How does PeerTube handle storage? I'm trying to imagine trying to create a federated system version of Youtube and it seems very problematic. Storage and bandwidth.
Each PeerTube instance provides a website to browse and watch videos, and is by default independent from others in terms of appearance, features and rules.
Several instances, with common rules (e.g. allowing for similar content, requiring registration) can form federations, where they follow one's videos, even though each video is stored only by the instance that published it. Federations are independent from each other and asymmetrical: one instance can follow another to display their videos without them having to do the same. Instances' administrators can each choose to mirror individual videos or whole friend instances, creating an incentive to build communities of shared bandwidth.
Videos are made available via HTTP to download, but playback favors a peer-to-peer playback using HLS and WebTorrent. Users connected to the platform act as relay points that send pieces of video to other users, lessening the bandwidth of each to the server and thus allowing smaller hardware to operate at a lower cost.
Yeah, but Lemmy instances don't split bandwidth P2P. Imagine hosting a video on some cheap cloud instance that doesn't have any kind of traffic sharing and putting some brand new game trailer up like Diablo 4, then someone links your video copy on something like Reddit. You'd get obliterated if all the video traffic was just coming from your server.
Peertube also uses ActivityPub, so theoretically, you can follow channels in Lemmy or Lemmy posts in PeerTube. Same with Mastodon. Not sure exactly how that works, though.
Kind of like how KBin also uses ActivityPub, so Lemmy users can use KBin magazines as if they were Lemmy communities.
Thanks! Peertube looks like the perfect foundation, at least for the current scale. You can post peertube urls in Mastodon or Lemmy and share the comment stream over the fediverse. We are in the earliest days right now, but it is on!
PLEASE - Just do anything to give Youtube a run for its money. They're steamrolling right now due to the promise of ad-revenue to streamers though. Idk how to fight that