I’m kind of sick of opening my tor browser everyday just for looking at important updates.
luckily if we get more people to join the fediverse, which RSS is an available option by default. in the future I might only need to just open my RSS feeds.
the problem is little to no content creators use the fediverse, even unaware that doing this is a good thing because of “First Mover Advantage”. on top of that, unlike that term doing this has no risks involved. you’re just expanding your audience.
People around the internet should ask their favorite youtubers and content creators to also use a Mastodon and Peertube account, maybe get them a crossposter software to do everything for them. if that exists.
like you and everyone else, I don’t want to rely on big social media corporations to connect with people.
I hope this message gets to somewhere, repost this or tell other’s to do the same.
As someone who managed a PeerTube instance for a large YouTube channel I have to say the big problem is storage: how are you going to pay for storage that increases with each new video while the income is mostly the same? From a business point of view it’s a suicide.
Keep in mind content creators on YouTube produce many gigabytes/week. In a few years they would have to pay hundreds of dollars each week, even when they pause and not producing any new video, when they are getting less donations and so on.
Why should they invest so much money in a PeerTube instance? Only a premium pay-to-view service can justify it and you really need a high cost-to-produce-and-stream-the-video/minutes-of-video ratio to make it convenient, for example documentaries and not lazy records of hours of online debates.
Interesting, I’m researching on the best solution right now, if there is no way around this problem then peertube will simply never take off.
edit; I haven’t found anything yet, in fact I think only you have talked about this specific problem, It’s really late here I’m gonna sleep.
This has to have been discussed before right? Because yeah this is a very strong argument not to self-host. Naively I’m wondering if there can be archives backed by IPFS or something but that’s so much data it’s scary.
Indeed I opened the issue on PeerTube Github about IPFS years ago. No, IPFS alone doesn’t solve this, it would just be a way to make the federation more robust.
The only solution I can think of is the following: make PeerTube content creators able to “archive” their old videos, maybe automatically when they approach a storage limit. By “archiving” I mean the video files are deleted from the server but the video page with its comments remain. Before archiving the author is prompted to download the video files. If a user open the page of an archived video they can’t play it, instead a button is shown to ask the original author to reupload it. The user is then notified that the video is available again. At that point is up to the content creator to reupload the old video and keep it online for a while. One could also reupload the video files because their video is relevant again (think about old news that can return interesting).
you should definitely open this issue on github and recommend your own solution, that way people don’t have to buy storage they can’t buy. this is a temporary solution but at least it’ll give them more time to think of something. (i.e. monetization methods, or better hosting solution.)
I already discussed this once on GitHub, I don’t remember where, sorry.
to solve this problem we should take example from youtube.
read number 7 and 7.2; https://www.8bitmen.com/youtube-database-how-does-it-store-so-many-videos-without-running-out-of-storage-space/
but peertube is different from youtube, It’s federated. and we shouldn’t use a storage system like GFS/Bigtable, because it isn’t open source. instead we should use HDFS, and make a hosting datacenter designed for video streaming services. should be similar to this;
app = peertube client
this way, adding more storage would be easier and cheaper as you don’t have to move things around much. and instead of renting the drives they should have an alternative to buy an HDD storage tied to that account. a seperate ssd should be used for running the operating system.
The reason no hosting companies haven’t done this (or at least, I don’t know if it exists.) is because not much avid content creators host their own streaming site like peertube. this problem has never been a thing before.
The article is really interesting, thank you! But it’s all about performance it seems. As far as I can understand a decentralized network of small PeerTube instances don’t need much work for scaling, what we have to solve instead is rough storage size.
For sure we should improve the support for WebMonetization and get microdonations while streaming but again the main problem remain: the storage cost always increases over the time while the income is always tied to actual views/popularity/donations/whatever at a given time.
The video files have to be removed from the servers, the point is how. In addition to the archiving feature I described the “archived” videos could be streamed from the PCs of people making them available via (Web)Torrent. This should be techically possible since the support for WebTorrent is coming to libtorrent, the library used by many torrent desktop clients, but we would still need a lot of work on PeerTube side.
At that point the PeerTube instances would be a mere interface to stream video stored on people’s PCs and eventually caching popular videos automatically on the servers for better performance.
I think you missed my point here, yes It’s good for performance, but I’m talking about how a datacenter could run a video streaming service for multiple customers, if storage is the problem then they can put the videos in a HDFS (or GFS) file system. no matter where the storage is, they can assign it to a VPS user. similar to youtube datacenters work. doing this will be cheap and efficient.
that’s a great solution. even though it haven’t been implemented, at least they have something to work with.
IPFS works similarly to webtorrent. However IPFS is working on a system to incentivize seeding via filecoin.
How many GB are we really talking about per week here? Most instances seem to have costs of between 15 and 40€/month and some of them have over a TB of data…
Roughly ~20-80 GB/week resulting after a couple of years in ~100-200$/month
That’s huge! Who uploads so much they need 80GB :o
Have you taken into account that the final space occupied by a video includes several files transcoded at different resolutions?
I mean, yeah for sure but still that is a lot. It’s Twitch Replays or something (also no need to use 4k necessarilly).