in transcoding your own stuff? I have plex transcoding disabled on all local network devices that stream it and run into minimal issues (codecs on TV devices, mostly).
By "my own stuff" I mean that I use my instance to upload videos I would otherwise upload to youtube - videos I
made that I intend to share with people. The usual reasons for transcoding apply.
I actually run my own PeerTube instance. I'm mirroring videos in my RSS feeds from Patreon and Youtube there. And I also have a handful of my own family videos.
I think that's more a measurement of demand volume than anything. It's a VERY tight squeeze between "I'll just send this file directly to the few people I want to show it" and "I want to show this to anyone" to the point no matter what is done by those people it'll seem like nobody does that unless it's also done in the other categories.
If only there were a smart way to build a cryptocoin without the environmental mess of miners, but where you earn coinage from seeding videos. I feel like you'd want people to have a desktop client to let you seed in the background then award some sort of virtual currency that can be sold later. I hate to sound like a crypto-bro but I can't think of anything else more fitting for something already decentralized.
GNU Taler [0] perhaps. They are funded by EU grants, and have a funding program [1] going to stimulate the ecosystem.
> We are building an anonymous, taxable payment system using modern cryptography. Customers will use traditional money transfers to send money to a digital Exchange and in return receive (anonymized) digital cash. Customers can use this digital cash to anonymously pay Merchants. Merchants can redeem the digital cash for traditional money at the digital Exchange. As Merchants are not anonymous, they can be taxed, enabling income or sales taxes to be withheld by the state while providing anonymity for Customers.
Maybe the tokens are how you access the content? Seed to get tokens, spend tokens to get new content. If you don't want to seed, you buy from users who did seed (or resellers).there are many token based comic apps, I wonder how feasible this would be on a small scale like that.
> the bizarre decision to make federation whitelist based.
Given the multiple articles I've seen on how federation can easily accidentally DDOS mastodon servers, which isn't even a form of federation that primarily uses something as heavy in data usage as video, I do not find that so strange tbh. And that's before factoring in malicious actors or even just careless ones like all the AI scrapers.
IMHO based on my use of the fediverse, fundamentally it's about porn and curtailing unwanted porn in your domain. I'm a user of mastodon.social in the "wee US hours" (before US mods are awake) and run across a lot of hit-and-run porn being pushed to Trending (and I report, etc.).
It's a thing, it happens a lot and Lemmy instances have the same problems to fight. Unwanted porn in my eyeballs is sadly a not uncommon experience until you've put in effort to set up blocks and filters on your personal accounts. Peertube being explicitly video based is a natural target for porn pushers.
Can someone please tldr me what digital public goods alliance means and how peertube can benefit from being recognized as a digital public good.
From what I can tell, it is UN affiliated/related project where basically it tries to make countries integrate these digital public goods in their country's ecosystem/ work on these (products?)
Is there any amount of sponsorship money that come with this classification or more tax benefits?
Or does UN (thus countries who fund UN) itself fund DPGA?
I find this idea fascinating now thinking about it if that can be the case, for these countries a few millions or even billions collectively might not mean much but it can mean a lot towards open source and digital soveriegnity in my opinion too.
I run [ODK](https://getodk.org). It's a offline mobile data collection platform that has been an DPG since 2022.
In practice, being a DPG makes your project slightly easier to choose in UN and government procurements. In most cases, they're choosing your platform because it's free, so it's unlikely that money or code contributions will come your way. It can even be a downside, because your software may end up deployed on an under-provisioned government server that generates a flood of support requests. Ask me how I know...
You may also get a bit more visibility and become eligible for some DPG-related funding calls. But in my experience, funding ultimately depends on demonstrated impact, donor relationships, alignment with national digital strategies, and the ability to deliver at scale.
So I thought that having an open source project in DPGA would be really great but it seems that everything that glitters isn't gold like how you mention support requests etc.
I have a question tho, What are the best foundations or labels (like DGPA) that an open source software can qualify for which might give it more exposure and funding
Personally I am starting to believe it might be NLNET (https://nlnet.nl/) but what are your thoughts on it?
I think open-source leaders who want sustainable resourcing should focus on building obvious paths for people who find ongoing value in their project to contribute. That to me is the best return-on-investment.
If it's a library, make it easy for developers to contribute code.
If it's an app, make it easy for individuals/businesses who value it to pay (e.g., cloud hosting).
I gave a talk about this at the launch of WHO's Open Source Program Office[1].
I've been wondering about angles to get interesting content on there. I wonder, for instance, if one could reach out to a bunch of bands and get permission for mirroring live show recordings on peertube and be off to the races.
I was watching the rsync video and she mentions the scenario where you run rsync with the remote as source, and the remote drive isn't mounted correctly and you end up deleting local. LOL
I'm happy that it did. It was a trick to get people to spend more time online so that facebook can make even more money off people's time and attention.
ursinewave@tv.gravitons.org : https://tv.gravitons.org/a/ursinewave/video-channels
"Roberta Fidora is a genre-bender from the Isle of Wight, UK, hopping between field recordings in space, industrial-tinged electroclash, guerrilla puppeteering and wildly maximalist, mildly-anarchic pop music."
meljoann@tv.gravitons.org : https://tv.gravitons.org/c/meljoann/
"Meljoann is an extremely physically attractive Irish multidisciplinary artist. They’ve been supported by Pitchfork, Beats Per Minute, XLR8, KEXP, Dan Hegarty, Cian Ó Cíobháin, Jenny Greene and Tara Stewart of RTÉ radio, Irish Times, Nialler9, Hot Press, BBC’s Gemma Bradley, Dummy Mag, HMUK and the Arts Council of England. She’s currently releasing a series of self-directed video singles. ‘HR’, their anti-capital concept album, is out now. Their third album, ‘Status’, releases in 2025"
I've been using: https://github.com/graham-walker/youtube-dl-react-viewer with yt-dlp to create complete archives of channels I like because I have so many channels I learn from I don't want YT to randomly disappear them. Mostly language, but loads of deep ML long plays and other things.
