Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Youtube Media Open Source Privacy Software The Internet Technology

PeerTube, the 'Decentralized YouTube,' Succeeds In Crowdfunding (quariety.com) 100

A crowdfunded project, known as "PeerTube," has blown through its initial goal with 53,100 euros collected in forty-two days. The project aims to be "a fully decentralized version of YouTube, whose computer code is freely accessible and editable, and where videos are shared between users without relying on a central system." The goal is PeerTube to officially launch by October. Quariety reports: PeerTube relies on a decentralized and federative system. In other words, there is no higher authority that manages, broadcasts and moderates the content offered, as is the case with YouTube, but a network of "instances." Created by one or more administrators, these communities are governed according to principles specific to each of them. Anyone can freely watch the videos without registering, but to upload a video, you must choose from the list of existing instances, or create your own if you have the necessary technical knowledge. At the moment, 141 instances are proposed. Most do not have specifics, but one can find communities centered on a theme or open to a particular region of the world. In all, more than 4,000 people are currently registered on PeerTube, for a total of 338,000 views for 11,000 videos. The project does not display ads, unlike YouTube. "In terms of monetization, we wanted to make a neutral tool," says Pouhiou, communication officer for Framasoft, the origin of PeerTube. The site will rely on a "support" button at the start, but "people will be able to code their own monetization system" in the future.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

PeerTube, the 'Decentralized YouTube,' Succeeds In Crowdfunding

Comments Filter:
  • Subjects are dumb (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TFlan91 ( 2615727 ) on Friday July 20, 2018 @06:30PM (#56983030)

    Wouldn't this just be a "youtube" front-end for torrents?

    • I'd expect somewhat smarter logic to handle the distribution of the pieces, to ensure maximum availability with minimum storage space wasted globally. Individual torrents don't really know about each other. But it does seem to be aligned with the principle that the more popular a thing is, the more nodes it should be located on.
    • The author is also dumb

      --
      federative system. In other words, there is no higher authority that manages, broadcasts and moderates the content offered, as is the case with YouTube, but a network
      --

      Someone does know what federation is, and therefore contradicts themselves. Apparently they haven't even heard of the federal government, which is the "higher authority", above the states.

      A federal system, or federation, is when previously separate entities establish a centralized authority, for common purposes. Examp

      • That should be "someone doesn't know"

      • by Anonymous Coward

        They're talking federated system architectures, not government.
        There is no centralized authority, each system is autonomous and interacts with other systems based upon agreed standards/exchanges.

      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        IIRC the original use was the Roman dominated "Federati", which in practice meant allies or associates, but where the policy came from Rome. These were groups that Rome didn't actually conqueror for one reason or another, but dominated. Mainly there were Germanics, but that seems to have been "that's where the situation developed". They were nominally independent of Rome, and would meet together in councils to decide on common policy, when never happened to contradict Roman policy (though they could be q

        • Thanks for that.

          I see the connection there. They had been operating independently, and were *allowed* a degree of autonomy in local issues, but ultimately under the authority of Rome regarding foreign affairs etc. That matches up both with the states who formed a federal government and with IT systems and database usage, where each part is to some degree independent insofar as its internal operation, but disciplined by the central authority in matters of relations with other entities (interstate commerce cl

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I love Rick and Morty, so I'll give this simplification:

      "Isn't that just copyright violation with fewer steps?" :-D

    • And wouldn't that just be "pirate bay"?

  • I have hosted popular podcasts and have had videos into the high 100,000s of views. Been thinking it might be time to do a new one after a couple of years off.

    I'm in! Registering now....

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Those guys are going to raise millions for yet another fail to deliver crownfunding scam. But a decentralized, censoship resistant youtube alternative???

    This exists already, it's called dtube.
    https://d.tube/ [d.tube]

    You can even get paid for uploading content to it today.
    https://steemit.com/trending/d... [steemit.com]

    So why bother to contribute to a kickstarter for yet another one?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      D.Tube is not distributed as a platform, it's still a centralised venue, only the distribution of the content is using "distributed" technology ... if the owner of the website d.tube close it it's all gone...

