I feel like it would be best to proxy YouTube, or subscribe to paid indie channels like nebula, but without a user base and without ad revenue or subscription revenue I don’t know how quality content can come to PeerTube. Maybe I’m just missing the content but when I’ve checked it’s all very low quality, just random unedited webcam vblogs mostly.
When I look at the trending videos on YouTube, it makes me want to become a hermit and have no contact with society, the videos are so bad. I think the money side of YouTube has totally corrupted it.
As a PeerTube creator, I make videos as a way to teach/inform/entertain, not to make money. One way to make PeerTube work is to find a way to fund the hosts/instances that transcode and store the video files.
It would be interesting to create a crypto coin and have PeerTube users, both creators and viewers, to buy a small amount of the coin (a few dollars worth) when they register, then each video that they watch costs a small fraction of a coin paid to the instance hosting the video, and the viewer could add a tip to the creator if they liked the video. The amount paid to the instance might be an approximation of the cost to host the video. Accumulating the coin might be a game not an income source for the creators, but there might be enough money to fund the instances with this scheme.
There certainly is value in quality video that people are willing to pay for. It would be nice to find an alternative to advertising based video.
Another side of video that YouTube is not doing a good job at is creating community. The comment section is hard to follow, impossible to search, and it is transient, as new videos are created, comments on old videos disappear. I don’t know how to do it, but creating a forum or a lemmy group for each creator or each video interest group with multiple creators involved would be extremely powerful.
I quite listening to a podcast that went hard into streaming crypto coin as a way to boost income. I think I like the idea in principle. But there is something that smells funny to me about cryptocurrency. And I don’t think it actually works that well in principle. Funding open source and open access content is tough.
I’m old enough to remember a time before YouTube. When YouTube started, it wasn’t about making money. There were no ads. No subscriptions. No sponsors. In the early days of YouTube it was just backyard videos. But it didn’t take long for the connect to start getting good because it was the first of its kind, and everyone started using it. The problem now is, to convince people to use something else that, essentially does the same thing, but doesn’t make people money. Good luck with that.
Money corrupted YouTube. And now, the idea that people can be “content creators” for a living means that there will likely never be a mainstream, ad free, subscription free video platform, where people just make videos in their spare time. Peer tube is cool, but your not going to see high quality, curated content like you get on YouTube. An I think that’s probably a good thing.
YouTube was founded by 3 former PayPal employees and bought by Google for $1.65 billion just over a year after its creation. It launched its partner program in 2007 which is when people could start directly making money from the site - but for most big people on the platform, making money was the eventual goal anyway. There was always a plan for YouTube to make oodles of cash and for people to make money making videos on it.
If PeerTube doesn’t have some type of monetary incentive, nobody except for mild hobbyists making subpar content are going to migrate over.
I like that YouTube has higher quality content now and I don’t mind that creators expect to be compensated for what is now much more work. I do mind that YouTube treats them like second class citizens and can take however much of the pie they can get away with.
I remember it too. I just also remember how much of a quality improvement career YouTubers made. It’s still a good and valid thing imo, they make good videos for money. All platforms should facilitate that. Not facilitating that brings us back to an internet I honestly don’t think had a lot of value, just random family videos mostly.
With instance subscriptions you could cut out the huge cut Google takes and make creator unions essentially much easier to make.
I loved the early days of youtube. Brought us such gems as Chicken Police and Crazy Rainbow Lady.
I know of at least one. The channel is called The Linux Experiment.
@thelinuxexperiment_channel@tilvids.com
I enjoy his content a lot and really appreciate the fact that hés putting his content on peertube.
I hope people enjoying Peertube are supporting the project and creators financially. Otherwise it won’t have any future sadly.
Well, like all of the fediverse. It’s a bunch of volunteers who run the instances out of pocket. They need donations to keep going.
I’m currently on nebula, 7.2€ a month seems fair. A lot of their videos are high quality. AND THE BITRATE. Oh don’t get me started… It’s way higher than whatever YouTube offers
I haven’t looked around in five years, but there was some interesting tech tinkering stuff on that diode instance. I’m assume people reuploading their own YouTube channels doesn’t count, but there were some quality ones there even back then.
Am I allowed to throw my hat in the ring? I’m definitely No expert and I’m constantly learning, but I have vods of my live streams, gaming and tech, and I’m running Fireside Fedi a show about talking with different folks around the Fediverse. Let me know if I can post the link. I don’t want to self promote of that’s not what folks are looking for here.
Aldo I would say that we’re still very early in the Fediverse life cycle. Majority of these folks aren’t paid or are a shoestring budget and solo with tiny teams. So if we want to see this experiment survive we have to do more than what we’ve done in the past.
