PeerTube is pretty sweet. If you post videos on YouTube, I'd suggest you also find a PeerTube instance you like, and host your videos there as well. Think of it as a backup for YouTube, for when they nuke your account for some unknown/undisclosed reason[0][1][2], while also participating in (and thereby somewhat supporting) platforms that don't surveil your every granular action.
It is indeed possible to have a tool that could cross-post to both. Use something like OBS to record a copy of your video that you're streaming to youtube, twitch, tec..
You also don't need to paint an entire a peer to peer community with the worst actors on it. There are plenty of normal content creators and instances that are not overrun with that content (see https://tilvids.com/videos/trending)
Also backing up your videos locally will not do anything for helping your fans get access to your content, you will still need to re-host it somewhere. Having it on peer-tube means if your account gets frozen/banned over some bullshit, you can just point your fans to your peer tube channel.
Youtube is such a platform, odysee and that sort of things are, peertube is not.
Peertube is the free software anyone can use to host video content in a decentralized and federated manner. It's akin to what the personal blogs were on the web a few years back
For the federated part, peertube is part of the fediverse through activitypub.
"... a platform infested with bigotry, consipracies, scams, misinformation, graphic violence, etc..."
Thought for a second there this was referring to YouTube and the videos its recommendation algorithms present. Heck the web is filled with this sort of garbage, just peruse the .com zone file. The majority of websites are junk. Yet we still "support" the web, a "platform" infested with the worst humanity has to offer.
Yeah it feels like Youtube algorithms generated an entire new generation of neo-nazis and reptilian/illuminati-concerned conspiracists but now that Youtube is (sometimes) starting to take a stand against its own children, the FLOSS ecosystem should be responsible for the monstrosity produced by that multi-billion dollar corporation?!
Source: i've stopped youtube entirely years ago because every time i was watching some interesting content (including radical politics) it would always try to push nazi/illuminati content to me.
And yet how many times does some tech journalist/tech worker/tech worshipper tell us that Big Tech knows us better than we know ourselves. Maybe advertisers believe it. Even if Big Tech knows what computer users want, it does not mean that is what they will try to serve to them.
I have scripts that allow me to see which results in a YouTube search are increasing in views over time. The worst videos, with high view counts, that are the least responsive to the search terms (if even responsive at all) are being incessantly promoted by YouTube and we can see the the high view counts continue to increase day after day, for years.
One mans misinformation and conspiracy theories is another mans truth. The exact reason I would use something like Peertube is the risk that my view is somehow not in line with the narrative and the content is removed.
I was looking at this before and went to https://open.tube/ to explore the content to see how the community looked. The front page had a video of extreme violence on it and I never returned. Looking now the front page is mostly political flamebait.
A real community growing on the back of this technology will require either YouTube screwing up royally or some sort of grassroots effort based on micro payments to content creators (as opposed to ads) I think.
I mean, you chose to browse an instance that describes it self as "a censorship-free Youtube alternative". What did you expect? Browse https://joinpeertube.org/instances and for the "Sensitive videos" option, choose "Hide". Assuming you may be interested in tech/science, https://tube.tchncs.de/ is quite a popular instance.
It wasn’t a conscious choice I think I came across it after clicking the “Sita Sings the Blues” link. Again like mastodon, the various instances are confusing to most people to be honest. But yeah I can see a grassroots instance around some hobby or interest being able to sustain itself.
History is littered with failures when competitors catering to ejected parts of a community try to make it work. You can't start a site based on the rejects.
These comments are basically equating Peertube to Gab, but I have to disagree with that comparison. Gab is a website, Peertube is software, and these are different things. Peertube doesn't need to be profitable to stay alive, it just needs people to keep using it. So I think it will have a longevity that "outcast" websites don't.
More accurately, if you start a site based on the rejects then it will only contain the content and community that was rejected in the first place. You can probably succeed if you brand it specifically for that crowd, but don't expect anyone else to switch.
Meanwhile, history also rewards communities who support and listen to the underserved in order to improve collective wellbeing. You can build a movement based on inclusion.
I agree, you can build a movement based on community and doing things for the love of it. Allowing everyone in comes later and is for mainly for growth and profitability and usually is when we see this earlier community fracturing. That's when these websites grow bigger and bigger and start to monetize because people will not cooperate freely for nothing anymore. Commerce replace community but a community comes first and is rewarded. Commerce rewards also, in more obvious material ways.
Thanks, that's a good observation of traditional (online?) community evolution.
It seems like software could potentially be a little different though, given zero-cost-of-copy, zero-cost-of-communication, and zero barriers (other than social inertia) to learning, inspection, modification and contribution of code.
Perhaps sufficiently-sized communities require fragmentation in order to function effectively (it certainly happens within large organizations) - that happens fairly naturally already with software projects too, though, so there may not necessarily be a scalability or community-size limit concern there.
Inclusion works to a point, and that point is when some of the included groups begin to exclude the other groups. By which I'm trying to refer to the paradox of tolerance: "[It] states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance."
If your movement is "based on inclusion" and the population that you strive to include contains Nazis, then your movement will be a Nazi movement sooner or later. Often sooner.
The story of how a bar becomes a Nazi bar applies to any community, not just bars. Karl Popper didn't stutter.
Not that anyone who touts him as an authority has read what he said:
"But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."
So you don't even get to be violent with open racists as long as they aren't actively hurting people.
How is this different than including any other group who by their nature rejects others not in their group? Is the Nazi thing just to shut down any further contemplation?
> How is this different than including any other group who by their nature rejects others not in their group?
A social group of CPAs, an alumni group of university, and a French expat mom's group are all examples of groups, though exclusive, unlike neo-Nazis, do not reject the equal rights of others to enjoy the same bar.
It is an unambiguous goal of neo-Nazis (and their historical antecedents) to claim racially exclusive spaces, whether in bars entire societies. They have an entire rationale for this, connected to the original Nazi concept of Lebensraum ("living space"). They act it out against people of color (and their white friends) by intimidating them bars and restaurants. It's not hard to find someone who has been subject to this. I certainly have.
However, they aren't the only group to "claim" spaces exclusively for themselves through intimidation - the KKK, organized crime, and criminally associated biker gangs do it too, so you are right that one shouldn't point fingers exclusively at Nazis. But in the context of bars in particular neo-Nazis are the most widely culturally understood example of this behavior.
