The creators of SponsorBlock did it again, now we can crowdsource better titles and thumbnails as well. I just tried it with LinusTechTips who is a worst offender when it comes to clickbait and its really great.
Compare without DeArrow
and with the extension
Video hosting is way more resource intensive (and therefore expensive) than text and even the most image filled of Lemmy communities
I know. They use peer-to-peer, hence the name PeerTube, that means while you are watching a video, you also upload that video for others to see. Granted the concept falls flat with so little users as there is never another person watching the exact same video at the exact same point it time, but in theory it should scale up.
I think we could also have a standalone desktop application to watch and seed. In the browser you stop seeding as soon as you close the tab, but with the desktop application you could allow for further seeding. People who want to keep the platform alive could practically donate their upstream traffic. I would.
I wish people would use it more cause I like the concept a lot.
The concept still works with almost no users. If you're the only one watching a video, the original host is more than capable of serving it to you and so no need for extra peers ;).
Being able to handle a small amount of users isn't the problem, it's once a lot of users suddenly join in that the system would collapse without the peer functionality.
Also, peer tube is not fully decentralized. All videos need to be stored on an instance (similar to torrent seedboxes) so there will always be at least one direct source available. So I don't think that standalone app as you describe is needed. (That would be interesting though in a fully decentralized model, without any instances but all videos just floating between peers. But that would have the danger of creating dead videos similar to dead torrents)
I assume that in the short term transcoding is also going to become an issue. Most fedi servers are being hosted on cloud providers like Hetzner, DO, Linode, etc. who do not have any kind of encoding hardware, and modern codecs like VP9 or god forbid AV1 are horribly slow to encode without HW acceleration.
I know there are several platforms that do offer it (Amazon and Google do AFAIK) but those can still get pretty expensive, and there is a sizeable chunk of people here who may not want their content to reach Amazon or Google.