cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/5294605
Youtube, for so many years, was just too good. Yes, they changed the 5 star rating system to likes and dislikes and a few years later disabled dislikes altogether, but their algorithm mostly digs up interesting content and it just works for creators and viewers.
This might change soon. Their new strategy to disallow ad-blockers will frustrate a certain kind of viewer. Those who dislike surveillance and like open-source tech, those who use uBlock Origin and know why.
Just like a few years ago mastodon suddenly reached a certain kind of popularity, because twitter had their first big fuckup, maybe Peertube is next. It certainly is the most polished decentralized solution that doesn’t use a blockchain. Creators or fans could easily host their own videos, fans can watch it, without ads.
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PeerTube will not replace youtube. it cannot compete in either scale or creator compensation.
i don’t think people realize just how insane your infrastructure has to be to handle 30,000 hours of video being uploaded every hour.
Taking some simple napkin math, I have a 1min 1080p video downloaded from YT. It clocks in at 15MB.
So, Gamer’s Nexus has 2.6k videos. (That’s insane, btw, but fairly large channel, not even LTT size though).
Assuming just 1080p, and let’s say about 10min average per video. (Some are less, some are 40+), that’s 150MB per 10min video, and that means it’s 390,000Mb (or 380.86GB) for their collection. Assuming I’m wrong and the average is even half of that, and the average GN video is only 5 minutes that’s still 190GB. And that isn’t counting 4k, or the multiple other formats to optimize streaming (720, 480, 360, misc bitrates, etc)
And that’s just storage, not even taking into account compute! (Or egress, or transcriptions, or scaling, or…)
Really for something like Peertube to take off it will require each channel to spin up their own instance, which honestly is just another expense for them, one that Youtube does for them for free, plus Youtube offers to pay them. Which, would cut down on some of the chaff (only people who want to do it would do it), but yeah, I don’t think it’s going to replace YT at any point. Smaller channels can combine for sure, but there is definitely a threshold where it becomes extremely costly.
I’m all for the fediverse, but video streaming is freaking costly and expensive. There’s definitely a reason youtube has a monopoly on it. Now this isn’t to discourage, but more for anyone who may be thinking "yeah why doesn’t peertube just replace it?)
150MB per 10min video, and that means it’s 390,000Mb (or 380.86TB) for their collection.
Your overall point is fair, but your math here is off by a factor of 1000 - it would be around 380 GB.
Oh damn, forgot GB. So stupid, good catch. Fixing it
It could be done if peertube used a scheme like BitTorrent. We are approaching a time where enough users have sufficient upstream bandwidth for video.
But then, even without hosting costs, creating videos takes much more time and effort than writing a short text.
Peertube does allow downloading from peers like bittorrent. But you still need to host the whole video, it only would alleviate data transfer. And I don’t think you’d want to not host the video and rely entirely on people sharing your video and continuing to seed it for it to be available. So for running a channel or sharing videos that you have produced you will still need to host the files somewhere.
This is something PeerTube already does. Viewers of a video will be a peer and so can other PeerTube servers also be for each others videos.
Bandwidth isn’t the biggest issue. Storage is. The video need to be stored somewhere and storage is expensive.
We need something like Siacoin, that’s easy to use and easy to donate or sell cheap storage.
Nice idea, but then everytime a video that contains anything licensed by the content mafia is uploaded (even partly), the user in question breaks that license opening themselves up to lawsuits.
In a perfect world where only properly free content is shared that model would work. But that is not how most content shared on YouTube looks like.
everytime
not a word.
A long time ago I read a paper how to mitigate this. Without remembering the details, the idea was: 1. One peer never holds a complete file, only parts of it. 2. You need a key to find all parts of the file and get them in the right order. So Disney can only accuse you of having an incomplete and unusable part of their movie.
But copyrighted material is only one issue. Do you want your hardware to be used for distributing depictions of sexual abuse, or inciting hatred and violence? Any YouTube replacement will need strong moderation tools.
That is essentially how bittorrent works anyway. In Germany people lost in court over this. Also portions of a copyrighted file are a problem. If they can “proof” that they got a relevant portion (more than the typical fair use seconds) you are still on the hook.