Strangely enough, Germany has had hate speech laws and struggled - to put it mildly - and continues to struggle with National Socialism attracting supporters.
Also strangely, the United States has such strong free speech and association protections that Nazis were protected enough to march through Skokie, and yet there has been no such struggle with Naziism - except to join the other Allies in smashing the Reich.
Yes, Popper didn't stutter, those who do not reject debate in favour of violence should be tolerated.
> Germany (..) continues to struggle with National Socialism attracting supporters.
Correct. But that's because fascism is the logical conclusion of capitalism. The State maintains a "social-liberal" republic which is nothing like a democracy but instead a hypocrisy reproducing systems of privileges.
We are stuck in a cognitive dissonance where we are told it's all about freedom & equality but all institutions around us do the exact opposite, and in parallel we're conditioned for being docile in the face of authority and extreme injustice. Both these conditions create a perfect ground for fascism to take root.
We have to remember fascism was born from "liberal" (= economic injustice) republics of the early 20th century and was based on myths distilled by public school systems and the media. Hitler did not invent racial hierarchies (they were common across all "democracies" of the time) and Mussolini did not invent state planning.
> United States has such strong free speech (...) there has been no such struggle with Naziism
Because in the US white supremacy is not called nazism, and may be more concerned with black/indigenous/latinx people rather than jews. In both cases, so-called "sexual deviancy" is also of concern to these people. Just because you don't see swastikas everywhere and Hitler is not the most popular figure in the USA doesn't erase the dozens of millions of people enslaved or killed due to their ethnicity, and the existence of white-supremacist discourse and militia across the country.
National-socialism is not the only variant of fascism. Mussolini famously said:
> Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power
Both US and UK have (or at least have had) a strong central government abusing power against its local population, laws based on racial hierarchies, a strong military-industrial complex, very close relations between industry leaders and politicians, pillaged/exploited/mass-murdered local and remote communities, maintained gender-based segregation and hierarchies, supported dictatorial/genocidal regimes across the planet in the name of fighting for "freedom" against communism and independent 3rd world countries... all of which are typical characteristics of fascist regimes.
But to be clear, i didn't mean that capitalism equates fascism (although the premises of both systems are uncomfortably-close), but rather that the atomization of capitalist society (in the form of private property, and everyone having to struggle against everyone else to survive) is a prerequisite to legitimize the absolute central power of fascism, under which hope and solidarity don't have a place.
I also mean that historically, in all countries - to my knowledge - where fascism has taken roots, the local bourgeoisie and industry were directly responsible for that. Hitler for example, had wide industry support (financial and logistical) for his campaign, as he was promising to do away with "judeo-bolshevism" and outlaw unions. There's an entire documentary about that called "Fascism Inc" that can be found on the Internet if learning about history is your thing (and of course, countless books on the topic).
> the atomization of capitalist society (in the form of private property, and everyone having to struggle against everyone else to survive) is a prerequisite to legitimize the absolute central power of fascism, under which hope and solidarity don't have a place.
Competition is a fact of life, and private property is a pre-requisite to freedom. Fascism is just one more form of collectivism that crushes individuality, and thus freedom and hope. I'm not interested in that kind of solidarity and the link you've provided is tenuous.
Regardless, freedom of speech is more effective than hate speech laws in staving off fascism, history, if not good sense, shows us that.
I know it was a bit of a snarky throwaway comment, but I would be interested to see how Australia succeeded given its penal colony history (I admittedly know nothing).
The crooks created mining, grazing, farming and other resource extraction companies and exported/are exporting everything they could/can get there grubby hands.
Now this entrenched power has formed poltical parties who reinforce their positons through policies. Ala Australias climate policy and rotating doors of ex-politicans joining boards of the companies they gave a leg up to while in office.
> I was looking at this before and went to https://open.tube/ to explore the content to see how the community looked
You do realize you picked an instance where the top videos have less than 10 views, don't you? Seems like you just went to cherry pick the worst and the least representative.
That's another problem. This particular platform actively promotes the worst video, even if it does not accurately represent the community. I must ask: who is accountable of this spectacular moderation failure?
I assure you it was due to random chance (i got there after clicking "sita sings the blues" on the main page) and I didn't cherry pick that site. Possibly the tiny number of views was why it was so memorable though as something not gaining traction.
With the exception of illegal content this is how it should be. “I don’t like this so I’m going to block it so I don’t have to look at it again” rather than “I don’t like this so nobody should be allowed to look at it”.
The problem with these decentralised platforms is that the first people to flock to them are the people who have been deplatformed by major services.
Some services try to capitalize on that (Gab, Trump's Twitter) while others ignore the problem and end up destined to be abandoned by normal people.
Large parts of the Mastodon network are filled with porn and alt-right accounts that got banned from Twitter. Youtube alternatives are quickly filled with conspiracy theories and other content even Youtube doesn't want its algorithm to push. Hell, even centralised services have this problem; DailyMotion is the last real Youtube alternative and these days it's mostly pirated content, from what I can tell.
Until some major content providers switch, which they won't, because they'll lose their income, there won't be a transition to free software. I fear the Fediverse came about 10 years too late to be successful.
The alt-right servers tend to get defederated rather quickly. The porn usually doesn't show up, but when it does, it does with a vengeance. There's a _lot_ of it, you usually just don't encounter it.
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
Which is why breaking away from the centralized web sucks.
Rumble, voat, parler, gab, even as I feel like the left has left me these days, these places still largely look like dumpster fires to me.
The centralized web is awful. Getting away from it is awful.
I don't know what's worse - the endless corporate censorship or the insanely explicit content, outright bigotry, and anti-science quacks who fill up spaces rebelling against it.
My ethics says the Corp censorship is far more problematic (when taking in the big picture) , but as someone wanting to participate in a free and constructive community it leaves one with no where to go.
Social media was a mistake. Allowing tech companies to become as big as they are were too.
It certainly polarizes people. The people in the middle who aren't that passionate about things tend to just scroll past, but the “passionate” ones just yell at each other and either keep doing that ad inifinitum or they form an echo chamber where they can call others snowflakes.
