TIL: PeerTube
TIL: PeerTube
There is a decentralized YouTube alternative.
Video hosting is notoriously expensive. PeerTube circumvents this problem, because videos aren't stored on some single server, which would cause high bandwidth cost for the server operator, but largely by the users after they watched them, similar to BitTorrent. This way, the cost of video hosting is distributed among the clients, by using their internet connectivity for sharing.
I believe that PeerTube is an interesting project, and I'd ask you to check it out. It's cool.
Similar to Lemmy, it's not a single running server, but rather a software that can be used to set up a server. So there's many instances. I'm still exploring which instances are interesting. If you have any recommendations, I'd like to hear them.
With most videos on Peertube the server still has to do nearly all of the work. Optionally users can contribute bandwidth while they are watching but not after; how would that even work on a website that you close after watching?
Its a neat feature if a video goes viral or so, but Peertube still needs a lot of bandwidth regardless.
One requested feature has been to be able to seed while not watching a video. This could help out to further distribute the serving of videos.
IMO the main benefitof seeding while watching is any "viral" videos or videos being watched many times concurrently have a reduced load on the server.
How does that compare to BitTorrent?
Its similar technically (and an earlier version of Peertube used something called Webtorrent), but the usage pattern is completely different.