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Questions about the current state of PeerTube #1457
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Just a quick note, most of the questions you ask here apply to Mastodon just as much. And in my experience, they don't prevent Mastodon from being a viable project. |
Hey @Wykks - thanks for the detailed feedback 👍 However @Chocobozzz was not the one presenting at Capitole du Libre 2018. It was Nathanaël ( @roipoussiere ). You are not the first to raise these concerns, and they are totally on our radar.
IPFS is not a silver bullet. You still need to index videos. You still need to get their metadata somewhere. Just because you made your video available on IPFS doesn't mean that content discovery is made easier. Actually it's not something IPFS does. IPFS is transport. A way to deliver content. And that's all. Within the IPFS itself, there are no search and indexing tools. There are plenty of session/transport/application technologies available to transport data. We just happen to have chosen HTTP(s) and BitTorrent/WebTorrent.
Not really. By federating, you send some of the metadata to remote instances that save it and integrate it to properly show your video without always querying your server. It's not like everything is queried each time your video gets watched 🙂 Plus, they are light static assets compared to videos. Having a proper caching policy on your reverse-proxy already reduces a lot of that load.
PeerTube is using protocols that are not fully distributed (ActivityPub, WebFinger, RSS/Atom, etc.), so cutting that would reduce interoperability. We certainly will go towards more decentralization, but instances will still be an major piece of the puzzle.
Short answer, because it's very difficult to implement. Long answer, because any video input to PeerTube gets transcoded right now. That means importing a lot of videos from a remote account takes a toll on the receiving server. Also there were discussions on other federated platforms to make the migration process part of the federation vocabulary, or at least put it in a standard form. These discussions have mostly stalled since, but it has postponed implementations. Now, account migration doesn't help in case of instance failure or shutdown. Some have suggested having a duplicate account that stays dormant and keeps in sync, some have suggested to be able to download a copy of their data that they could re-upload elsewhere to replicate their channel. All of this is complex too. We feel there are other vital issues (moderation tools and transcoding to name a few) to be taken care of before that becomes a focus, because once it is, it will take months to be implemented and monopolize the implementation schedule.
No, there is no such expectation. But currently the search being limited to the followed instances forces to remember more instances than is ideal.
We do not make any android app, so I suppose you are referring to one of the third-party apps available. They make an instance choice by default, but that choice is not ideal. The user is not aware of the moderation policy of that instance. Making a central looking glass would probably alleviate the problem, but that is both a SPOF and an added moderation burden on the PeerTube team. All of this is detailed in #824.
If you are settling (creating an account) on an instance, then yes you should care about it. Its moderation policy matters. Its quotas matter. Its availability and response time matter. Ideally one should just care about the instance they settle in, or the instance they use as a looking glass to the federated network. The fact that right now, instances only show the content they have federated with is a byproduct of the explicit follow system. Now, I reckon you have seen #824, you know more or less the directions which we could take to solve this issue to discover videos. |
@Nutomic @rigelk Of course IPFS is not a silver bullet, and Peertube already have a video indexation system. I did not mean to use IPFS there. But to have a single entry point for users. I don't know if that make sense, since I quite new to these tech...
Knowing where you upload a video is not enough ? Anyway, thanks again for these precision! This cleared my mind 👍 |
It sounds to me like you want to centralize Peertube in some way, and make it so that all content is listed on a single, official website like peertube.com (or whatever the name). That would just be an exact copy of what Youtube is doing. I think one of the best things about the Fediverse is that it is federated, so there can be different instances with different rules, and different moderation. If you try to cram all those communities together, it will just lead to conflict and videos targeted at the lowest common denominator. There are definitely many things missing from Peertube, including account migration that you mentioned, but I think the overall concept works well. What needs fixing are basically implementation details. |
Well, actually no 😄 The current way Peertube is, make it so a youtube like is possible. This is how I see things: If you have a single entry point, peertube instance are then equally referenced, and peertube instance owner will still have be able moderate their data at will (and choose how advertising works on their videos). To sum it up, I believe that Peertube instance should serve data, not the app. Of course that's just how I see things. If you disagree at "Some instances will prevail above the others" sure, the current system should be fine. Only time will tell, nobody can see the future ¯_(ツ)_/¯ |
Jumping on that, PeerTube instances are mostly a default interface served and a core API. Nothing prevents an instance from just serving the API part. Actually there's even a shorthand for that. Nothing prevents to make another webapp, or make additions to the webapp, or make the webapp query multiple servers to display/look for videos. |
Sorry if I miss something but isn't possible to make instances share an IPFS folder containing an index of all instances and videos available on PeerTube? I never checked how IPFS works so that's why I ask if it's possible. |
@rigelk Okay, that's something. @Booteille Yeah something like that probably. I think the discussion about that should continue here #824 I'll close this issue, I got what I was asking for. Thanks a lot for your time! |
@Booteille two things: your solution implies that someone creates an IPFS folder, and then gives the secret key allowing to revisions of the content of that folder to third parties ; it also implies sharing a database index as a file. All of that with concurrent access already seems convoluted to me. Please contribute directly to #824 if you want to further discuss global video search. |
(Sorry if this kind of text is not appropriate here; please tell me if I should have posted this elsewhere).
Hello!
I'm quite new to this project, (also I saw you at https://2018.capitoledulibre.org 👋).
As far as I understand, the main idea behind being decentralized is to be able to host losts of videos without having to own one huge centralized server system (like youtube); awesome!
Users have to (as far as I know):
I have several thoughts:
Do you believe that people will remember several instance of peertube ? When using the android app, one instance is already set by default. People should not care about instance url.
If I'm a content creator and I host my own instance, do I have to play the "google referencing game" to be visible, because my instance wont be automatically linked to the most used instance of Peertube?
If the server where my account if created is shutdown (which is highly statistically possible, because there a several servers hosted by several independent individuals), do I lose all my subscribers, and everything I created? (which is basically the end of the world, if it's your main job). Why a vital feature like account migration (#549) is not prioritized?
Since only the video hosting is decentralized, as a instance owner, I will have issues if my instance become too much popular despite the decentralization, because every other bits of peertube are targeted to the instance, which cause bandwidth and cpu issues.
Also, obviously some Peertube instances will have a lot more views than the others, so the current federation system can be a strong censorship feature.
Do you plan to implement complete decentralization (more than "just" video hosting) ?
One service address => Talk to all public Peertube server instances (thus server instance may not have any frontend, by default).
The use of something like IPFS for everything else than video hosting (not this #494) could address this, right?
Important note:
I'm not hostile at all to Peertube, I actually want to contribute, but I really puzzled about the current state of the project. I strongly believe that it cannot truly succeed (and by that I mean, used by common people) until there is complete decentralization. I just want to know what's your visions about theses points (I didn't find answers about them in other issues).
Thanks for your time!
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