Very nice improvement and I hope more fediverse software starts supporting this. tl;dr popular videos are also uploaded by the viewers, thus lowering the server load, similar to Bittorrent, but all in the browser.
pixelfed seems to be getting some really nice improvements at an incredible rate. Props to those devs!
ELI5?
Like Peertube, videos shared on Pixelfed are now (optionally) WebP2P enabled, meaning that all users currently watching the video contribute to sharing the video by sending small parts of it to other users via a P2P connection similar to Bittorrent. This helps the server a lot as it only has to send the parts no other viewer can send. This is important when videos are very popular and watched by many people the same time, which would normally overload the server (unless you are Google and have datacenters for Youtube all over the world).
I didn’t realize PixelFed had videos at all?
It has and you can also do live-streams with it, although those probably don’t work with WebP2P.
Neat!
That’s cool but are the videos on Pixelfed long enough for WebP2P to work? I imagine the median video length on Pixelfed would be seconds rather than minutes as it would be on Peertube.