It's not just polarization. Polarization is a natural state of human societies and is a good thing as it enables things to move forward (in either direction).
Silicon Valley corporations, whether for profit or by ideology, have pushed nazi/conspirationist propaganda to everyone in the form of recommendations for many years. To be fair, so have traditional media outlets, neither of which is excusable in my view.
I think you summed it up quite well. At this moment, there does not seem to be a space between the corporate you-are-the-product mainstream and the weirdos with an agenda crowd at the edges for a person to just be, speak and think in a relatively free and neutral sense without ending up in some ulterior trap.
There is no such space because there can be no such space.
If you want a community without bad actors, bigots, cranks, etc, then it has to have rules and moderation, which means censorship. If you want free speech, you're going to get the bigots, cranks and bad actors. "Speak(ing) and think(ing) in a relatively free and neutral sense without ending up in some ulterior trap" requires curation and tone policing, which is censorship. Otherwise, the bigots and the cranks are also free to speak and think in the same way as everyone else, ruin the community and drive everyone else away.
You can't have your cake and eat it too, you have to pick one.
USENET more or less burned down in flames because killfiling the lunatics didn't actually stop them from taking over the asylum. Both Facebook and Twitter (especially Twitter) give users copious abilities to block users and filter content... and guess what? It's still considered censorship, and it doesn't work at scale.
The problem is the censors are also prone to being bad actors, flexing their agenda by bending and stretching rules far beyond their intention and turning them into another tool of our tribalism battles. It's used to squash dissent and often not enacted in good faith.
People are called bigots for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with bigotry. And it's done intentionally to weild power over wrong-thinkers.
The bad actors are at all levels and of all persuasions
The advantage of Federation is that this is largely solved by the nature of federation. You just join a server with not to much drama and a culture you agree with.
There are a number of problems with the model (including finding such a server). But censors flexing their agenda isn't a real problem in my experience.
I'm registered on a mastodon instance and I find it quite nice and not at all a dumpster fire.
If you're a conservative or so you will probably have a hard time finding an instace you feel at home at, but the defederation of mastodon instances from instances that allow hate speech, racism, homophobia, etc. are precisely what prevents it from being a dumpster fire.
The Fediverse is not without issues but I think it is an example of fuctioning decentralized social media.
We have so many techniques for extracting signal from noise (from reputation, to curation, to tags, scores, bayesian filtering, etc) which could be used to form a metastructure on top of sites like PeerTube and provide viable alternatives to both censorship and free-for-all high noise cess pools.
I looked on Rumble to see the videos on the front page.
Headline was:
A Vivafrei video on Trudeau rescinding Emergency Orders Act
Editors Picks were:
Mudroom Remodel + Vacuum Charging
Very old COFFE GRINDER restoration
This Is Why They Did It, by Russell Brand
Wife CHEATS, Wants CHILD SUPPORT For Illegitimate Daughter?
In the News Section:
Trudeau announces end of Emergencies Act
Shaffer: Biden Telegraphing Ukraine Moves
Trump: Biden's America is getting bum-rushed
Ukrainians express support for state of emergency
Viral
Puppy gets super excited when it's time to open presents
Mother cat adorably hugs & kisses her kitten
Tired man & his puppies fall asleep together for nap time
Woman hilariously struggles to fit balloons in her trunk
Podcasts
Freedom Fighters Forced Trudeau to Revoke The Emergency Powers Act
Pfizer Withdraws Application for Covid-19 Vaccine in India
Stand For Freedom: Why one gym owner pushed back against tyranny and now is running for Congress
Saagar Enjeti CAUGHT LYING About Russia & Ukraine On Breaking Points
The Dive With Jackson Hinkle
So, apart from seeing a few folks that got cancelled like Dan Bongino, looks like Vimeo or Youtube. Where are the awful dumpter fires?
Similar here. I'm no fan of the weird right wing self parody copycats, but Rumble seems to be less inundated and more generally acceptable than the others it generally gets associated with. Not sure if it'll last, but I've heard some of the podcasts and such I follow mention their Rumble alongside Facebook and Twitter in the general spiel. Gives me a little hope that an upstart is still possible.
Reddit has a outlet though, you can just make your own echo chamber there, and don't have to leave the platform unless you're a particularly ornery bunch like the gamergate stuff and subreddits where people start threatening and doxxing.
If a society is terrible because seven zillion witches live there, then how are witch-hunts wrong in this metaphor?
If these offshoot communities full of outcasts are as horrific as he admits, why shouldn't we ban the people that make it that way from our communities?
Why is he so willing to trust these same people when they say they're fighting for "fairness"?
How does he manage to identify some of the worst forces in conservatism, the ones that convinced me to become what many would call "far-left", and come to the conclusion that people are being too hard on them?
> If a society is terrible because seven zillion witches live there, then how are witch-hunts wrong in this metaphor?
Isn't the insight we're to take regarding witch hunts, as moderns able to look back across history, that the people accused of being witches weren't witches, and what was really happening (among other things) was violent intolerance for those with a different way of life, and the indiscriminate use of power?
That's what makes witch hunts wrong in any metaphor.
> How does he manage to identify some of the worst forces in conservatism, the ones that convinced me to become what many would call "far-left", and come to the conclusion that people are being too hard on them?
Because intolerance is wrong, certainly to the degree we see now. I'm sure you might feel like responding with "they started it" but not only has the author covered that, it's also no excuse.
In this metaphor, witches stand for openly racist trolls, flat-earthers, hardline anti-vaxxers, and self-confessed nazis. Terrible people that any decent community doesn't want. And the fact that there's a lot of them breaks the metaphor, since there weren't any witches in the actual witch hunts; it's not clear what the takeaway is supposed to be. The targeting of innocent people is what makes a metaphorical witch-hunt bad.
"Intolerance" without specifying what one is being intolerant against is just a bare negative connotation unassociated with any meaning. Some things ought to be tolerated, and some things absolutely must not be tolerated.
Well, hang on - there weren't any people who could literally turn you into a toad, but I'm sure there were as many witches (people who believed in that stuff) then as there are now.
>but I'm sure there were as many witches (people who believed in that stuff) then as there are now.