‘Landgericht Hamburg’ proofing will be hard, admittedly. But doesn’t BT just split up a file in x parts, so each part is watchable? What if you sliced differently, like every 100th byte of a file? Or even bitwise slicing? Not one 600 s snippet but 60000 10 ms snippets from throughout the movie.
That could help, but if a file is not shared that much (yet) or not many people are online at the moment, a single peer will still share many more parts, likely ending up with having shared significant amounts.
But copyrighted material is only one issue. Do you want your hardware to be used for distributing depictions of sexual abuse, or inciting hatred and violence? Any YouTube replacement will need strong moderation tools.
The concept is that will only happen if you have watched that video depicting sexual abuse, because your peertube client (the website) won’t download videos you didn’t watch.
I was thinking of a hypothetical system were peers provide storage for creators independently of what they are watching (in response to ‘videos take too much storage for individuals to host’ comment. For peertube, you are right.
You are vastly overestimating the amount of storage you need since you are looking at some download which itself has to choose the encoding (which is independent of whatever youtube does: youtube absolutely crushes the quality).
Most estimates assume that youtube has 1 exabyte of storage, let’s say we buy this in bulk from retail (which we wouldn’t do: you wait as long as possible since storage prices are going down and retail stores would give you the finger if you ordered and exabyte worth).
Let’s take that number and run with it:
Buying retail, you can get Seagate Exos X20 20TB drives for 280€, 1 exabyte is 1Mio terabyte, meaning we have 1_000_000/20 * 280 = 14 Mio € (you’d need machines to put those into but you also wouldn’t buy the entire thing upfront, and using retail prices either).Compute also isn’t that big of a deal if you do it correctly: the expensive part in video hosting is usually video encoding since to get small video sizes you need to spend compute beforehand to compress it.
However, you can shift this in significant parts to the user by implementing the transcoding in WASM and running this clientside (see e.g. https://www.w3.org/2021/03/media-production-workshop/talks/qiang-fu-video-transcoding.html) in that case users would compress locally in the browser before uploading (this presumably wouldn’t even take longer than normal uploads for most people since you trade off transcoding time against upload time).
There are still other compute expenses but those are much more limited.
These mechanisms don’t (at least to my knowledge) exist in peertube yet, but would be possible.The actually expensive part is always the actual networking: Networking is one of the few things that actually get more expensive at scale due to the complexity explosion, rather than cheaper (e.g. having dedicated transcoding hardware drops in price per user since you have higher utilization).
Networking quickly runs into bottlenecks where you have to account for all the covariances between datasets in the network.
Basically to increase the amount of e.g. storage available everything in the network needs to be increased (from the local machines connections, over the cables and switches up to routers and outgoing connections) due to you increasing the density at one point, you have to increase the network everywhere.
That’s why networking dwarfs everything: you just get crushed by networking being the bottleneck between your increasingly dense devices.The clue behind peertube is that this is not as extreme of an effect due to
- federation (certain connections just aren’t dense due to the overall network topology being distributed)
- torrents
The latter is the important part: instead of having network cost rising (super) linearly to the amount of users you have it rise linearly to the amount of simultaneous unique videos.
This is a much smaller number which means you do not need to compete in that space, which is the dominant cost factor. (if you have a method where one user can retain the video and share it without actively watching that same video, you can probably get real-world sublinear scaling)Mind you, the costs involved here are still large, but not insurmountably large, especially considering there is not one unique organisation that would have to pay for the entire thing and its not an upfront expense. Fundamentally though the system is built such that it won’t be crushed as users flood into the network.
That’s why it needs to be an international project. Paid by every country together. Sure some will initially have to pay more but sooner or later everyone wants to be part of it and pay their part.
Yeah, storage and bandwidth are massive considerations and there’s no way Peertube can handle it. And each channel running their own instance actually makes it worse, since you’re going to have smaller entities who can’t take advantage of deals that larger companies can make for hardware, data centers, bandwidth, etc. Plus, if you’re having to run your own instance to have a channel, then you’re not just focusing on creating videos for the channel, now you’re also a system architect, sysadmin, etc. It makes it a massive barrier to entry, and one that only tech enthusiasts will even consider tackling.