I'm looking forward to trying out PeerTube.
Start archiving now, the internet is rapidly getting user hostile.
These are good alternatives to have, but a solid chunk of the "youtube economy" is about selling ad time so creators can make a living creating content. I hate ads as much as the next person but we need to recognize that the issue is not purely technical.
Definitely, hard to compete with YouTube as a revenue source. That being said, my instance is mainly for digitizing and hosting old VHS tapes from my family so they don't get lost over the years. No need for advertising there :)
Service reminder: Peertube is mainly developed by academics (at least half of whom are French) to host educational content. Competing with YouTube is not their priority. Their priority is to be able to present a history course on the Second World War without having to contort themselves to avoid saying ‘Nazi’ and pass under the radar of automatic moderation.
It's a great project, but it's not a replacement for YouTube, and that's fine.
Is this run by the NL gov? I wish all govs would have something like this. Unfortunately gov are usually about 1 generation behind the state of the art in terms of understanding technology at any point in time.
So what are the top 10 (or top 100) videos in terms of being actively replicated across the largest number of Peertube peers? I can't find this anywhere.
Prisoner's Dilemma Bonus: I'll upvote all responses if no responses attempt to explain Peertube's philosophy to me.
I've been working to get more involved with, eg, mutual aid groups and other forms of local capacity and resiliency building over the last year - one thing that's stuck out to me is how many of these groups' public face is an Instagram site. That might not have been existential a couple years ago, but given what we're seeing now with, for instance, Paramount making a rival bid for Warner based solely on their coziness with the current administration, it doesn't feel like the corporate media ecosystem is going to be an even "squint and you can kind of pretend" neutral territory for organizing and information dissemination going forward.
For all that tools like PeerTube, Mastodon, etc are clunkier and more limited than things like YouTube, Bluesky, etc, I think that argument is increasingly going to be irrelevant to their value - we need to start ensuring our capacity to go from 0-1 on media distribution, not from 10-100 or 100+.
> For all that tools like PeerTube, Mastodon, etc are clunkier and more limited than things like YouTube, Bluesky, etc, I think that argument is increasingly going to be irrelevant to their value
Their value is going to stay limited if people don't want to actually use them.
Technically proficient people may overlook something being clunky if it suits their needs in other ways, but it's a harder sell for the average user. And really, it shouldn't be an issue. Good UX isn't trivial, but it's not especially complicated or budget-busting either.
Users are also happy with clunkiness if it gives them other things they value. Ask any Windows user. Also, video game modding.
My general experience is that clunky software is what made people tech literate, and now that everything has safety barriers and protects the user from everything tech literacy has fallen.
Windows is also just convenience. Most use it because it comes with the computer
Or because don't know (or care) that they have a choice. Same with browsers. Most users will click the 'internet button' to get online
The main reason is the better alternative costs twice as much.
Wow. I didn’t know Linux cost that much! /s
Cost isn't only money. In the case of linux it is time to learn to use it (which is a sunk cost on windows: already paid it). Then you need to download and install it - again windows comes by default so a sunk cost.
> In the case of linux it is time to learn to use it
How much time do you need to take to learn "click on the swirly orange thing for Internet"? It looks just the same as it does in every other OS.
> (which is a sunk cost on windows: already paid it)
This is actually something I'm coping with at the moment, because I have to learn how to use Windows and it's the most backwards thing ever to use.
If somebody else admins your system. However if not there is a lot to learn. At least every distribution I've used needs manual updates from time to time. (though admittedly most people would replace the computer before I've seen anything hard happen)
Why would it need someone else to "admin" it?
Who currently "admins" your Windows system?
Windows user here. It goes vastly further than that. I've been using Windows since version 3.0. I'm used to it to the point where it's second nature. Linux is foreign and difficult to comprehend, not least because it explicitly avoids being anything like Windows or accommodating habits people acquired from Windows. I don't like the direction Windows is going any more than anyone, and I'm avoiding Windows 11 for the time being, but as long as Linux people continue to believe that the only reason Windows users don't switch is because they don't know Linux exists, Linux will not be able to attract Windows users even as Windows goes full capitalist enshittification.
You know the Firefox icon in Windows?
It's the exact same in Linux. Click on it, get Internet.
You do everything in a browser anyway.
I don't remember the last time I've clicked on a Firefox icon. I've pinned it to the taskbar and I press Win+1 to use it, which is 100 times faster. I've been doing that for >10 years now.
This is acceptable. We now understand that privacy-focused solutions are not appropriate for individuals with average technological literacy, and we cannot depend on companies to self-regulate.
At present, the emphasis is on the potential of large language models (LLMs) and the related ethical considerations. However, I would prefer to address the necessity for governments or commissions to assume responsibility for their citizens concerning "social" media, as this presents a significantly greater risk than any emerging technology.
> Users are also happy with clunkiness if it gives them other things they value. Ask any Windows user.
In that case, the alternatives are also clunky. I use Windows, MacOS and Linux regularly, and all of them got serious UX problems.
There are some technical barriers to approaching fediverse platforms, but I personally see the main barriers being cultural.
I'm a big proponent of Mastodon and still love using it, but the culture (especially early on) was exceptionally protectionist and lots of people got bullied off for very silly reasons. I think the attitude is less like a children's secret club and more chill generally.
All this to say, I think this is will get better, but the best way to help the fediverse is to join it, be active, and be chill.
I joined Mastodon, was active, and was chill.
I was talking into the void. I gave up after 6 months of getting no reaction and finding nobody of interest to follow.
(Worse, half of what I wrote is now gone because my instance shut down and Mastodon doesn't even have a feature to migrate any content to a new instance.)
I joined Mastodon early on and stuck around for a few weeks, before I got tired of constantly being messaged by neonazi gay furries who were very keen to show me how excited they were to talk to me.
>but the culture (especially early on) was exceptionally protectionist and lots of people got bullied off for very silly reasons.
Had no idea that was happening. What makes your say that?