Talk to content creators you enjoy. Let them know you’d like to see their content on the Fediverse. Especially if you’re a patreon member. Create content yourself. The Fediverse will succeed or fail based on our actions.
The internet wasn’t born in a day and a LOT of projects failed, because everyone took the easy centralized way. This time we have to fight for it to remove their claws.
Let me know if I can post the link. I don’t want to self promote of that’s not what folks are looking for here.
Go for it.
In all honesty I don’t understand how PeerTube is supposed to scale with users once it gets content. Hosting, transcoding and streaming video is super expensive. There’s also a matter of making money from videos and without financial incentive it’ll be hard to compete with commercial solutions (in a capitalist hellholes that most of us live in). Community funding can keep up with hosting text but can barely keep up with hosting pictures, let alone something more, unless you’re an internet archive or something.
People who are on Nebula already made it in Youtube and they’re so big that they just want to make more money. They provide nice service for the money but I don’t think they will come support your revolution for free.
People who are on Nebula already made it in Youtube and they’re so big that they just want to make more money.
Nebula is a gated community for YouTubers who have already made it. They have no avenue for adding more users, like the wealth of good indie YouTubers that are up and coming, and they don’t even seem to want to add to their own curated list themselves. Their community has been stagnated for years. All they have done is forced their current membership to constantly advertise for them on YouTube.
Nebula is not the answer and never will be. I don’t even see a point in going there, because I already have these same channels on YouTube.
I didn’t mean Nebula would be the answer but many Nebulas that would do better or worse based on their own decisions rather than everyone being beholden to a single corporate overlord.
Peertube allegedly uses p2p networking that runs in your browser to serve videos. It’s open source but when I tried to actually read up on the protocol large parts of the docs were in french
I think it’s basically just bittorrent.
It uses P2P when multiple users is watching the same video. A PeerTube server can also mirror another PeerTube server’s videos and function as a peer.
You can see it this screenshot, that I’ve downloaded most of the video data from other peers.
PeerTube is build on ActivityPub, just like Lemmy. Right now federation is broken between Lemmy and PeerTube. When it’s fixed, you’ll be able to subscribe to PeerTube channels from here and comment as well.
Fix for the federation is here https://lemm.ee/comment/18936804
PeerTube scales by increasing the amount of instances available. But you are pretty much correct. The two things that’s expensive is: Storage and transcoding. The biggest expense is storage. It gets more and more expensive as videos is uploaded. Transcoding can become more expensive, if you have to keep up with new videos getting added all the time.
I would like to see individual content creators create their own PeerTube servers and thereby serving their content to the rest of the PeerTube servers and the Fediverse. I imagine a lot of content creators keep some kind of backup of their videos, so why not attach a PeerTube server to it? PeerTube allows you to keep the original file.
Regarding financial incentive, the “only” thing creators would miss out on, on Peertube is ad revenue. If we disregard the low amount of viewers on PeerTube compared to YouTube, a creator can still use sponsors, patreon, donations, affiliate links etc. on their videos.
I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that all money on YouTube comes from ads. IIRC nearly half comes from subscriptions and each Premium watcher is basically worth much more than ad-supported ones. My thinking is similar to yours - creators need to host things themselves and the next step would be creating coops that optimise infrastructure costs and deal with stuff like payment processing for subs. Nebula is one, Floatplane is another but with LTT yuck. We need more, especially non-US based. And people need to sub those too.
You are thinking about channel membership, right? This is something that could also be implemented in PeerTube, either by Framasoft themselves (devs of PeerTube) or as a plugin by anyone.
You mentioned LTT. They have their own video platform. It would have been cool if they had actually used PeerTube and build upon that instead of creating yet another “walled” video platform.
As long as artists need to support themselves in a capitalist environment it’s not reasonable for us to expect them to share their content freely. If we increase the amount of those small walled gardens then big corporations are no longer in control and we can rethink how we can compensate their work but it’s not fair to skip this step.
I feel like PeerTube only makes sense in the case of “I have the technical knowledge to host my own instance”
As indeed, I find it difficult to believe that any single “community”-instance will survive once it starts getting some traction. Hosting, maintaining and moderating such a platform would be extremely expensive if you have to do it for not only your own content.
I know nebula creators aren’t supporting any kind of revolution but they are creating their own coop and I commend them for that. All workers should. Maybe just an oss tool to get communities like them started for groups that want to form coops.
In that idea what we need is a built in interface for sponsorship, tipping, and paid subscriptions, built into PeerTube. They could have subscriptions on the instance itself or the channel.