But even say that happens: a bunch of people running their own instances for their channel. Where are they hosting it? Are they purchasing their own hardware? Running their own data centers? They’re most certainly not running it out of their home. The overhead for that kind of operation is massive. What you’ll end up with is a bunch of people running their instances on AWS or some other PaaS provider. And then you’re right back to the problem you’re trying to solve with a distributed service: that the service is consolidated on one platform (even if it doesn’t appear that way to the end user). Sure, AWS et al aren’t dictating the terms of service for your Peertube instance, but the instance is dependent on that platform.
On top of all that, you have the issue of monetization. How are you going to make money from your channel? Peertube doesn’t have the kind of infrastructure of advertising etc. that YT has.
You also have another massive issue: legal. YT spent over a decade going through the courts with the MPAA, RIAA, et al fighting about copyright issues. Google has massive amounts of money and was able to weather that fight. But it’s competitors didn’t. Which is why you don’t have Vimeo stars, for example.
Running a YT channel is a massive time, energy, and money sink. Add all of these other considerations to it, and it’s an impossible task. It’s hard to think someone would could see PT as a viable alternative. Google destroyed all of the competition (or let attrition do it for them), and pulled the ladder up behind them.
I didn’t even think about the personal risk, which I do know because I run a lemmy instance. You hit the nail on the head, I either see it as:
- Individual creators host their own, where they can host all they want, but there is no money to be made, in fact there is only money to be lost, so it’d end up being an insane amount of ads and sponsored content
- Group servers like we have, but they’re only good until a tipping point to be honest, if they started getting a fraction of youtube content we’ll see them lock down uploads, and most will shut down if they get hit by one of the acronym agencies.
I love the fediverse, but I was a professional in the video world too, and video is heavy. Everything about it is crazy, take all the scaling problems and quadruple them. I hope peertube can find something that works
380 GB in storage for multiple years of contents is really not much. I archive that amount every 2 months.
The real problem is serving all that content to the viewers, and the first bottleneck is usually the upload bandwidth.
I think the more interesting number would be to know how much data would it be to upload an average sized video to every viewer of it.
Using your example of a 15 MB video, serving that to 300.000 viewers means uploading roughly 4,5 TB data, plus some for technical data (TCP/IP and HTTP headers and such). For every (average) video! Now that’s a lot!Fortunately PeerTube helps with that: viewers will automatically upload their downloaded chunks of the video to the others currently viewing it, so in the end the server needs somewhat less bandwidth usage.
Other than that, it would be the perfect place where channels could team up to host shared instances for themselves, or every channel their own one but with redundancy set up, so that their friend channels could also chip in with the bandwidth when needed.
Who said it needs to compete in scale as a single entity? PeerTube was never planned to be run by a single large provider
to be ran
to be run
Oh yes, sorry, and also not complete but compete
For the scale that is needed it will inevitably be a handful of hosts at best.
PeerTube will not replace youtube.
I didn’t say it would. Mastodon looked vastly different when it had its first wave of users. Peertube will look very different in the future as well.
The amount of money that is being thrown into hosting alone would not last, sure more do-able with the Fediverse but still not likely to happen.
PeerTube will be a real competitor to YouTube when the Year of the Linux Desktop happens.
Well, that’s perfect, because that’s going to be [insert next calendar year here].
Commenting from the future. Here in 2039 and i cant believe how prescient you are!
2040 def the year it happens.
I feel like all of these fediverse platforms are going to suffer from the same issue.
I searched up peertube and clicked on the peertube link. No where was there a “recommend videos” feed or “upload videos” or “create account” and the first link to a peertube platform is a cliche “rebellion” something or other.
These things will never see mass adoption if they aren’t approachable to the casual browser. It sucks, but the average user would rather give their data to Google or watch 25sec of ads before each video then try to figure out fediverse. Especially since when you do figure it out, there isn’t any good content yet.
I didn’t mean that the average user will migrate to peertube. I meant that tech savvy people who share peertube’s values might join.
Lemmy isn’t easy to use either.
- diode.zone
- tilvids.com
- conf.tube
- cliptube.org
- media.privacyinternational.org
- makertube.net
- video.blender.org
- vidcommons.org
- share.tube
Just to name a few I think have nice videos right on their start page.
You can only make it so easy… If you want a centralistic platform with algorithmic recommendations, use YouTube… Emancipating oneself is work. But I’d agree onboarding for new users could and should be easier.