      PeerTube is a distributed platform made of nodes communicating through a protocol, like email servers do. if a certain node/server close, it's video are taken down but not the whole network... you can host your own, and profit from the federation and at some point peer distribution among other nodes too

  • by Anonymous Coward

    It's so simple.

    youtube-dl is powerful and elegant. Teamed up with mpv or smplayer and it's all gravy.

  • Nowadays you can embed videos into your site with a single tag and that's a lot more decentralized than relying on a single piece of software that may or may not be developed.

    • Um, what?

      Where do you think the video that is referenced by the tag is going to come from?

      • by wfj2fd ( 4643467 )
        The same place the HTML/JS/CSS and images come from. It's just another asset.
        • The same place the HTML/JS/CSS and images come from. It's just another asset.

          Dude are you trolling me? If so, great job because you had me riled up my entire drive home.

          HTML5 provides a video playback mechanism? The method of playing the video is completely irrelevant to the technical challenge here. The issue storage and bandwidth.

          Do you think replicating Youtube is just about as easy as plunking the video onto whatever website you want? Do you have any idea what sort of resources it takes to host petabytes of video and have the capacity to stream HD or 4k video to hundreds of thou

          • This is my thinking. Who pays for all this? It's a question I ask of any decentralized service. Also another thing that seems messy, usernames.

            • Who pays for all this? It's a question I ask of any decentralized service.

              The peers pay for it. You pay for it. You pay for it through your ISP bill and the storage space and electricity to run your computer.

  • If you’re at a university, and if you’ve got student workers in your IT group, you might want to keep an eye out for any unexplained VMs which might appear.

  • Sesta DMCA and plenty of other laws will run everyone off of the platform once the inevitable legal issues arise.

    It will be relegated to a dark place on the web with a bed reputation where law enforcement will take YOU to jail for accidentally hosting something they don't like.

    Good luck explaining the problem to a jury in such a way that they will not think you are up to no good. We have long since forgotten the principles of innocent until proven guilty and have fallen back to the old day of guilty until

  • by PhantomHarlock ( 189617 ) on Friday July 20, 2018 @07:13PM (#56983194)

    This will in no way become just a front end for torrent sites. Nah. :D

    It's interesting from the standpoint of disseminating information people want to give out freely and not be at the mercy of a centralized server, but typically the altruistic part will get dwarfed by the pirates pr0n.

    The lack of monetization will keep both very high quality original content away from it as well as bottom-feeder clickbait and top ten lists.

    Speaking as someone who makes part of his living off of YouTube, it doesn't really hold an interest for me, but if I was not concerned with monetizing my videos directly, it sounds interesting.

    It is just so ripe for abuse that it will be interesting to see if legitimate players can even function in that environment. But if one of the 'instances' they speak of can be moderated, people could exist within the instance relatively harmoniously.

  • Each one more magnificent than the last.
  • If this is "decentralized YouTube" then SVN and CVS are "decentralized version control". Every time people slap the word "decentralized" something (hi Diaspora [wikipedia.org]) they mean something akin to sharding systems common to an MMO where you choose a server to play on and can only interact with other characters on that server -- which was done for performance reasons.

    Git, on the other hand, is truly decentralized. No one's repo is more central than anyone else's by design. Doing social media this way is completely possible, but no one's done it yet...;)

  • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Friday July 20, 2018 @07:42PM (#56983264)

    I think we can all agree that a Javascript variant is not something that should be used to make a server and yet, this is exactly what they used to write a server.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      It's also an awful name choice, unless they're hoping to be the go-to choice for "water-sports" enthusiasts.

      YouPeer would have been worse though, so at least there's that.

  • BitChute uses a torrent-like distributed peer hosting mechanism to help with scalability.
    It doesn't work great, even though I really want BitChute to succeed. Sadly, too many videos just stop streaming and you're left waiting an eternity for it to buffer.

Keep up the good work! But please don't ask me to help.

Working...