this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Peertube is one of the oldest federated software projects. It's a lot less sustainable than ActivityPub platforms because storing HD video is much much more expensive than what Lemmy instances currently do. Lemmy as a platform with a few federated home servers could feasibly replace Reddit, Mastodon could feasibly replace Twitter, but if PeerTube ever got mainstream enough to handle even 0.01% of YouTube's traffic/hosting footprint it'd be impossible to deal with the associated costs.
Not as much as you might think. Depending upon the type of video The actual encoded files can be rather small comparatively. The big thing in heavy lifting the platforms like YouTube etc do is the multi-rencoding for different resolutions. And then hopping between them on the fly to try to keep the stream as real time as possible.
If peer tube has lag and doesn't support high definition / multiple resolutions per video, it'll never get enough popularity that storage / bandwidth become issues.
Using WebRTC it won't lag. At least not for popular streams. For obscure content that no one watches. It might. But that isn't some deal breaker. It supports high resolution just fine. But honestly we don't need a ton of different resolutions for every video. It's a luxury and a convenience. Realistically with modern codex today the difference in bandwidth while not insignificant. Again is not a deal breaker. The distribution isn't all through a single entity. It is highly distributed.
Personally I had not messed with any peer tube instances for a year and a half or so. So the other night I installed it on an Android device and the experience has come leaps and bounds. If the content were there. And loading up as all the content that I did watch did. I could absolutely see myself using it. The issue will be content. And perhaps monetizing it. Though there is a lot of content that for one reason or another can't be monetized. Which would be perfectly happy on a service like this.
Yeah open-source alternative youtube would look bleak without some sort of reliable (and heavy) funding. I suppose if they could get the eu to fund them, then maybe but yeah it looks a bit bleak if i am being honest
If funding enters the picture, capitalism means that it'll eventually shift towards profit (or in some cases "not operating at a severe loss"). Something based on BitTorrent might be one of the only capitalism-proof solutions for handling video, but that of course has its own problems (most people that create video content like to be able to delete it, for example)
That's what peer tube basically operates on. Not exactly. But it's a very similar concept.