There weren't any witches the way witches were defined back then, which was people who entered into pacts with the devil to gain satanic powers to wage war against Christianity and undermine the community. It was a conspiracy theory not unlike the satanic panic of the 1980s or the red scare.
> "Intolerance" without specifying what one is being intolerant against is just a bare negative connotation unassociated with any meaning. Some things ought to be tolerated, and some things absolutely must not be tolerated.
I'm using Popper's definition provided in his short but often misquoted (certainly on HN) paradox of tolerance, that violence and other coercive means should not be used against those who are willing to debate and not use violence to further their arguments/goals. The content of those ideas is irrelevant.
> In this metaphor, witches stand for openly racist trolls, flat-earthers, hardline anti-vaxxers, and self-confessed nazis. Terrible people that any decent community doesn't want.
Who made you the moral arbiter? As J.S. Mill points out repeatedly in On Liberty, those who will judge what is right and wrong with such certainty that they would deny others the right to speak contrary to these "certainties" are only saying that they are certain of what they say, and they are not infallible.
> The targeting of innocent people is what makes a metaphorical witch-hunt bad.
The targeting of anyone based on disagreement or some misplaced certainty in a hierarchy of morality based on disagreement is what makes a witch hunt bad.
This is complete BS. Witches are a creation of a relgious zealots for a start. Its anti-science.
The problem with society is the promotion of the rat race and attempting to fit everyone into little categories. You cant.
I have been in many scenes including gaming, cars, mechanics, machining and i can find vibrant communites away from the big tech just as i can within it. Why do I have success yet you or others cant?
I find that the main problem with the internet is that people want to be entertained in their downtime. They want to be amused, occupied and interested. Whether that be to stalk others in the privacy of there own zone, or to create a fantasy to fill in time.
That personality trait is the problem and creates the situation for these viral communities to breath. Trolls gonna be trolls. It creates the awkward social dystopia we find ourselves in. Going to school, university, getting a job and becoming a contributing member of society is not equivalent to meaning and happiness. What happens when these people get home at night and realise their life is meaningless? This.
I think your comment is fair and relevant. Our society is so broken that it produces (and encourages) psychopaths at every level of power. Then some people wonder why Twitter/Facebook is a cesspit of evil. And if you ever had the chance to avoid how sociopathic capitalist mentality is, don't worry GAFAMs have plenty of recommended posts/videos full of neo-nazi conspirationists to redpill you.
Not sure what you criteria for "real community" is, but AFAIK there are already communities using this technology.
The micro-payment as opposed to ads model already exists on third party services such as utip, tipee, onlyfans, etc. and is the main source of revenue for most video content creators.
When peertube aware content creators explains why they choose youtube as their main platform the given answer is the large userbase and visibility a.k.a. The network effect and dominant position youtube has. Though twitch and tiktok seems to putting a serious dent as many youtubers turn to twitch for live content and interacting with their communities in a healthier way than youtube where toxicity prevails, and with tiktok for engaging with their communities with shorter videos requirient less effort and escaping the youtube algorithm.
What I find even weirder (kind of) is that the top recommendations are not only very polarizing and politically loaded (vaccines, convoy, "evil agenda", "journalistic hypocrisy" and police violence), 5/6 in the top row have literally 2 views. So it's not that they've generated engagement to end up there, the algorithm straight up defaults to promoting them.
And what's even more wild is that every single one of those videos has a click-bait title and thumbnail.
I think it's always telling which creatives are the first to 'defect' to a new platform and it seems like all of these 'open streaming alternatives' just attract the people who failed to gain traction on closed platforms (rather than people who actually care about the technology).
Yeah, no social media can (or should) scale massively without appropriate moderation. If the history of social media can give us some lessons, it should be that there must be someone who takes control of the social platform and should be accountable for its impacts on society.
That someone who takes control of moderation should be the user.
In the past, most USENET was small enough that people maintained their own individual blocklists of bad actors and ignored them. Today, we crowdsource a personal blocklist with EasyList and other lists that users opt into.
The only centralized or automated moderation any media needs is to stop bots and spam. If you went to opentube and you had the option to view only "family friendly" videos then even sensitive people could use the site without being offended.
The way Minds works is if you miscategorize offensive content as family friendly too many times then your whole account is made NSFW. Offensive videos are not censored, but you have to opt-in to seeing them. The choice is always with the user what type of content they want to see.
I disagree, I think o. the surface censorship is appealing but as someone who enjoyed the early days of high speed internet I prefer raw unmoderated content.
I’m an adult and can navigate away. The world is a tough place. Pretending that bad stuff doesn’t happen is akin to putting your head in the sand.
Should it be front and center? Probably not. But it shouldn’t be “banned”.
It’s a slippery slope, moderation can and will be abused. Just look at the reddit zealots.
It's compatible with mastodon which already has a fairly large community (you can follow peertube users and their videos will show up in your feed.)
I think this kind of social network absolutely is the future because of how incompatible people's ideas about what is acceptable and what isn't are. If you find an instance who's moderators share your ideals you're good to go. No need to learn a new technology or give up most of your social network even!
The base concept of "everyone can host their own instance (within a few limitations)" is how most of the internet actually works. HTTPS, Email, DNS, etc. - all of those things allow pretty much everyone to host their own, individual servers.
This kind of openness is very central to the success of the internet. Large corporations (Google, Facebook, etc.) consolidating huge amounts of that into single platforms concentrates a lot of power in a single hand, which does create some very real concerns about the internet becoming less and less open.
PeerTube is *NOT* a video sharing platform like YouTube is. PeerTube is just a piece of software that allows everyone and their grandma to create their own video sharing platform similar to YouTube. So, basically all those many different PeerTube instances are mini-YouTubes each.
Since YouTube is a near-monopoly, it's sort of unavoidable that a lot of PeerTube instances that do crop up, are catering to those who got banned from YouTube - often for very valid reasons. And that's why you end up with a lot of offensive content.
That's not a built-in flaw of the software though. It's rather a problem that's caused by the current situation of YouTube being so extremely dominant, that those people who've been banned from YouTube end up basically being the only niche audience that remains untapped.