I was there in the early days, loads of folk joined and their first posts got replies like
Because you couldn't see replies from other servers, they'd get quite a few of these.> Their value is going to stay limited if people don't want to actually use them
Nobody really wants to use instagram either—there's basically nothing positive to say about the app or service itself—it just has critical mass.
Is this a "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" moment?
More like texting, nobody likes the phone system, but everyone you know is on it
When texting took off, it was the easiest (only) way to send instant text based messages between friends wherever you were, even if the phone system is now heavily used by spammers and there are better options.
When Facebook took off, every Myspace page was so full of garbage that they barely loaded on most people's computers, and Facebook was slick and shiny and easy. The real name policy made it super easy to connect with people you met IRL. Even if it's now confusingly slow and FB Messenger can't display your recent chats in the correct order for some reason, it was the easiest most obvious option at the time.
I don't really understand why people use Twitter (at its best it just seems like a worse version of RSS), but the site presumably loaded quickly at some point and was easy to use, even if it's presumably worse now.
And so on. They persist through momentum.
Some things continue to persist, some things get beat out and die. But if you start off more confusing than your alternatives, at least compared to when they started, you won't get picked up in the first place.
> I don't really understand why people use Twitter
The honest answer is that it isn't the content(RSS feeds), but the combat sport nature of the platform. It's the only place where you can tell a billionaire any kind of awful thing you can think of. It's also the only social media that drives important people insane. The wealthier they are, the more insane they'll be driven.
Facebook will drive your meemaw insane with AI generated ads of legless veterans being given a cake.
Twitter will drive the richest man on earth insane. It will drive every journalist at any paper of merit insane by interacting with the insane billionaires. Nearly every journalist who uses twitter enough will develop delusions of grandeur that their brand of psychopathy is the solution to the nation's woes. Since their bosses have also been driven insane via twitter, it's the kind of writing that gets published. This writing will take the insane delusions of the insane billionaires at face value. It will go along with conspiracy and never beg any question that actually needs answering.
It's truly a unique and addicting environment.
Twitter drives them all insane the same way that we used to marvel at the way celebrities got driven insane by fame. The feedback is going straight to their heads and they are losing touch with reality isolated in their little bubbles the same way celebrities get isolated from reality through their wealth.
I guess it's sort of amusing that this happens, but I have no particular interest in it lol
Pretty much all of my Twitter (and Twitter clones) interactions are involuntary when they show up on news articles or other media.
[dead]
Instagram makes texting look positively motherly
Typically crowds don't shove billboards every third person
At least for Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse ecosystem it does seem that people actually want to use them, and more people every day.
People moved on from Mastodon to Bluesky because it was more responsive to user needs. I encouraged people to move to Mastodon but then watched them move on.
It is what it is - but it's worth being clear-eyed about what it is.
FOSS just does not have the aggressive scaling mindset. Even success stories like Linux' game compatibility and Chromium can be traced to just regular tech companies, as opposed to non profits.
Maybe this is ok?
Many non open source apps do get critical mass but they eventually go bust. Emacs, git, Linux and I think even Mastodon have a slower uptake but do not seem to have such a high risk of collapse. While YouTube and Facebook et al seem to have an insurmountable moat and collection of users the reality is recent history is littered with boom to bust failures:
MySpace, Vine, Yahoo all the way back to GeoCities.
I would be patient and only worry if mastodon is actively dying.
For me it's the only social media app I have installed.
What is the aggressive mindeset of Bluesky?
I have both Mastondon and Bluesky accounts and in my experience I find Bluesky is just simpler to use which attracted more of the types of accounts I wanted to follow. Nothing aggressive about that, just good UX resulting in a richer pool of accounts.
It has actually improved a lot since then. The UI has had changes, search is better, it has quote posts now. More usability enhancements are under active development.
Once "normies" have tried and moved away, I think it's too late. Unfortunately such services don't get a second chance.
It was probably hard enough to convince them to try once.
> search is better
Search is still awful, in part because a few people don't seem to want it. It needs substantial improvement.
> Their value is going to stay limited if people don't want to actually use them.
Namely, in the case of PeerTube, content creators. Youtube is convenient because it comes with builtin monetization. You can probably expect loud objections (rightfully so) from some of them if you download their stuff from Youtube to upload it to PeerTube.
If you don't have the content creators, you don't have content consumers and you cannot bootstrap a network effect (some services did bootstrap a network effect with plain and simple piracy, though).
I believe the UX is secondary to available content. People do make the necessary efforts if they think the benefit is worth it.
Is the UX even the issue with these competitors? The cost for bandwidth and storage and having fast enough servers is the real issue here.
To me a fatal flaw in ActivityPub systems is that your identity is tied to a server. Yes you can port it, but it’s a hassle. That means the server ops become these little lords over little fiefdoms and a server just dying takes your identity with it.
This also means your reach and what you see depends on your choice of server. I very much don’t want that.
It’s also confusing to non-technical people. Join Mastodon! But which one? How do I pick one?
Technically speaking, Nostr is better. Your identity is a key. Servers are just dumb relays.
Unfortunately it seems to be nothing but crypto bros talking about crypto, or was last time I checked. Nobody uses it.
> That means the server ops become these little lords over little fiefdoms and a server just dying takes your identity with it.
Or that means that everyone can be their own little lord reigning over their own little server, to the point that it doesn't matter, because effectively, network nodes don't need to be "big" to be relevant in a federated ecosystem. I'm not so much into ActivityPub, but I run an XMPP server for my family. I'm not saying that this is for everyone, but close-enough.
>everyone can be their own little lord reigning over their own little serve
Only if it's simple for the average person
And only until an admin of a big sever dislikes something you say and adds your server to the censorship list on fediseer.
> To me a fatal flaw in ActivityPub systems is that your identity is tied to a server
In contrast to Instagram, Facebook and co?
A handful of servers vs thousands.
Are you on Instagram?" is easy to understand for someone not on it; they search for "Instagram", install the client app, sign up and done.
"Are you on Mastodon?" doesn't work the same way as they would need to pick a server to sign up against, which seems like an important decision (what happens if I pick wrong? Do I have to pick the same server my friend has? And so on?).
