PeerTube
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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Well obviously... But as a German I must say there is no possibly to use PeerTube in any legally save way in Germany.
That is not the fault of PeerTube of course it's the fault of copyright mafia and German politics. Since PeerTube uses P2P to distribute load among all (which is extremely clever and should definitely not change), German law makes you responsible for anything you upload even if it's in a P2P manner. So if you just accidentally clicked on a video containing Copyright protected Material or illegal content, you are seen as contributor of this content with all consequences.
So imagine going to jail because you clicked the wrong video... This is as stupid as it sounds and needs to change. Sadly German public is not carrying about this enough. I hope PeerTube will become more popular one day so that people are confronted to this insane law more frequently.
Wait, I thought that PeerTube was peer to peer in the sense that the various PeerTube server instances were peers, and not the users clicking and watching videos were peers. Am I mistaken? It seems that in order for the users to peer, they would need to either install a client program that would do that, or make some heavy browser security approvals. If it's the servers that are peering, then this law shouldn't apply to the users.
Look up WebRTC
Ah, interesting, thanks! The wikipedia article on PeerTube explains that it is indeed user peer to peer to some extent, using WebTorrent. I had no idea. Very interesting.
Pixelfed also just integrated this feature.
Interesting, thanks!
You can disable the sharing aspect and just download. I mean I agree it's the law there that is wrong.
Does piped work the same way?
No, piped is a proxy of YouTube.
As others have pointed out the clear option is PeerTube. The fascinating thing about PeerTube right now is that the frontend experience actually seems to be best on other services. This is primarily because discoverability between instances is fairly poor due to both federation mechanics and due to the nature of bootstrapping social. Because Lemmy and Mastodon feature their own human driven mechanisms for content discovery this problem is largely solved so long as you are browsing through another platform (the same mechanisms do not seem to transfer well to a youtube like frontend, although nobody has tried yet). Comments made on Lemmy and Mastodon will also federate back to PeerTube so you're not segregated based on what service you follow from.
You can subscribe to channels from both Lemmy and Mastodon. Check out some popular channels:
!veronicaexplains_channel@tilvids.com
!letstalkphilosophy_channel@tilvids.com
!alliterative_channel@tilvids.com
!kde@tube.kockatoo.org
!lofiorchestra@makertube.net
!random_retro@makertube.net
NOTES:
- All of the above are channels. On Lemmy you can only subscribe to channels while on Mastodon you can subscribe to both channels and users. This is important as some videos get federated under the channels and some under the users. I believe this is up to the individual creator.
- Whitelist only is still fairly popular among PeerTube instances so you may not be able to access all creators from your Lemmy instance.
- Federation does not backfill so if the channels appear blank don't panic. It will fill in with future videos.
- If you follow these channels from Mastodon and then put them in a list you have a feed that is analogous to Youtube's subscribed page
I don't have to make a new account then?
Nope. Although I will say if you do have a Mastodon account, I find that experience a little nicer. Specifically the ability to put my channels into lists. Hoping to see a multi-reddit type grouping system on Lemmy in the future.
See FediFollow's recent post for more folks to subscribe to (not these links are mostly for users while on Lemmy you have to subscribe to the subchannels).
How do I find YouTubers?
Most YouTubers won't switch as they are generally in the business for monetization purposes. Early experiments in monetization have been done on PeerTube but nothing significant enough to be competitive. It does have first-class support for donation links but that's pretty much the bare minimum at this point.
Several of them are in the tilvids instance
It's PeerTube. I have a explainer video on how federated subscriptions work in PeerTube as part of my PeerTube Admin Chrenicals series: https://tube.jeena.net/w/b5DBfFwPU8FCWW24gCU7TY
Going to the video rental store back in the day and picking out something to watch based on the cover
I still buy DVDs and Blurays but that's another field, you're talking about Netflix here.
Lemmy is to Reddit as my phone's video gallery is to YouTube.
I was going to say mastodon, but more recently I think it's Grayjay, its an android app that combines YouTube, odysee, twitch and other video platforms into one.
The idea behind it, is that you can subscribe to a channel or creator and follow them on all platforms. That way if they ever get taken down from one you still follow them on the others
It seems that right now the only way to get itit's through its site. https://grayjay.app/
Interesting.
PeerTube