You don’t need a centralized platform to have recommendations.
You just let users choose some tags and go from there. Each server will surface different videos, but if they all pull from everyone they’re federated with it would be a lot more accessible pretty quickly. And let users opt in/out of watch history tracking to feed their suggestions.
It won’t have the potential YouTube does, but YouTube’s so compromised on intent that it could easily be better in practice if content availability were the same (which is obviously way off).
I’m not sure if Peertube perhaps already does that. There are tags to a video and it shows related videos. But I don’t know how it calculates that.
I don’t think Peertube stores interests of the users, yet. That would be a possible solution. But it also requires the user to put something in or some tracking of their activity.
Edit: Misunderstood you, corrected my comment.
That’s fine, though.
You just explicitly make it opt in and make it clear what you’re storing and why.
If you have a bunch of people guess how many M&M’s are in a jar you can average the guesses and you’ll come very close to the correct amount. A recommendation system can be very democratic in that way. When reddit still had their public API I would take advantage of this fact and use it to decide if something was a “deal” or not on PC parts. I was tracking the prices of computer ram at the time as an experiment. It worked very well. If they are federated properly, then their content can be filtered and appear on an instances front page.
I replicated your experiment. Top link seaching for peertube is https://peertube.tv/videos/
There are at least videos listed. But they are 80% by the same channel and mostly about cars/EVs with a few other tech things. Immediately i think “this is for a certain type of person” and that aint me.
They really need to mix up their front page to show some sort of diversity. Should not repeat the same creator over and over again. Surely there are 10-15 people on all of pt that could be highlighted.
I think it needs a site like the old link aggregators, that scrapes videos across a ton of different PeerTube instances and turns them into a nice searchable frontend, as well as showing a variety of different vids on the landing page.
No, because:
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Content creators want to monetize their videos, even if it is shit monetization.
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Users and content creators want discoverability.
They can monetize their videos on PeerTube, can’t they? It has built-in Liberapay support
That would be like saying Patreon is monetizing video.
No. I mean ad-supported income that automatically comes with YouTube. Not to mention members subscription and Superchats which are also built in functions and represent significant part of content creators’ income.
I havent noticed any liberapay support on peertube channels. I can’t find any information on liberapay on peertube either, could you share some links?
Hmm, sorry, I have probably remembered it incorrectly.
I remember seeing a liberapay-yellow button below the bottom right of some videos, but now I can’t anything about it either.It seems there’s no liberapay integration, however there’s a support button if the channel sets it up. It can show arbitrary text, like links to liberapay and similar.
Here’s an example, and mentioned in the FAQ here
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peertube is never gonna be a replacement for youtube, it’s good as a “upload random stuff you made” platform but modern youtube is so detached from that
Mastodon might never replace twitter but it’s still a cool platform with a similar use case.
true
I guess it depends on what you use it for.
I have two use cases, personally.
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How to videos for stuff I don’t know how to do. Like, fix a leaky spigot or something like that.
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Following content creators.
I could see PeerTube being fine for #1, but I don’t see it ever being positioned as a viable option for those who want to generate reasonable profit for their content. Would be happy to be proven wrong though.
YouTube algorithm: Yo, dawg, I heard you like spigots! Check out the latest spigot content from these awesome creators! Don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss out on the freshest spigot uploads!
I think PeerTube could possibly work for streamer VOD channels, since a lot of them probably keep them locally for archival/backup purposes, anyway. I’ve seen people mention thar PT uses BitTorrent for streaming videos to other users – I think that could work for this particular purpose
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That’s what Youtube still is to me.
That’s what YouTube was so maybe the churn will continue.
Peertube needs to really federate if it wants a fighting chance. Having to rely on Sepia Search to find videos just won’t cut it for most people.
It also needs some big content producers using it in order to anchor it. And that requires it to enable an intuitive business model for those producers.
Patreon integration, payment processor integration, and ads management. And that last one is kind of anathema to a lot of people and projects on the Fediverse.
Not just using it. Using it exclusively. Nobody is going to commit to going to a new patient to watch just some of their favorite creators content.
It already has “Patreon” integration, with Liberapay, which is better because there are lower overall transaction fees (Lp itself imposes none).
Patreon would be probably relatively easy from that I think, as that’s just one more platform that works in almost the same way.