> Are you on Instagram?
> Are you on Mastodon?
In both cases, you have to share the user handle, which is just a bit longer in the latter case.
> what happens if I pick wrong?
You move to another server.
> Do I have to pick the same server my friend has?
No.
You and I both know the answers to those questions; my point is that the average non-technical user does not and this presents significant extra friction that Instagram doesn't have.
(this kind of attitude of asserting technical superiority and blaming non-tech users for not understanding it and not willing to bother figuring it out is exactly why the free/libre software movement achieved zero impact with non-technical users; you have to meet your users where they are... or a competitor will happily do so.)
If you're not being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, you are welcome to search my username and "mastodon"/"fediverse" to see my thoughts on it in more detail and why it will never be a serious competitor to mainstream social media platforms. Happy to engage with serious arguments.
To me it just looks like some kind of fear of a new thing, because technically there is nothing really complicated about Mastodon. Still, I do understand that switching to a new platform corresponds to some non-negligible effort and one would have to substantiate it with sufficient benefits. We, technical people, should not feel superior but explain that the benefits are stronger than the downsides and switching is worth it in the long term, especially due to the ongoing enshittification of all popular for-profit platform managed by megacorps.
Agreed, nostr makes a lot of sense when you read about it and then you go there... Once.
Moving to another mastodon instance is simple. It takes 2-3 clicks and off you go. I think what you say was probably true in the past, but today, nothing could be simpler than taking your stuff to another instance.
Just to say that I'm using NOSTR on my apps, most people using those apps don't even know about NOSTR at all but they all enjoy the quick login procedure without emails nor phones.
Any libraries you recommend? Do you host a dedicated relay for your own apps?
I've tried some of the libraries for Java, didn't like the way the author programmed them so just ended up using the most relevant part which was the NPUB/NSEC key pair generation and the function to verify signatures on the JSON messages.
The rest of the protocol isn't difficult since you basically just need to send JSON back and forth. The advanced options are complex but they're basically exotic cases for the most part.
I've enjoyed NOSTR a lot but feel that the definition of "relay" has been lost in recent times and NOSTR relays are today a set of huge servers that host data and act as databases, rather than the original goal of just connecting people in P2P style.
For my apps I'm developing a platform where relays go back to the original definition of "relay" and devices connect to each relay as a connecting bridge to engage in P2P between themselves using webRTC and bluetooth.
The problem is that everyone is reading Instagram.
I don't understand why. I made an account recently in order to access a specific thing. I can confirm the app is 100% pure garbage. The home feed is garbage and navigation is awful (to keep you on the home feed). I uninstalled it after they were caught bypassing the permission system to spy on you, by binding localhost ports that web ads would access. The web app is no better garbage-wise (but it can't bind ports).
And it's the subcultures that you'd expect to be the most untied from corporate shackles, that are the ones most on Instagram. I don't get it.
I think it's two aspects - one is that Insta started out as the "not-facebook" platform and Meta's somehow managed not to fuck that up, and the other is there's a massive network effect - every tattoo artist, venue, and band are on instagram now, and it all becomes very self-reinforcing.
They're trying... They finally released a native iPad version of the app this year (after so many years), and its default pane is not the one that includes people you actually follow (like the phone app) - it's just reels, and you have to go looking for the right page in the menu to see anything from people you care about.
It's very revealing about where they wish they could have taken the app already, where you don't follow anyone, just trust the algorithm to force-feed you content. Doing that too quickly would instantly kill it, so it's been years of boiling the frog.
The 'Snooze suggested content in feed for 30 days' thing is already bad enough, if they stopped letting you do that Instagram would be insufferable to use.
> Meta's somehow managed not to fuck that up
But then they fucked up. Several years ago.
>bypassing the permission system
On Android you can't make a network service permissioned. And when you make a binder service permissioned it's up to the app itself to specify with what permission a caller needs in order to be able to use the service, or the service can choose to be unpermissioned. Either way apps on Android are free to host unpermissioned services that other apps on the system connect to. Chrome connecting to such a service did not have to bypass a permission since there was no permission protecting it.
What they were caught doing was opening some local port via TCP sockets (let's say localhost:9000) and then advertisements would connect to localhost:9000 to add themselves to your advertising profile even if you were in a private browser, had cookies blocked, or anything like that. Both Facebook and Instagram apps were caught doing it. Now, if they were formally caught by the legal system, they'd go to prison (,in countries other than the USA) so as soon as it made front page HN, they removed it from the apps.
>even if you were in a private browser
Incognito mode is about not saving data or browser history to your computer. Sites can still identify you if you login or even just from your IP. It's not meant to make you anonymous. This is a common misconception which is why these modes show a big warning explaination when you enable them.
>they'd go to prison
That's for the courts to decide. The Facebook and Instagram apps may have already gotten consent from the user to share this information.
I don't understand your defense of Instagram. It's not even a very good defense. The fact that Facebook removed the code as soon as they were caught means they also think they would be in serious trouble.
Unauthorized use of a computer is broadly illegal in many jurisdictions, including the USA federally. In Europe, misinformed consent is not consent. "Authorization" generally refers to a reasonable person's expectation of giving consent, and does not refer to any technical property such as Android permissions.
>as soon as they were caught
They removed it after it stopped working due to Chrome rolling out an update.
>Unauthorized use of a computer
This is not a real thing. It's not like websites need to get your permission before they can use your computer to run javascript.
>does not refer to any technical property such as Android permissions.
I only brought that up due to someone else thinking it was related. I agree that the permission system of android is totally unrelated.
Instagram is useless unless their are people you want to follow or get people to follow you.
By definition someone’s actions, if repeated sufficiently often, define their real character.
You don’t have to take claimed pretenses seriously.
This is a bit of a harsh take. These same groups use Signal for all their internal messaging - by and large the will is there, but they're not tech savvy and we haven't given them viable alternatives.
