PeerTube – free open source software to host your own federated YouTube
PeerTube is a software that you install on a web server. It allows you to create a video hosting website, so you can create your own "homemade YouTube".
The difference to YouTube is that it's not intended to create a huge platform centralizing videos from the whole world on a single server farm (which is horribly expensive). On the contrary, PeerTube's concept is to create a network of multiple small interconnected video hosting providers.
The advantage of YouTube (and other platforms) is its video catalog: from knitting tutorials to minecraft constructions through videos of kittens or holidays… you can find everything! The more the video catalogue is varied, the more people are interested, the more videos are posted… but hosting videos from all over the world is (very, very) expensive!
If the hosting provider Knitting-PeerTube becomes friends with Kittens-Tube and Framatube, it will display the videos of others on its site: thus diluting hosting costs while remaining practical and complete for Internet users. PeerTube's federation protocol will be fluid (everyone can choose their "friends" hosts), and based on ActivityPub: this will open the possibility to connect with tools like Mastodon or MediaGoblin.
When you host a large file like a video, the biggest thing to fear is success: if a video becomes viral and many people watch it at the same time, the server has a big risk of falling! Peer-to-peer broadcasting allows, thanks to the WebRTC protocol, that Internet users who watch the same video at the same time exchange bits of files, which relieves the server. There is nothing to do: your web browser does it automatically. If you are on a mobile phone or if your network does not allow it (router, firewall, etc.), this function is disabled and switches back to an "old-style" video broadcast.
The only downside for some is that you cannot monetise your videos right now through PeerTube. That said the federated servers are run independently by different people and organizations. They can apply wildly different moderation policies, so you can find or make one that fits your taste perfectly.
See https://joinpeertube.org/en/
#peertube #youtube #joinpeertube
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Take back the control of video streaming! #JoinPeertube PeerTube is an open-source federated video network. Videos can be hosted by the people, with the people, for the people. |