I am trying to move to towards peertube more but the creators aren’t there yet so…
Yeah I think the only way ‘creators’ will be there is if there is something to move across these larger ones, or at least makes sense to cross-post between YouTube and PeerTube. It’s going to be a hard battle to fight especially with PeerTube limited Space on most instances.
I really tried to visit the main instance regularly, which was hosted by the developer. But the latest video was 1 month old and every video there targeted a niche I don’t care.
Yeah unfortunately it’s not a viable replacement at the moment.
And I don’t think we can solve this easily. I’ve heard bigger creators say they want to make money with their videos. And Peertube doesn’t do ads, so it doesn’t pay the creators. And we’re kind of going in circles now anyways because your initial suggestion was to switch to Peertube because of the YouTube ads. We can not have them and don’t have them at the same time.
Maybe the solution is sponsoring. I heard ad revenue had declined anyways and many creators mainly rely on sponsoring nowadays.
I don’t think it’s an issue. If your content is good, you should be able to find an audience and if you have an audience you’ll be able to find sponsors. That doesn’t have to be by directly reaching out to sponsors themselves, you can work with intermediaries.
Youtube obviously dominates the space right now but it’s hardly the only viable business model. In fact I think it’s better if content creators have more control than YouTube provides.
As far as I’m informed YouTube doesn’t treat them well. The creators are completely at mercy of ‘the algorithm’. It decides how much it wants to pay them per 1000 views, how many people it wants to recommend a video to, and there is little to no transparency from YouTube’s side. And if they encounter problems they get to talk to an AI. There aren’t many human contacts to solve an issues even if the creator’s livelihood is in danger.
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If interoperability were improved, Mastodon and Lemmy may be able to standin for discovery algorithms in the short term.
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I’ve just signed up for access to MakerTube but yeah I agree, most Instances won’t be able to host 5+ years of content from users making rather the user or the instance to rather have to delete the content or the user to create a ‘second’ channel to upload more. Hopefully with time, storage get’s better and easier but quality of video files (and there for size) will most likely grow so it’s really a cat and mouse game.
Ad blocking is always going to be a game of Whac-a-Mole, with YT’s latest efforts likely converting some users to turning it off or subscribing while pushing others away.
Thing is, converting a nonzero number is, in a vacuum, all that’s needed to make the line go up.
When YT insinuated its way around uBO, I tried Piped and Invidious, both of which had such severe drawbacks that I was relieved to find instructions on how to update uBO to once again get around it.
But I’m one of those people who simply cannot handle the audio of advertising. That overexcited tone announcing grandiose solutions to invented problems makes my blood boil to the point that I’ve not listened to the radio outside of NPR since the '90s, have never had a cable subscription and never bought rabbit ears. I do not stream anything on my phone for the same reason. If advertising is part of the package, well, that’s what VPNs and torrents are for … unless I can purchase the content without it for a reasonable price (my Beatport collection confirms this).
But there’s no fucking way I will pay for a service that includes advertising. And on YT, even though that’s nominally what happens if you pay, well … there’s a reason SponsorBlock is also a thing. Spotify absolutely baffles me. I have no problem spending $10 (or whatever it’s up to now) a month on music, but I damn well better own that music in perpetuity if I’m paying for it.
It’s impossible to avoid being manipulated in life, but it’s not particularly difficult to excise voices telling you how much happier you’ll be if you buy something.
Inb4: so you just think all content should be free huh.
I’m placing my bets on piped video instead, for now at least. YouTube needs something more tragic, like getting acquired by Elon Musk, before it bleeds for real.
Afaik piped is not an alternative to YouTube just a different client for it.
If everyone suddenly moved to piped one day both YouTube and piped would probably suffer
Yes, it’s a client. Well, for better or for worse, no chance that this huge of a user base will move to piped. I don’t understand why it’s not super famous yet, but I guess invidious and piped are simply fringe tech still.
That’s why I said that YouTube would need a major tragedy to get a real hit, real alternatives like Peertube are going to struggle a lot against the network effect. Nebula has a much better shot given the amount of content creators invested on it, and it’s still a long shot.