People can have multiple facets of character? Or do you think that’s not even possible?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
>> We need to start ensuring our capacity to go from 0-1 on media distribution, not from 10-100 or 100
And a dozen pirate networks stand ready to fill that void at a moment's notice. From oldschool torrent, to cyberlockers, to the dark webs of Tor and FreeNet ... there is an entire ecosystem of hardened video distribution schemes out there. Youtube was aguably born from piracy and fights in the courts to this day. The next thing, whatever replaces youtube, will likely also come from shadows.
This situation is so frustrating to me, and despite my attempts, nobody seems to get why it's problematic. I still have a Facebook account from over a decade ago that I use occasionally to access stuff that is only visible on Facebook, but by the time Insta kicked off I had already decided social media was bad, so I never got one, and it didn't seem like a great loss because I wasn't that interested in looking at other people's photos anyway.
Except now, apparently - and I'm still not exactly sure how - business owners and activist groups and event promoters communicate everything about what is going on via... photos?! I suppose it's the digital version of flyers, except you could see flyers posted up all over town, in all the record stores or cafes you already frequented, friends could hand you them when they saw you out and about, you'd get bombarded with them when you left related events... And none of those situations forced you to enter a heavily-surveilled gated community owned by a spectacularly wealthy foreign company notorious for enabling genocide, live streaming murder etc.
I was at some event a couple weekends ago and an organizer came up to me saying that there was going to be an after and just check the Insta for the address, and I'm like... But I don't have that? Can't you tell me now? And because the site is login-walled even when at some point later in the day the thumbnail did appear, trying to click on it to see the details resulted in the login block and so I missed out.
But I am well aware that I am a teeny tiny minority of people involved in this boycot and so I'm only really hurting myself. The way I've heard it described by activists is that using Insta (or X or YouTube) is like tacitly accepting that we already live in a panopticon and thus all resistance has to take place within full view of the authorities, it just needs to be smart and present itself as something that isn't actually resistance, or that works around censorship using codewords, or this, or that, "just like how it's done in China". And it's like, great, the new generation of western activists who actually still live in a society which grants them some civil liberties have decided they're all doomed to exist under the totalitarian jackboot and practice their resistance accordingly. After all, you can't build a movement out there on the actually free fediverse or the small web where there's only a smattering of nerds.
I don't know if I should be depressed or just suck it up and get that stupid Insta account.
I'm on the same boat as you. Trying to find word about where the good local popup restaurants are, and apparently the only way to do it is to follow a bunch of random Instagram accounts. I finally tried to relent and make an account just to be able to read that stuff, but they wanted me to take a video of myself holding my government ID in order to prove my... identity, I guess? Not sure why that's necessary for an account I never even plan to post with, but it was enough of a barrier for me that I said nevermind. Now I just mention it whenever I'm chatting with organizers/proprietors, but I'm never exactly sure what to suggest as an alternative.
Email newsletters are easy until you want to self-host and between Gmail, live, etc only 2/3 of providers will receive your messages at all and this one guy uses a corporate email address for everything for some reason and their antivirus blocks half the messages you send out despite none of them having attachments or suspicious links, even the ones that have no links at all. Then someone finds your personal email address to tell you that every time they try to confirm their email address by sending back the broken string, your server refuses the connection, so they can't even with up, and they've been trying for months. Meanwhile, someone's spamming people with fake emails sent (spoofed) from your server and opf rules are causing a transactional email sent to your own inbox for every rejected email, and you've given up on trying to respond to any real messages because you just can't find them.
As a workaround, next time someone forces you to use Instagram go to https://flufi.me/ to see public content without logging in.
It’s not the solution but I cannot get other people to stop posting on proprietary platforms
>flufi.me
Naturally, gated by whatever Cloudflare setting it is that doesn't just block me but runs a CPU to 100% indefinitely unless I kill the tab
Loaded in about one second for me (in regular Firefox with uBlock Origin installed, and Diversion running on my network).
It's depressing to me at least. I guess with things like this it works well if you fully buy in and don't understand or care about the privacy violations and psychological tricks they use. But even if I tried to ignore it, I just end up annoyed by the interfaces or workflows or stuff like that. I guess it's just the curse of having really non-standard preferences
Facebook simultaneously makes it hard for you to access anything without an account (connecting the world?) while also having been known to change people's privacy settings from Friends to Friends of Friends or Public
Zuck, you do not deserve to be spoken of in the same breath as actual internet pioneers
I have seen organizers get stuck in the dopamine loop of focusing on inspiring content that "increases engagement" and getting fixated on moderating trolls that it actually gets in the way of doing impactful work. I definitely on the depression train on this front. It's far worse than digital versions of flyers, people aren't incentivized to focus show up when they can just keep scrolling for their fix.
I "trade" my content in kind -- garbage in, garbage out style -- combining my short form renders on my commute with songs I think will match the rhythm then publish as a music video.
And I'm not chasing clicks, likes, nor monetization on that platform; I was fortunate to ignore FB's SSO with IG as I deleted that account a decade or longer ago.
I wish you were right, but you're wrong. It's a wishful thinking that I have been participatory in for decades. However, it will not come to fruition. Why? It's very simple: we, as a people and as a society, are not willing to give up convenience.
Secondly, the corporate media have been straight up propaganda centers for decades now and anyone who has been paying attention has known that for a long time now. That is not something that we are on the edge of our seats waiting to happen. It happened a long time ago.
Remember when CNN was meeting with the Pentagon so that the Pentagon could approve their stories during the Iraq War? Remember when the media constantly lied to us during COVID? Remember when they told us Biden's health was in pristine condition and that he was never better?
Don't try and politicize this issue in one way or the other. Anyone paying attention can see that there is no savior on the left or the right. It's the corrupt politicians vs. us.
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/
https://framagit.org/framasoft/peertube/
https://joinpeertube.org/
peertube is in that weird space where the software is good technically but is overkill for home users and small entities[1] and moderation, bandwith and storage cost makes it a bit difficult and expensive to host large public shared instances unless you find a way to monetize it.
I guess it is more an alternative for Microsoft Stream than youtube really as it is more likely to be used as an internal video communication platform for a company than a public video streaming platform.