I really hope that activitypub and the federated web end up becoming the technologies that "win" out of all the nonsense that is "Web3", but the wildly successful monetization of traditional web platforms and the "different-but-more" monetization of the crypto-obsessed vision of Web3 are nearly impossible for platforms like Peertube and Mastodon to effectively win out against.
I suspect the blockchain nonsense (which I refuse to let have the "Web3" title) will win out because there's so much commercial incentive and if there's one thing we've seen from the internet's history, it's that money and commercial interest accelerates adoption even when maybe it shouldn't.
I also think federation has the Google conditioning of the mainstream working against it. The mainstream's been conditioned to think of the internet in terms of global platforms. Switching to interacting with smaller nodes is a paradigm shift that I don't believe most users are willing to make, especially given the benefits (like use of personal data and human-scale moderation) don't seem to matter to the majority given the apathy towards Facebook's and Google's business practices.
That said, much like gopher still exists in parallel with HTTP, IMO it doesn't really matter which wins because the mainstream using one is not mutually exclusive with some of us using the other.
> I suspect the blockchain nonsense (which I refuse to let have the "Web3" title) will win out because there's so much commercial incentive and if there's one thing we've seen from the internet's history, it's that money and commercial interest accelerates adoption even when maybe it shouldn't.
Blockchain has already “won”: it's now a mainstream investment item, with investment firms bullish. But it also completely failed its goal of decentralization (almost every token holder uses a centralized exchange) and also isn't a competitor to the web at all: you can't connect to a blockchain with a web browser, and every “totally-not-web”3 platform out there is in fact built on top of the Web.
It's not too late for the bubble to burst. When investors realize they put millions of dollars into a system which can process under 100 requests per second they may have a stroke and the whole thing could collapse like the .net bubble burst in the 90s and took away much of the landscape with it.
The issue is that the entire financial market is a bubble now, not only crypto, but stocks, credit (mortgage, student loans, all private debt really), real estate, etc. And as we've seen with the 2008 crisis response and the coronavirus response, politics in the Western World (that is: not China) are willing to do as much they can to keep this bubble from exploding. And as we've seen from how Japan dealt with the Asian Crisis, you can pretty much keep such a bubble alive forever (despite Japan being crippled by its demographic decline).
Maybe not forever forever mind you, but my point is that if/when it collapses it's likely to collapse when the entire financial system does (and, as much as I hate the current state of affairs, I don't think there will a positive outcome if it happened).
Edit: just to be clear, I wish this stack of turd would disappear, but I don't believe it.
> The issue is that the entire financial market is a bubble now, not only crypto, but stocks, credit (mortgage, student loans, all private debt really), real estate, etc.
That's correct. But that's nothing new. Major economic crises are a feature (not a bug) of the capitalist system and were already quite common in past centuries (plural). Remember when 1929 was supposed to be the very last crisis?
I agree with you it may have dire consequences but it all depends on the scenario. Economics (money + private property) is just a lousy/leaky abstraction to extract value from certain people are redirect it into other pockets, but if the entire system collapses, housing will not tear itself apart and fields won't stop growing.
If we as popular classes (those who produce value for the system to waste) are ready to organize without higher management and without greed (and without transnational supply chains who may be harder or undesirable to keep flowing), we may all well be better off in the medium term.
On a micro level, the VioMe factory in Greece is a good example of a destructive industry run for profit turning into a "greener" (all things considered) self-organized factory after the 2008 crisis. On a macro level, the spanish revolution of 1936 also showcases the power of the proletariat and what Graeber calls the "caring classes" (see CCC talk) to operate a radically-different society in a situation of crisis (in that case, a fascist coup d'état in some parts of the country).
So i agree with you we're in a bad place, as our dependence on fucked-up/polluting centralized processes and abstractions, and repression against autonomous/struggling communities have only increased in the past decades... but that's a cultural bias and there's in absolute no reason humanity (and the rest of the planet) can't fare much better without industrial capitalism, given a painful transition period.
It's also interesting to realize just how fucked up we are if we keep going in the same direction. "End:Civ" is an interesting documentary in this regard, although it's starting to be dated and the climate change situation has definitely gotten even worse since then. In that sense, and given that collapsing the entire economic apparatus looks more and more to be the only way to save literally millions of species, i think not all hope is lost if we were to crash the whole system.
I doubt they'll ever truly win, but they already work. You don't need to be as big as twitter to be a successful social media platform.
I already use mastodon. Not in a "someone needs to be first" sense, but just as a platform I like.
Peertube doesn't have the content to be there yet, and the model is a bit more difficult (as hosting video is just more expensive than hosting small bits of text and pictures, even with p2p features). There is some good content on there, but (for me) not enough to make it a social platform like YouTube. Also content discovery still isn't there yet. I recommend fedivideos@mas.to as a good resource to find some nice things.
There is nothing inherent about federation requiring provider lock-in. HTTP has redirect codes, XMPP has <Moved> stanzas, and even better the ZoT protocol (as used in Hubzilla) has crypto-identity over federated services so you can move by simply signing a new identity file mentioning new servers.
I don't think that these p2p technologies are going to win out. They're just objectively inferior to centralized services except in rare cases.
But the fact that they're being maintained, and probably will be maintained in the future, is really good. In the event of a serious war or disaster, even locally, they could really come in handy.
Almost every production ready activitypub and federated web framework is under hard copyleft. There is not a single company who will use the technology (unless you are being boycotted by the fediverse like Gab). The fediverse creators explicitly made themselves hostile to innovation. You can't expect to be as popular as WordPress when you demand every user to open source their entire stack.
It's not every end-user, it's every operator. And that's a good thing: it creates a positive feedback loop where i'm incited to share my patches because others are too. I'm not going to be at a disadvantage sharing code/ideas, because it's the standard within that community and it will benefit everyone equally.
Copyleft is is not hostile to innovation, it's the only sustainable path to innovation and was the standard way of developing arts/sciences for millennia before the copyright industry was born and fucked up everything.
I look through the listing of peers, and I don't see a single instance which trustworthy enough to devote my time too. For instance, checking the box "education" brings up a completely non sensible list that provides no context in which to make a judgement about the quality or character of the "tube".
Also, this seems to have the same problem as mastodon, where I have to create an account for each tube, no thanks. Clicking "English" still brings up non english listings, furthering the difficulty of using the app.
