What I find crucial about Framasoft’s work is not the idea that PeerTube will « beat » YouTube (that’s not even the goal), but that it exists at all. A small association like theirs reminds us that the way things are done online is not set in stone.
By building tools that prioritize openness and decentralization, they show that there could be real alternatives to the dominant platforms. Even if most people never leave YouTube, the simple fact that PeerTube and similar projects exist keeps alive the idea that the web doesn’t have to be controlled by a handful of corporations.
They need help in their journey - support them :) [0]
This is about PeerTube. I really want this project to succeed but it’s been many years and basically no one has heard of it. Is it really worth directing people to? The positioning of PeerTube, Framasoft, etc gets confusing for an everyday person like me.
vintermann · 1h ago
It hasn't succeeded yet, so therefore we should stop talking about it? I never understood this line of thinking. Some new inferior but better hyped variant, like Bluesky to Mastodon? Yes, the better technology doesn't always win out, but should we make that a self-fulfilling prophecy by pre-emptively abandoning something?
realityfactchex · 2h ago
As an everyday person, you can continue to use YouTube to discover and consume content.
It's more like, if you find a maker of content that you like, they might happen to have a PeerTube or other independent YouTube-like site up as well, as a backup or larger archive of their material.
The independently hosted FOSS alternatives are more for people who create content and don't want to or can't depend on the good graces of bigtech to indefinitely host their content for whatever reason (usually a practical matter, sometimes even underlying political factors).
For instance, YouTube will scan new content automatically and zap the channel if it says the wrong couple words more than a few times.
Maybe that's not a problem for a lot of channels. But there were definitely tons of creators who got burned by that kind of cancelling over the last n years.
So I imagine, yes, some entrepreneurial, technical, and communication-oriented folks would be interested in things like PeerTube, YouPHPTube (which is actually quite good) [1], etc.
> For instance, YouTube will scan new content automatically and zap the channel if it says the wrong couple words more than a few times.
This type of censorship is why I think decentralized video is important. But if it isn’t accessible to everyday people there will be low views and it hurts the availability of censored content.
bruffen · 2h ago
FYI: Us humans call it "watch videos", not "consume content".
Whenever I look at PeerTube there is basically no high quality stuff on it - i look through it for 5-10 minutes and it’s all bad.
To me it’s so far removed from what YouTube is i find it hard to compare the two - it might market itself as an alternative but I don’t see how that can be
vintermann · 1h ago
We have to distinguish delivery and discovery. Any competing video platform will have a very skewed selection of content at the start, biased towards stuff YouTube doesn't want to show its users, and in most cases, with good reason (i.e, stuff the users wouldn't want to see). Any kind of popularity-on-the-platform based filtrering will also not work, due to this skew.
balamatom · 1h ago
yes! i think we also need to keep reminding people that discovery is not an euphemism for advertisement. and if they expect it to be this passive, detached process of being told what the good shit is and then fed it, then they're part of the problem.
i've had good experiences with discovery on decentralized platforms. it's proceeded by means totally unlike advertisement, hmm, i wonder if anyone remembers what those were?
what i find funnier is how the platforms that have actual content hate crypto, and the platforms that have crypto ... i'm not sure if they even remember what "content" was. that ain't a way to starve youtubers, it's the exact opposite. shame.
jbm · 50m ago
This is nice but I have zero idea how I can surface interesting or useful videos. The search function on PeerTube doesn't give me anything useful for my topics of interest.
As a result, I wind up wasting hours and I simply do not have that time.
est · 1h ago
> I really want this project to succeed but it’s been many years and basically no one has heard of it
It's about authorship, not the tool.
I hope non-profit and academia would embrace peertube.
raybb · 29m ago
Too bad the creators stopped giving Mobilizon (Facebook events/meetup alternative) love a while back. It's a wonderful idea and pretty close to useful but so riddled with bugs it's painful. I've opened a few very small PRs and issues and posted them in their Matrix but nobody seems to be home to look.
By building tools that prioritize openness and decentralization, they show that there could be real alternatives to the dominant platforms. Even if most people never leave YouTube, the simple fact that PeerTube and similar projects exist keeps alive the idea that the web doesn’t have to be controlled by a handful of corporations.
They need help in their journey - support them :) [0]
[0] https://framasoft.org/
It's more like, if you find a maker of content that you like, they might happen to have a PeerTube or other independent YouTube-like site up as well, as a backup or larger archive of their material.
The independently hosted FOSS alternatives are more for people who create content and don't want to or can't depend on the good graces of bigtech to indefinitely host their content for whatever reason (usually a practical matter, sometimes even underlying political factors).
For instance, YouTube will scan new content automatically and zap the channel if it says the wrong couple words more than a few times.
Maybe that's not a problem for a lot of channels. But there were definitely tons of creators who got burned by that kind of cancelling over the last n years.
So I imagine, yes, some entrepreneurial, technical, and communication-oriented folks would be interested in things like PeerTube, YouPHPTube (which is actually quite good) [1], etc.
[1] https://youphp.tube
This type of censorship is why I think decentralized video is important. But if it isn’t accessible to everyday people there will be low views and it hurts the availability of censored content.
i've had good experiences with discovery on decentralized platforms. it's proceeded by means totally unlike advertisement, hmm, i wonder if anyone remembers what those were?
what i find funnier is how the platforms that have actual content hate crypto, and the platforms that have crypto ... i'm not sure if they even remember what "content" was. that ain't a way to starve youtubers, it's the exact opposite. shame.
As a result, I wind up wasting hours and I simply do not have that time.
It's about authorship, not the tool.
I hope non-profit and academia would embrace peertube.