[1] if the audience is small, you are just fine sharing vids using the html video tags
From hosting a peertube instance solely for my own stuff for several years, I've come to appreciate just how difficult self hosting a streaming video platform is. As you say, bandwidth and storage requirements are significant; another less obvious one is transcoding. When a user uploads an HD video file, it needs to be transcoded into lower resolutions if you want there to be a hope of people streaming it. While Peertube itself is perfectly happy running on 2-4 vcpu cores on a cheap cloud vm, if you use those cores to handle transcode jobs it can take huge amounts of time (like 20+ hours) to transcode even medium length 1080p videos. So you really need either a lot of CPU that sits mostly idle, or hardware acceleration, both of which are expensive when purchased from cloud providers. Or you can use remote transcoding to offload transcode jobs onto your home gaming pc or whatever, which works well, but can be complicated and a bit touchy to set up properly, and now you have a point of failure dependent on your home network...
And then, people watching videos are used to the YouTube experience with its world class CDN infra enabling subsecond first frame latencies even for 4k videos. They go on Peertube and first frame takes like 5 seconds for a 1080p video...realistically, with today's attention spans most of them are going to bounce before it ever plays.
Since you seem like you have practical knowledge here, I hope you don't mind me asking:
Would it change the equation, meaningfully, if you didn't offer any transcoding on the server and required users to run any transcoding they needed on their own hardware? I'm thinking of a wasm implementation of ffmpeg on the instance website, rather than requiring users to use a separate application, for instance.
Would you think a general user couldn't handle the workload (mobile processing, battery, etc), or would that be fairly reasonable for a modern device and only onerous in the high traffic server environment?
> Would it change the equation, meaningfully, if you didn't offer any transcoding on the server and required users to run any transcoding they needed on their own hardware?
I think the user experience would be quite poor, enough that nobody would use the instance. As an example a 4k video will transcoded at least 2 times, to 1080p and 720p, and depending on server config often several more times. Each transcode job takes a long time, even with substantial hwaccel on a desktop.
Very high bitrate video is quite common now since most phones, action cameras etc are capable of 4k30 and often 4k60.
> Do you think a general user couldn't handle the workload (mobile processing, battery, etc), or would that be fairly reasonable for a modern device and only onerous.
If I had to guess, I would expect it be a poor experience. Say I take a 5 minute video, that's probably around 3-5gb. I upload it, then need to wait - in the foreground - for this video to be transcoded and then uploaded to object storage 3 times on a phone chip. People won't do it.
I do like the idea of offloading transcode to users. I wonder if it might be suited for something like https://rendernetwork.com/ where users exchange idle compute to a transcode pool for upload & storage rights, and still get to fire-and-forget uploads?
Right on. Thanks for the consideration!
I really appreciate you walking through that; it's an eye-opener! It seems like you not only deal with a considerable amount of five-minute-or-greater videos, but much higher quality than I was expecting, too.
I also like the idea of user-transcoding because, honestly, I think it's better for everyone? I would love if every place I uploaded video or audio content offered an option to "include lower-quality variants" or something. Broadly, it's my product; I should have the final say on (and take responsibility for) the end result. And for high-quality stuff, the people who make it tend to have systems equipped to do that better anyway. So they could probably get faster transcoding times by using their own systems rather than letting the server do it. Seems like a win-win, even outside of the obvious benefits of "make a whole lot of computers do only the work they each need done, instead of making a few computers do the work that everyone needs done". With the only slight downside of the "average user" having some extra options that they don't understand which cause them to use it wrong and then everyone hates your product. Yay, app development.
I think offering client side transcode as an option, with server side transcode available for those who don't want to do it client side, is compelling. I would probably do it, as I have a powerful home system that can transcode much faster than my cloud host (I do use the remote transcoding feature in Peertube though).
That's very much not what transcoding is for. You don't want transcoding so a client can render the video in a comfortable resolution. You need transcoding to save bandwidth. If you want the client to do transcoding, you must send them the full raw video file. Either end of the connection may not have enough free bandwidth for that. The client may not be able to teanscode depending on size and format.
You of course, can do this anyway. PeerTube allows you to completely disable transcoding. But again that means you're streaming the full resolution. Your client may not like this.
If realtime performance is your concern I think PeerTube allows you to pre-transcode to disk. If there is a transcoded copy matching the client request, the server streams that direct with no extra transcode.
To answer your question: shifting transcode onto the client won't improve performance and will greatly increase bandwidth requirements in exchange for less compute on the server. You almost certainly do not want this.
Yep. As OP said: I meant the user could transcode the various versions on their machine and then upload each to the server. Sorry about the wording; I can see that it's vague.
I think GP meant making the user perform transcoding at upload time
The funny thing is that YouTube has now enshittified to the point where people routinely DO wait well over 5 seconds to watch the video they actually wanted to watch while interstitials and other commercials are jammed in. Even with adblock enabled, the latest YouTube code won't unlock the first frame of the actual video till some period of ad time has passed so you just sit there looking at a black screen. This on its own definitely isn't enough to get people to leave the platform, but it's still notable how much worse the experience has gotten compared to a few years ago.
On what setup? All YouTube videos load and start playing instantly for me. Every time I've experienced otherwise in the last couple years, it's been my first indication that e.g. AWS is exploding that day
I wonder if it depends what country you are in. I only notice it occasionally when the video won't play in FreeTube or PipePipe (which always has the pause at the start since the last few months) and I'm forced to open an incognito browser tab to watch, and then I realize just how many ads other people are being subjected to before they can even watch the video.
I bet you're using Chrome. Open a video in Chrome and the video is immediately playable, load the same video on the same machine in Firefox and you can expect to wait 5+ seconds for the video to be playable.
I suspect that non-Chrome browsers are being intentionally hobbled
I did a pretty low rigor test and just pulled up one of those 4K videos with the swirling ink in Firefox on my M1 Mac and it seemed to load just as fast. The only difference was that it didn't autoplay the video (because I'm logged out I think) but I clicked it as the page loaded and it played instantly.
