With the mass migrations of Reddit users to Lemmy/Kbin, and Twitter now speedrunning its own mass extinction, it seems me that the eventual future of social media is de-centralized. I like how Lemmy is slowing turning out, even if it still has some work to do and growing pains to fix up. It’s still able to inform me of all of the current events I want and has a large enough community that it doesn’t feel empty.
I think a similar path will present itself for a de-centralized video media platform like PeerTube, since YouTube will eventually piss off enough of its users to cause a similar kind of exodus. Wanting to jump in on the concept at an early stage, I signed up for a channel on spectra.video and uploaded my video collection there.
But, I don’t really see the same kind of community and usefulness on PeerTube. I check out the Discover and Trending pages, and it just seems like the same set of videos, really. There’s not enough content to keep PeerTube from looking like a small indie project. I can click on Recently Added and it is usually other people just dumping their channel collections, instead of recent adds of new videos. It’s very easy to scroll down and find videos from months ago.
After poking around on various other PeerTube sites, I think I found the real problem with the platform: Federation.
For example, let’s look at how federated Lemmy’s community is:
All interconnected with hundreds and hundreds (if not thousands) of other instances. If you sign up for one Lemmy account, you have little risk in not being able to access a remote community elsewhere. It feels like a federated community, where everything is de-centralized, but communication is linked everywhere. I can even link to my own video channel from Lemmy.
Now, look at PeerTube’s instance lists, based on what I’ve seen on the Join PeerTube site:
- Spectra.video
- TILvids (basically non-existent)
- Neat.tube
- Video.blender.org
- BassPistol
- Diode.zone
- FTV
- PeerTube.io
- Review.PeerTube.biz
It’s all so bare. At most, 80-90 instances for some sites. I can’t see a lot of other instances’ videos, and they can’t see mine. Not from here or here or here or here or here or here or here or here.
It makes PeerTube a large collection of small silos, instead of a real federated community. People want to be able to sign on to an instance and find the content they want without having to jump through all of these different instances. Subscription feeds rely on having a unified list from many different instances. The technology has a lot of potential, but the PeerTube community is not nearly as organized as the rest of the Fediverse.
This sounds like a somewhat simple problem to solve, but I’m not sure what other kind of technological hurdles exist. How did the Lemmy community solve it?
Lemmy solved this by not hosting video, for one. Hosting video sites is expensive as hell, especially if you’re expected to also replicate other people’s content. That way, servers can be run for only a few hundred dollars per month.
We’re looking at a gigabyte or more per post here, that’s not viable for any small, independent server. If Peertube ever takes off, the bandwidth and storage bills will kill it in a month.
But, all of these instances are already hosting the videos. Why not serve the links to the content on the Discover and Trending pages?
one reason which come to mind is Stream-ability.
if you download the video and play it, it might be fine. but users normally want to stream it.
to stream it, the endpoint from where you stream it needs to be near you.
if you are in the US and will stream something from a European server, you’ll have problems. and even if you don’t, that cannot be considered the norm.
that’s why people use CDNs, and they are a huge business.
so there’s an advantage to have a close to you instance, which has as much locally present content as possible
PeerTube uses P2P to share video data and PeerTube instances can mirror each others videos so they appear as a peer on the video.
The median seems to be much lower, like 10, 20 or 30 per month. Many admins reported they ran a server for other purposes anyways, and just had to pay for the domain to add a Lemmy instance.
It’s only after a few thousand users that the bill goes 3 digits.
At least that’s the impression I got from reading a few posts about this.
That’s true, but small servers don’t really matter much. Either they don’t contain many posts or they’ll easily get overwhelmed when their communities do get popular.
Only when you get to beehaw/.ml/.world size do servers actually matter for the network, in my opinion. My server runs for about €10 per month, including the domain, but I doubt it stays up if any big server server decides to create or follow a community on a server that size.