I think it has more potential for shorts, if they do that, shorts get hella compressed on tiktok, ig, etc. itd be nice to self host and deal with your own compression, and just pay to serve content how you want it.
Maybe blender animators, vfx makers, edm visuals, etc. those type of artists would benefit most from something like peertube, dont get much visibility in youtube and peertube could be a return to artists and less whatever contents become
Yes but good luck finding it.
I’ve found better stuff by asking around for good channels, or learning that folks I follow have made a peertube channel, than I have by trying to use the interface. The discovery isn’t especially good.
There are only a couple decent channels I’ve watched but I get the honest impression there are more, they’re just burried in stuff. Also depends what you’re looking for. There are far more Foss youtubers who mirror over there and make decently high quality stuff than is available for a a lot of other genres of video
There definitely isn’t much, but I think there’s potentially more than is immediately obvious
@Cris_Color discovery is of the main features the federated apps have to improve. Urgently HoHOhoHO
While I agree, I also think in the case of peertube part of it might also be that there aren’t enough people watching for viewership to clearly highlight quality videos
I have some favorites
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https://makertube.net/accounts/michellemay about stichong, sewing etc
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https://subscribeto.me/accounts/gbryant technology and videogames
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https://video.canadiancivil.com/accounts/shifter active mobility and biking
Wait! Shifter is on peertube? Cool! Love that guy.
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No good content??? My man!!! Have you not heard of Nicole??? The fediverse chick!!! Watch as she mindlessly smokes a cigerette as she stares blankly at her monitor.
Or you could try Veronica, as she uploads several videos every minute. All about Linux. Nobody knows how she does it…
without ad revenue or subscription revenue I don’t know how quality content can come to PeerTube.
I saw a video where a YouTube channel broke down their income (I’ll try and find it but there are probably similar ones out there) and the amount coming directly from ads was quite small. Other sources of money include:
- Sponsorship
- YouTube’s built in subscription
- External subscriptions like Patreon
- Merchandise
- Physical media deals
Like Spotify, the cut from streaming isn’t great but those on it can leverage their profile in other ways.
The Fediverse still has a bit of a problem with monetisation but Ghost is working on joining and that is the equivalent of Substack with different subscription levels and I think most Fediverse services could do something similar. So Peertube could build in a “subscribe” button so people who enjoy your content could sign up to throw you a buck a month. Obviously a similar system could be added to the instance so you could donate to them, as hosting video is expensive.
I do wonder if we need a FediPay/PayFed service that other services could just plug in, so you’d have a central account across your Fediverse identities - subscribing on Pixelfed could get you subscriber exclusive Peertube content.
Would be interesting if Liberapay could somehow be built into PeerTube. So you simply click the “Support” button and it asks how much and then another click. Done. The rest is handled by Liberapay, which have been set up earlier.
Yeah, it has to be frictionless or you lose people along the way.
Although, looking around, this channel has a “support” button with PayPal and Patreon links. It’s a little crude but works.
For ease of use, it probably has to be a bit slicker and “one-click” but it’s a start.
Do some searching. There are lots of great channels. I’ve posted them the last 3 or 4 times this question was asked.
without ad revenue or subscription revenue I don’t know how quality content can come to PeerTube
AdSense makes up a relatively small portion of revenue for most creators. Their profit comes much more from:
- Sponsor spots
- Direct contributions
- Merch/personal products
Good point about the other funding methods.
yeah this is a bit like musicians or authors complaining that nobody buys their CDs and hardcovers anymore.
YouTube can kick you to the curb just for saying fuck and demonetizing you
I mean, your preferred PeerTube instance can do the same. The major difference is there would probably be a human doing it.
totally, but nothing is stopping you from moving to another one while still having access to the protocol. or if you can afford it, starting your own
Moving to another one that lacks the exposure of the one you were on. You could start your own but it wouldn’t have the same traffic. It’s the same problem, just on a smaller scale.
that’s totally valid. I don’t really use peertube and so my question is, since the program doesn’t have that many users anyways, how many creators are relying on getting views from their own instance? I thought they just advertise their channel to outside platforms
I haven’t checked it out yet, but the same could be said about the early days of YouTube. Professional cameras weren’t that common for the first years of it.
Yeah but that’s not the case for almost any other brand new video sharing platform. Because now people know how to content create. But they need to make money.
And content? I’ve only just started using it properly recently (here) but was happy to see a channel putting out trailers:
I was wondering about jailbreaking trailers from YouTube but, apparently, the studios own the copyright. I don’t think they care about YouTube channels uploading them because it is extra publicity but it is a legally gray area.