> Also, this seems to have the same problem as mastodon, where I have to create an account for each tube, no thanks.
Creating an account per node is federation working as intended. The idea is that this is then your identity across the network, the same way that you create an email address with an email provider that then lets you send email to users using other email providers. Each node should then network with other nodes to provide its users access to videos from nodes it trusts (same as Mastodon does - you don't have to be on the same node as a user you follow as long as your node networks with their node). The trust model is centered around your trust of the admin of a particular node, which brings a more human scale to the tech (particularly as compared to something like YouTube).
Federation is coming back into vogue particularly now as a reaction to the Facebook/Google problem where a single entity collects all the data about all users of the platform and can unilaterally ban a user with no recourse. In a federated network a node decides what other nodes it federates with and so self-regulates. But email is an example of federated technology everyone uses.
> Creating an account per node is federation working as intended.
I call that broken by design. Having your identity tied to a server means somebody else controls it. Email has the same problem, if GMail changes the ways it handles emails and makes a provider switch necessary, tough luck, you now have to tell everybody that you are moving to a new sever and your email/identity changed.
Just using a GPG key to represent your identity or something along those lines would be a much better way to handle it.
> Just using a GPG key to represent your identity or something along those lines would be a much better way to handle it.
This is something the web3 world is moving towards a user-friendly solution for[1]. A web3 wallet (something like metamask which is a browser extension) actually holds a public/private key pair. Websites can authenticate by asking the user to "connect their wallet"[2] which actually means signing a message which the site can validate. To do this, the browser extension shows a popup showing the relevant bits of the request with "Approve" and "Reject" buttons. Once signed you are able to use the facilities of whatever website even though you don't have any sort of account. If at a later stage I want to revoke my approval I can just do that in my wallet - I don't even need to go to the site and there is of course no account to delete there. You can easily maintain multiple distinct personas because a wallet can contain multiple "accounts".[3]
Something similar might presumably work for the fediverse. No accounts just an identity service/API that allows sites to get your public key and ask you to verify things by signing with the private key.
[1] I say moving towards because there are plenty of rough edges, but the basic idea is pretty good and the UX is already streets ahead of the normal GPG verification/signing type workflows
[2] There is an API called "walletConnect" and as long as wallets and sites implement that, they are able to interoperate fairly seamlessly (in theory). In practise it doesn't always work that great. https://docs.walletconnect.com/
[3] These are actually an address and a keypair. The address is used to perform transactions on the blockchain so wouldn't be relevant to the fediverse I wouldn't think.
I see this a lot as a justification for crypto and tbh I don’t buy it.
Why can’t we just use key pairs without all the commodity token nonsense? Blockchains are a hyper redundant global network of adversarial servers. This is the silliest way possible to implement a key based id system.
You absolutely can, and if you read what I wrote above I'm not shilling for any token or pushing any kind of blockchain.
I'm saying the user experience of having your keypair in a browser extension with an API that lots of sites agree to use is significantly superior to the old gpg way of doing signatures and verification and means that you can do what the GP wanted (having a key that you control representing your identity which is strongly authenticated with zero knowledge and not an account on each server). You can do all of that without any sort of blockchain and it's something fediverse sites could adopt.
That’s fair I just assumed you were shilling because you mentioned web3 and metamask.
I totally agree and hope the web moves in that direction. Unfortunately I think the tech giants will fight tooth and nail to retain their sso products. People also generally do not want to perform key management :(
Another issue is that if you choose the wrong node and they decide to shut down for some reason, you lose all your content.[1] There has already been precedent for this.[2] All it takes is being out of the loop for too long and missing a message announcing a shutdown/migration to lose your data. In practice this makes the largest nodes the most appealing for registering an account since their popularity gives you the highest chance of your data living on, which defeats the point of decentralization.
Also, if you're Twitter, you can afford lawyers and moderators to clean up illicit content. If you're operating a Mastodon instance, that responsibility falls on you. It's simply a question of who has more capital, human resources, and free time.[3]
Twitter being centralized means that it's unlikely that Twitter will go away in the long term. That's what would make me choose Twitter over a Mastodon instance if I wanted a public archive of something. I have to wonder what would happen if content of more and more importance started to be hosted on the Fediverse if it was subject to link rot from the nature of federalization.
> Federation is coming back into vogue particularly now as a reaction to the Facebook/Google problem where a single entity collects all the data about all users of the platform and can unilaterally ban a user with no recourse. In a federated network a node decides what other nodes it federates with and so self-regulates. But email is an example of federated technology everyone uses.
I swear I read this exact sentence back in 2017 when Mastodon first came out with a splash and it has only gotten less relevant in the five years since.
> it has only gotten less relevant in the five years since
What does "relevant" mean? Hacker News is irrelevant to people who aren't into the tech scene. Mastodon is irrelevant if someone doesn't care about federation, but for those of us who do, it's still as relevant as ever.
Neither Hacker News nor federation (I expect) are going to take over the world, but they have their respective audiences.
That's sort of a misreading of the figures though, isn't it? It's not that those 950K sign-ups have all disappeared; you just have a slightly higher replacement level of new entrants. What it describes have a fairly consistent monthly usage rate -- not leaping up, but not dropping either. That also seems to be what the more in-depth statistics here indicate: https://the-federation.info/mastodon
I'm not saying that you're any more wrong than the idea that federation is currently "in vogue", but it doesn't seem right to suggest that this is something that is in decline, either.
Maybe you could argue that in the face of increasing numbers of adoption of social media more generally? Are we steady-stating there too, though?
The only major events in the fediverse from the last several years to have any cultural impact is the rise of federated porn after the Tumblr exodus, and the rise in federated white nationalist forums after Trump got banned from Twitter. The fact that federation is becoming popular among pornographers and fascists is certainly not backing up the assertion that federation is "in vogue".
> "Creating an account per node is federation working as intended."
That's misinformed. You need an account on an instance where you want to publish videos (although maybe publishing to a federated channel is supported now?), but you only need one account to consume content. In fact, you don't even need to use a Peertube account, as the protocol is based on ActivityPub so most clients (like Mastodon) will be able to receive updates from peertube channels you follow.