Might be an unpopular opinion but I think piped is far worse of an experience than the default site/app
Doesn’t work half the time, can’t do 4k for some reason , audio is a bit scuffed and no recommendations
Don’t get me wrong I really want to like it but it has a while to go before it can get mainstream appeal
If YouTube has a major tragedy and people migrate to piped YouTube will find a way to block piped, it’s their database at the end of the day
Not unpopular with me at all, my wife also prefers regular YouTube because the video quality tends to be better. YouTube just handles variable connection speeds better, and the buffering and quality switching is very smart. I mostly agree, the watching experience is superior.
But YouTube ads are among the highest annoyances of my daily life right now, they simply could not be less relevant for me. Because I’m in NA it’s adamant that I buy an EV or an SUV, a bunch of fast food ads, it’s just too much. I’m willing to spend 20 seconds waiting for Piped to buffer instead of 8 seconds of YouTube ads.
And I’m not really hoping Piped will ever go mainstream, because as you said, if that happens they’re toast. Piped and Invidious have to stay niche to keep flying under the radar - well not really under the radar, YouTube already sent a Cease and Desist to Invidious, but I guess for now they’re not invested in enforcing it yet.
Not until they make it possible for creators to make money. At least with a patreon type system on peertube itself
That’s without doubt the worst feature of YouTube.
The amount of algorithm spam is unfathomable. A web search of “how do I …?” went from one line responses to ten minute videos with an automated voice.
There last ten years of internet have been a mistake.
I use YouTube for blender tutorials and find new tutorials that are straight to the point all the time so I’m not sure what you mean.
Also if anything that’s a reason for making monetization via a system like patreon even more important instead of an ad based monetization.
Funny you should mention Blender, there is an official Blender channel on Peertube
I know, they actually run their own instance
I saw some YouTubers linking their Patreon on their channel info and video descriptions. As I don’t have a Google account and not going to start now, this is the only way I can support hem. If they are interested in getting money, they will just start making good content to get patrons instead of shit videos that make you addicted or hypnotized to keep watching them, I suppose, and would be more healthy too.
The near stranglehold YT has had on online video could not last forever. I think they’ll be the 800 pound gorilla for years to come, but I hope many smaller guys pick up speed as YT continues to throw its weight around. And I believe YT will continue to shit on users and eventually pay a high price for that.
How long until YT is totally paywalled?
How long until YT is totally paywalled?
Probably never. I doubt they could offset ad revenue with subscription fees.
Bold of you to assume they would stop rolling ads instead of simply requiring a “fair and reasonable ad supported tier”.
Creators or fans could easily host their own videos, fans can watch it, without ads.
Yeah sure. Because creators don’t need to eat or pay rent or anything.
If people have bet their livelihoods on fleeting hobbies on platforms that actively fuck them over, repeatedly, then frankly I can’t be too upset about it.
People will make stuff for free because they enjoy it. Most people don’t have much free time to chase their creative hobbies; I wish we didn’t live in a world where artists have to justify their existence by monetary means, but let’s not pretend that ads are paying for the creative underclass.
A lot of people have jobs doing creative work like YouTube, even before the age of YouTube people where creating stuff such as TV Shows, Radio and Movies (Legacy Media). Sure a lot of people would still create something in free time but the reason people create quality content on places like YouTube is because they are being paid as a bonus, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to spend as much time on the content they create.
I agree
Let’s try out some systems where artists don’t have to suffer this way. Maybe UBI?
I agree, given my own experience in this regard. I’ll film what I’m doing because I think there’s a value in the techniques or approach that others may find helpful in their own lives, but there’s a limit to how much time I’ll spend editing it or adding effects/thumbnail creation/etc. That’s time that could be spent on the tasks that aren’t being done due to the setup and breakdown time for capturing the video, the amount of editing that does get done, or the time spent planning for longer/deeper dive videos.
Sure, there’s a slight economic advantage for doing those videos given what we do, but it’s not like we’re monetized. The collection of videos is primarily just because of my enthusiasm for what we’re doing, with my reliance on internet groups for social interaction coming in as a close second.
So far most instances do not want to federate so it’s getting anoying to discover new content.
I think they are Federated, it’s just hard to find users as one of the people on your instance needs to know what the creator is called before you can expand into, finding there content, this TBH kills the PeerTube experience as you need to use other instances or sources to find the creators you want to watch instead of just working like YouTube does.