I don't doubt at all that Google hobbles their sites on Firefox but at least on my machine they aren't doing a great job of it
You likely pay for YouTube premium if you aren’t noticing adds
I do pay for premium but my impression of the parent was that this was independent of ads. The test I did in the other comment didn't trigger an ad for some reason even though I was logged out, which may be why it loaded so fast.
Ah. The parent mentioned several frustrations that I am not familiar with (presumably since I also pay for premium and don’t block the ads), but my impression was that the delay was caused by the code refusing to play the video until the time slot for the ad had completed even if the ad failed to load (as would happen when blocking the ad http request)
FreeBSD + Waterfox, or Firefox for that matter. YouTube really likes to strangle those who are not in their domain.
If I set my user agent to something like Linux/Ubuntu, it loads just fine. If I set my user agent to some unheard Linux distro, it lags as the same with FreeBSD.
I shove 1080p mp4s onto a very cheap server and I get 2 seconds of load time there versus somewhere between 1 and 2 seconds on youtube. And looking at network requests, the first chunk of the file loads in well under a second so I'd expect something with the metadata preloaded could start playing at that point. So if peertube takes 5 seconds, I really wonder why.
Is it inconvenient to transcode before/during upload?
If you scale an instance you need to use object storage (s3/b2/etc). Fetch from object storage can occasionally have latency spikes.
5 seconds is somewhat exaggerating, I clicked through 10 or so videos on my instance to check and it's 2-3 seconds most of the time.
We can exclude rare enough outliers.
I've experienced B2 throwing a wrench into the dream of low latency, but some object stores are very fast. And more importantly you only need the first couple megabytes of each video to be on fast storage.
I'm using B2, so maybe that's it. I have the instance configured to serve video directly from B2 rather than proxying it. Peertube has no facilities to keep the first few mb of each video local to the server that I am aware of.
What value do you get in transcoding your own stuff? I have plex transcoding disabled on all local network devices that stream it and run into minimal issues (codecs on TV devices, mostly).
By "my own stuff" I mean that I use my instance to upload videos I would otherwise upload to youtube - videos I made that I intend to share with people. The usual reasons for transcoding apply.
I actually run my own PeerTube instance. I'm mirroring videos in my RSS feeds from Patreon and Youtube there. And I also have a handful of my own family videos.
> if the audience is small, you are just fine sharing vids using the html video tags
Yet people do not do that.
I think that's more a measurement of demand volume than anything. It's a VERY tight squeeze between "I'll just send this file directly to the few people I want to show it" and "I want to show this to anyone" to the point no matter what is done by those people it'll seem like nobody does that unless it's also done in the other categories.
> find a way to monetize it
If only there were a smart way to build a cryptocoin without the environmental mess of miners, but where you earn coinage from seeding videos. I feel like you'd want people to have a desktop client to let you seed in the background then award some sort of virtual currency that can be sold later. I hate to sound like a crypto-bro but I can't think of anything else more fitting for something already decentralized.
GNU Taler [0] perhaps. They are funded by EU grants, and have a funding program [1] going to stimulate the ecosystem.
> We are building an anonymous, taxable payment system using modern cryptography. Customers will use traditional money transfers to send money to a digital Exchange and in return receive (anonymized) digital cash. Customers can use this digital cash to anonymously pay Merchants. Merchants can redeem the digital cash for traditional money at the digital Exchange. As Merchants are not anonymous, they can be taxed, enabling income or sales taxes to be withheld by the state while providing anonymity for Customers.
[0] https://docs.taler.net/
[1] https://www.taler.net/en/ngi-taler.html
What value would this virtual currency have? Okay, someone seeded some videos and got a token - why should I go and pay them for that token?
Maybe the tokens are how you access the content? Seed to get tokens, spend tokens to get new content. If you don't want to seed, you buy from users who did seed (or resellers).there are many token based comic apps, I wonder how feasible this would be on a small scale like that.
Here are some attempts:
LBRY: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LBRY
BTT: https://www.kraken.com/learn/what-is-bittorrent-btt
I seed videos to my other computer all day and I'm a trillionaire.
LBRY did that, the US government killed it.
Content discovery on it is still difficult, mostly because of the bizarre decision to make federation whitelist based.
I'm also sceptical that activitypub is a good fit for video, IPFS could be a better solution.
It's a shame the US government killed LBRY.
> the bizarre decision to make federation whitelist based.
Given the multiple articles I've seen on how federation can easily accidentally DDOS mastodon servers, which isn't even a form of federation that primarily uses something as heavy in data usage as video, I do not find that so strange tbh. And that's before factoring in malicious actors or even just careless ones like all the AI scrapers.
I can see that's probably the logic behind it, but when your biggest USP is federation it still seems like a bad idea to deliberately hobble it.
IMHO based on my use of the fediverse, fundamentally it's about porn and curtailing unwanted porn in your domain. I'm a user of mastodon.social in the "wee US hours" (before US mods are awake) and run across a lot of hit-and-run porn being pushed to Trending (and I report, etc.).
It's a thing, it happens a lot and Lemmy instances have the same problems to fight. Unwanted porn in my eyeballs is sadly a not uncommon experience until you've put in effort to set up blocks and filters on your personal accounts. Peertube being explicitly video based is a natural target for porn pushers.
It's not by choice.
I built the original android native client. Every so often I would get an update rejected from the play store because of the default instance content.
The app is currently still in a pending appeal because of a NSFW switch already for more than a year. I have abandoned it at this point.
https://github.com/sschueller/peertube-android/issues/302#is...
Can someone please tldr me what digital public goods alliance means and how peertube can benefit from being recognized as a digital public good.
From what I can tell, it is UN affiliated/related project where basically it tries to make countries integrate these digital public goods in their country's ecosystem/ work on these (products?)
Is there any amount of sponsorship money that come with this classification or more tax benefits?
Or does UN (thus countries who fund UN) itself fund DPGA?
I find this idea fascinating now thinking about it if that can be the case, for these countries a few millions or even billions collectively might not mean much but it can mean a lot towards open source and digital soveriegnity in my opinion too.
