Some weird, German communist, hello. He/him pronouns and all that. Obsessed with philosophy and history, secondarily obsessed with video games as a cultural medium. Also somewhat able to program.

https://abnormalbeings.space/

https://liberapay.com/Wxnzxn/

  • 25 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: March 6th, 2025

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  • I think you do bring up important points, and ads are indeed a de-facto impossibility (even though, technically, there’s nothing stopping someone creating a plug-in that shows ads, the dynamics you describe would make platforms using it isolated quickly). I would add that, personally, I don’t want to ever have PeerTube go down the ad rabbit hole, it comes with a lot of dynamics that almost make enshittification inevitable - although I heard some Fedi platforms had some success with very selected and limited sale of hand-curated advertisement spots, that really isn’t scalable in the same way.

    But while this makes PeerTube uninteresting to the really big players that want or need to maximise their income - I think there is still a lot of potential left. Two of the other big revenue streams are still available - sponsored segments in videos can work basically the very same as on YT. And Liberapay/Patreon/Ko-Fi are still available as well, with Framasoft mentioning looking into enabling better integration for services like it in the future. Another possibility I imagine could work, would be Nebula-like platforms utilising the technology eventually, with local content on the server being fenced-off to paying subscribers, but those registered local users still able to also reach the bigger, free network of videos in the Fediverse beyond that.

    There are a lot of mid-sized YT channels, and channels not wanting to compromise on satisfying ad guidelines, that basically only make pennies from YTs normal monetisation strategies and completely rely on sponsoring and patrons. For those, PeerTube is a genuine possibility in the future, after more organic growth. And that growth will have to follow the usual stages of alternative platforms, with currently enthusiasts and hobbyists being the “moss and lichen” to enable growth of “grasses” in the future, to use a metaphor.

    this really feels like the kind of software project that has the end state of getting “adopted” by a corporation and the major devs hired on as consultants.

    I can understand the fear, but from what I know of Framasoft - if they were prone to sell out, they would not have “wasted” decades on their passion projects, and stubbornly delaying to do more dynamic, non-local, non-French marketing of their “de-google-ify” suite.

    EDIT: Good exchange indicative of this I just (at the time of this edit) witnessed on Mastodon:


  • To be honest, I had the feeling it is lopsided the other way around at the moment: There are quite a few good and passionate content creators, lacking in an audience and interaction. I mean - sure - it does not have the amount of content of a big tech platform like YT, and not enough to binge watch stuff all day long, but I think lack of an active audience is at the moment more pressing - as is discoverability. If not using outside channels - like promoting on their Mastodon accounts primarily - or using places like !peertube@lemmy.world or !peertube@lemmy.wtf to discover things, a lot of worthwhile content right now flies under the radar. And that is excluding unofficial mirrors of YT content, which I tend to avoid.

    On the other hand - I know lack of a mobile app has come up at several times in comments on there, and I have myself by now anecdotally heard from a few people wanting to try PeerTube and then being weirded out by the unfinished mobile app in ways that were unrecoverable. In addition, adding more know-how and codebase for mobile applications into the greater FLOSS ecosphere and Fediverse is good in its own right, there is a severe lack of it.
















  • I don’t know about the “no real life effects”. As a teenager, I was dangerously close to falling down a conspiracy theorist rabbit hole, back then with 9/11-“truthers”. It was online arguments I witnessed, where their arguments got dismantled by people knowing what they are talking about, that got me out of there before I got in too deep.

    Similarily, loneliness once got me adjacent to the proto-“manosphere” before it was a thing as it is today. But arguing with them about how they are wrong about womens’ roles historically, claiming they were “privileged” in ways they objectively weren’t turned me off of their bullshit really quickly.

    I know arguing online has become more exhausting ever since, but I think there might be a bit of an overly dismissive reaction present with a lot of people on the internet. Developing your own ideas against opposition is still something worthwhile in many cases. And online, there’s usually at least some kind of audience, that gets influenced by discussions - for better or worse.

    That being said, I may be overthinking things. Because any discussion, where your goal is “totally destroying the opponent” is usually in the category of least worthwhile discussions to have.





  • Not part of Framasoft, but I am administrating a PeerTube platform/instance myself, and can anecdotally say, that it works rather well. Another factor is, that as an admin, you can set up to automatically mirror videos on other instances, when they meet certain criteria.

    For example, I have ~300GB set aside to mirror trending, new and most-watched videos of some instances, that I consider to have quality (EDIT: and reliably non-illegal) content regularily (e.g. spectra.video, makertube.net, peertube.wtf, etc.) That way, in addition to just users watching videos acting as a seeding peer via webtorrent, my own dedicated server in Finland among other professional servers with large bandwith also add to the resilience of the network, even for smaller instances.

    Anecdotally, I have also heard of some people running a PeerTube instance successfully from just a SBC, like a RaspPi or similar, from home, utilising the WebTorrent integratio you mentioned EDIT: As I have learned, while they are using P2P connections, it is no longer the WebTorrent protocol to their advantage. Here’s a video I remember talking about this as an example.