> Federation is absolutely not in vogue, and never has been vogue.
email is federated. WWW is federated (src/href). They are two of the most widely-used protocols. So federation is not exactly hyped because most people don't even realize they're using federation, but it's certainly useful and popular.
> I don't see a single instance which trustworthy enough to devote my time too
Then you could make one with some friends/colleagues or a local non-profit you're involved with. Peertube is federated software: it encourages deployment in existing human circles rather than global discovery of random stuff.
In education circles, i know Peertube is part of the apps.education.fr suite of free-software apps for teachers, but i don't know of practical use-cases. I assume it's useful to group class levels into separate channels so students can see the videos you showed in class from home.
> I have to create an account for each tube, no thanks.
No you don't. The protocol is federated so from your Mastodon/Peertube account you can follow any Peertube channel on the condition that your instance has not blocked federation with the remote one.
> Clicking "English" still brings up non english listings, furthering the difficulty of using the app.
This is a specific to the project homepage advertising many instances in many languages. But on well-moderated instances the language flags should work just fine, at least for local content... the problem is with admins/submitters not setting language flags properly not with the software itself. The project homepage could definitely use more manual curation, but that would be a full-time job in itself for a project that's developed by a handful people financed by a medium-sized non-profit (Framasoft) and crowdfunding.
If a video is unpopular, can it just disappear like a torrent that loses seeders? Or is there some mechanism to incentivize peers to hold on to videos that get like one view a month?
No, if an instance publishes a video it means that it has to host it as a webseed. The torrent mechanism kicks in only when the video is being accessed by multiple people at the same time
It depends on the host's policy. In the peertube model, your server is responsible for hosting the video so unless it closes down there's no reason for it to be unavailable. This has interesting consequences because it means you should not trust a random service provider to host your videos, but rather find a dedicated community on a specific topic, or an existing network (such as a local non-profit host) which is sustainable.
There is currently no incentives for seeding and that's a good thing. Seeding (replication) is achieved as a community-to-community service between consenting sysadmins/communities. So if people from kolektiva.media find conf.tube content/concept interesting, the admins can setup say 1TB (or unlimited quota) of replicated content from conf.tube, and both sources will be listed as webseeds when you watch the video on either instance.
I've wondered about that. I put a video on PeerTube a few months ago.[1] It's a rendering test, of interest only to some people I'm working with. I'm curious to see how long it stays around and whether enough bandwidth is provided for streaming. So far, it's still up, despite very few views.
I hate to say it but brand, ui, ux really matter in terms of first impressions and overall "love" of a product. I wish they would put more work in branding and ux on their website to make it appear more appealing and professional.
Or even a service that had some sort of ontological tagging of channels and videos, that also reliably notified you when new videos are released on your subscribed channels.
Would this be vulnerable to a legal attack from Google?
That would be amazing. Why support only Youtube though? It could be useful for many other sources/kinds of content!
> Would this be vulnerable to a legal attack from Google?
Not really, no. Rehosting the video could be fragile legally, depending on the actual use-case (eg. education/accessibility exceptions to copyright). But a free-software gathering links to existing 3rd party content is just a standard web page, nothing challenging legally. RSS feed readers are not illegal. [0]
[0] The notable exception being if you're setting up a centralized for-profit service out of it like Google News is doing. In this specific case they're making profit from content created by 3rd parties, which is definitely a copyright infringement.
This depends on the specific instance. Some have better connectivity to certain places than others.
What's interesting about Peertube is you are not tied to a single (commercial) CDN to distribute content to your area. If your local community is poorly-served by existing instances, consider setting up a local instances with some likeminded people and setting up replication (part of Peertube admin UI) for other instances/channels you find interesting and would like to be available locally.
I have tried to use PeerTube a number of times (when it comes up on HN, which it does very often). It is absolutely appalling in both usability (confusing, ugly and borderline hostile design) and technical (videos buffer constantly - this is table stakes for hosting video) aspects. I understand the appeal for uploaders, but I will never consider switching to PeerTube as a viewer. I won't even click a link to a PeerTube video because I know in advance it won't play properly.
This depends on the specific instance and its traffic to your area. Cross-instance replication is well-supported by Peertube (the software) and if an instance is not loading well from your area you could consider using a local non-profit (or just ask some friends) to host a local peertube instance to replicate the content you find interesting and make it more easily accessible locally.
I love the idea of federated video streaming; I do not love the idea of manually searching each instance - and believe this is why it can never replace something like youtube in it's current form.
It would be really good if each instance had a search API to allow more centralised search sites to emerge.
When I search for a video, it tries to launch a popup window for another domain (sepiasearch.org) which Firefox blocks. Seems confusing for a typical viewer
And then if you click on one of the search results it will open in yet another popup with yet another weird domain with some oddball TLD like .win which looks even more sketchy.
It's a tiny bit refreshing to not see the same content trends as on youtube. It gets a little more organic vibe. That said, there's also a lot of weirder content too obviously. Alas
I was intrigued enough to install from F-Droid and poke around. Overall it seems pretty nice, but after swiping back to my home screen I got the first frozen/unresponsive launcher I've had in several years and had to restart my phone. I'm not even sure how an app could accomplish that, but I'm disinclined to call it a coincidence.
That sounds like it's worth trying to reproduce and sending a bug report. This could be specific to your kernel or system layer so please don't forget to send details about the hardware/software.
Also worth noting: Peertube is well-supported by Newpipe (though i don't think P2P streaming is supported), and it's just a web page so you can also open it from your usual browser without downloading an app.
Putting things on a peer network is the very definition of losing control of your videos. Once something's p2p, can't ever be modified or taken down.
It's a great value prop for pirates who want easy access to illegal movies and trolls who want their inflammatory opinions to ruffle feathers forever, but it's a pretty lousy deal for everyone else.
The headline is "take back control of YOUR videos".
Videos that you downloaded from other people aren't yours. You might own a copy, but that's no different from any other system of distribution. The difference between p2p and standard distribution is that the owner loses control.
It is a dangerous belief that anything you publish can be 100% reliably unpublished, even if you use a centralized platform that grants you the button to do so. Information does not work that way.
However, a centralized near-monopoly grants itself certain power over the spread of information: if everyone uses it and it bans your video, the video may essentially be unknown—despite your intent. That is losing control, both for you personally and for us as a society: we lose control of our videos by using one big centralized platform, which lets it hide them from us.