I run [ODK](https://getodk.org). It's a offline mobile data collection platform that has been an DPG since 2022.
In practice, being a DPG makes your project slightly easier to choose in UN and government procurements. In most cases, they're choosing your platform because it's free, so it's unlikely that money or code contributions will come your way. It can even be a downside, because your software may end up deployed on an under-provisioned government server that generates a flood of support requests. Ask me how I know...
You may also get a bit more visibility and become eligible for some DPG-related funding calls. But in my experience, funding ultimately depends on demonstrated impact, donor relationships, alignment with national digital strategies, and the ability to deliver at scale.
Thank you for your response!
So I thought that having an open source project in DPGA would be really great but it seems that everything that glitters isn't gold like how you mention support requests etc.
I have a question tho, What are the best foundations or labels (like DGPA) that an open source software can qualify for which might give it more exposure and funding
Personally I am starting to believe it might be NLNET (https://nlnet.nl/) but what are your thoughts on it?
I think open-source leaders who want sustainable resourcing should focus on building obvious paths for people who find ongoing value in their project to contribute. That to me is the best return-on-investment.
If it's a library, make it easy for developers to contribute code.
If it's an app, make it easy for individuals/businesses who value it to pay (e.g., cloud hosting).
I gave a talk about this at the launch of WHO's Open Source Program Office[1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/live/yNK27_6MrF8?t=1215s
Looks like it qualifies you for UNICEF grants
https://www.unicef.org/innovation/growth-funding#:~:text=Gro...
I would also like to know what this means
Yeay, checkout my instance, been running it for 5 years now! https://video.benetou.fr
Just out of curiosity, what type of hardware are you hosting this on? It's very responsive.
I've been wondering about angles to get interesting content on there. I wonder, for instance, if one could reach out to a bunch of bands and get permission for mirroring live show recordings on peertube and be off to the races.
Anyone wanna share some cool channels?
https://tinkerbetter.tube/c/veronicaexplains/videos she’s also on YouTube but it doesn’t hurt to use PeerTube and get out of Google’s reach
I was watching the rsync video and she mentions the scenario where you run rsync with the remote as source, and the remote drive isn't mounted correctly and you end up deleting local. LOL
My brother's got an instance for canadian urbanism and fediverse engineering: https://video.canadiancivil.com
Self-promotion, but the music I release here is totally free to use in your own projects. It's all CC0
https://makertube.net/a/johnoestmannmusic/video-channels
I put up metaverse rendering tests on Hardlimit.
https://video.hardlimit.com/c/aninats/videos
(It's discouraging having put in so much effort on trying to make the Metaverse work, and then having the entire sector die.)
I'm happy that it did. It was a trick to get people to spend more time online so that facebook can make even more money off people's time and attention.
ursinewave@tv.gravitons.org : https://tv.gravitons.org/a/ursinewave/video-channels "Roberta Fidora is a genre-bender from the Isle of Wight, UK, hopping between field recordings in space, industrial-tinged electroclash, guerrilla puppeteering and wildly maximalist, mildly-anarchic pop music."
meljoann@tv.gravitons.org : https://tv.gravitons.org/c/meljoann/ "Meljoann is an extremely physically attractive Irish multidisciplinary artist. They’ve been supported by Pitchfork, Beats Per Minute, XLR8, KEXP, Dan Hegarty, Cian Ó Cíobháin, Jenny Greene and Tara Stewart of RTÉ radio, Irish Times, Nialler9, Hot Press, BBC’s Gemma Bradley, Dummy Mag, HMUK and the Arts Council of England. She’s currently releasing a series of self-directed video singles. ‘HR’, their anti-capital concept album, is out now. Their third album, ‘Status’, releases in 2025"
Our channel here https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/c/boilingsteam/videos
Makers @ https://makertube.net/
Are these many users actually uploading their stuff there, or is this downloading from youtube and re-uploading?
I assume content creators are uploading their own content to their peertube channels.
[dead]
I've been using: https://github.com/graham-walker/youtube-dl-react-viewer with yt-dlp to create complete archives of channels I like because I have so many channels I learn from I don't want YT to randomly disappear them. Mostly language, but loads of deep ML long plays and other things.
I'm looking forward to trying out PeerTube.
Start archiving now, the internet is rapidly getting user hostile.
Drives are cheap, data is expensive.
and v8.0 released today
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/releases/tag/v8.0.0
I host a simpler youtube alternative based on https://www.mediacms.io/
It's not a perfect platform, but generally does well enough from my home server and a gigabit fiber connection.
These are good alternatives to have, but a solid chunk of the "youtube economy" is about selling ad time so creators can make a living creating content. I hate ads as much as the next person but we need to recognize that the issue is not purely technical.
Definitely, hard to compete with YouTube as a revenue source. That being said, my instance is mainly for digitizing and hosting old VHS tapes from my family so they don't get lost over the years. No need for advertising there :)
Isn't that what the web archive is for?
You're not thinking fourth dimensionally!
Youtube used to have quality content (dare i say, content of much higher originality and quality) in times when there was no monetization yet
That's now on my to-do list, thanks for pointing it out. It looks clean and simple but with some nice features.
Good news! good Non Profits are always amazing!
Is this the J D Power award for open source?
the J D Great Responsibility award
Service reminder: Peertube is mainly developed by academics (at least half of whom are French) to host educational content. Competing with YouTube is not their priority. Their priority is to be able to present a history course on the Second World War without having to contort themselves to avoid saying ‘Nazi’ and pass under the radar of automatic moderation.
It's a great project, but it's not a replacement for YouTube, and that's fine.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_public_goods
Video.edu.nl
Is this run by the NL gov? I wish all govs would have something like this. Unfortunately gov are usually about 1 generation behind the state of the art in terms of understanding technology at any point in time.
Note that now Youtube can claim they are not a monopoly and keep on steamrolling.
So what are the top 10 (or top 100) videos in terms of being actively replicated across the largest number of Peertube peers? I can't find this anywhere.
Prisoner's Dilemma Bonus: I'll upvote all responses if no responses attempt to explain Peertube's philosophy to me.