An interpretation of PeerTube’s slogan could be that switching to it you take control of your videos by making them less liable to become hidden due to e.g. censorship—but also in that publishing something useful on it you by extension also bring viewers into the ecosystem and thus help society as a whole take that control back by reducing its dependency on a centralized source.
And maybe you would understand why that statement makes absolutely no sense if you read the headline of this thread.
It doesn't say "take control away from Youtube and Google", it says take back control of your videos. p2p is the ultimate destruction of control, that's the entire point of it. Saying that peertube gives you control is like saying that playing a slot machine gives you ROI.
You're deconstructing a head of lettuce and wondering why you get word salad. Language isn't that simple. Insisting on narrow interpretations of individual words isn't helpful. You need more context to understand it, not less.
With p2p, control is transferred away from Google to you and anyone else that chooses to host it. This is reasonable justification for using "take back control" to me.
I guess you'd also object to GPL being described as "more free" than MIT.
The owner retains control of nothing. From the instant you first seed to p2p, there is nothing you can do anymore to change what might happen next. You completely lose all agency over your own material. That is not "control".
If you want to get off a platform, you can do that with a website. You don't need to give up editorial and retractive control forever (which you must do in order to use p2p, which is why this headline is so wrong) just to step off a platform.
> The owner retains control of nothing. From the instant you first seed to p2p, there is nothing you can do anymore to change what might happen next. You completely lose all agency over your own material. That is not "control".
(putting aside the fact that peertube is NOT A P2P distribution platform[1])
P2P is not different from any kind of distribution mechanism for digital content: the moment you put your content online, you've lost a good chunk of control over it since anyone can now download it a re-upload it elsewhere. This is automatic for p2p, but it also happen all the time on youtube, (or worse, porn tubes).
There is no way around it so far, and DRMs have largely failed preventing that. So any content creator must know this at this point: once you've published something online, you cannot reliably unpublish it.
Now, when you go through a centralized platform you also lose one more part of control: not only you cannot unpublish it, but you also cannot guarantee that it will remain published. This is the part of control you can get back by using peertube or other federated or distributed streaming system.
But that's not what this headline is claiming. It's claiming that PeerTube will give you control of your videos. That's the one thing that p2p services do not and cannot ever do. Putting content on p2p is synonymous with giving up control of it forever.
I realize you're probably just trolling, but Peertube also has a button to delete your own video. The instance will stop serving/seeding it so even if some people hold a copy it will be hard if possible at all (even with the info hash) to access it.
Of course some people could upload it again someplace else and there's pretty much nothing you can do about it. Not that different from traditional tape media and CD/DVD.
> It's a great value prop for pirates who want easy access to illegal movies and trolls who want their inflammatory opinions to ruffle feathers forever, but it's a pretty lousy deal for everyone else.
Not everyone else; it's a good deal for anyone who wants their content to be censorship-resistant, which is not just trolls and pirates.
Why in the world would someone who wants "control" of their content use p2p instead of youtube?
If you're worried about platform censorship, the solution that gives you more control is to self-host, not to completely resign all editorial power for the rest of eternity by handing your content over to a peer network.
p2p doesn't give you control of content, it takes away all control of content by ossifying it as-is.
> If you're worried about platform censorship, the solution that gives you more control is to self-host
Thanks for pointing this out! This is precisely what the Peertube project is about. It's *not* a P2P tube where discovery/notification is unmediated between peers. Peertube is a software for selfhosting your own "tube", which supports federation between hosts so your content can be discovered from elsewhere (with allow/deny lists supported).
The P2P bits of Peertube is only for video delivery, which is very clever. It was always possible to setup your own Youtube (eg. with MediaGoblin) but who had the hardware and connectivity to do that?! Especially since:
- if a video has a peak of popularity, a centralized setup has to send a separate stream to every viewer
- if people want to view a video from which your instance doesn't have good connectivity, it will be terrible user experience, unless you as a server operator setup a sort of CDN which is expensive and more complex than it has to be
Peertube has a very interesting hybrid federated/p2p design where the owner retains control on the published material (you can delete videos from your account), but both viewers and federated instances replicating your materials can help seed it to more people.
Peertube is intended for selfhosting for existing communities (non-profits, conferences, classrooms, etc) and it gives us the practical power to do it without requiring thousands of euros of monthly infrastructure bills.
Certainly. But one thing that they definitely do, and that p2p hosting does not, is give people control of their videos, which is what this headline is claiming.
Ok, thanks - I'm more ambivalent about the situation: I think it can be unclear, and can depend on people's perspectives regarding privacy and control, and the behaviours of the platforms and software available (all of which can be culture, context and chronology sensitive).
Perhaps the existence of different options at the moment is necessary until there's (ever?) any consensus on a satisfying unified technology and sharing model for content.
(if this seems confusing, please consider: it's not a technological absolute that use of a peer-to-peer platform means that you have to share your content with everyone; it can be a choice if the technology caters for it)
But this is not how it works with peertube: you aren't publishing a torrent containing a video, you are uploading a video to a specific peertube instance, and on top of that there is a WebRTC-based P2P CDN (you're sharing data with other people watching the same video at the same time), but that's it.
I've deleted/privated/unlisted a few cringy YouTube videos from about 10 years ago. I have fairly high confidence that even in the insanely rare case that my other videos become popular or I become a celebrity, no one will find those old videos. That's not possible with a P2P service.
First because the list of videos you advertise on an instance/channel is dynamic, not an append-only log like on a blockchain. So you can properly delist a video from your Peertube channel and it will no longer appear to clients.
Second, because even if people still has the infohash somehow and continue to seed it, there needs to be a mechanism to find other peers when someone wants to download the content (how did they obtain the infohash?). It's technically possible (although becoming harder with peertube moving from Webtorrent to WebRTC+HLS) but not a supported use-case (you'd have to write another piece of software for that).
All in all, the situation is pretty similar to that of Youtube. Yes someone could have a copy of your cringy videos and decide to upload them elsewhere, but your followers would not automagically discover them. The same goes with Peertube, which is more federated than P2P in its design.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30401241
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23758547
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12163892