The difficulties we are having with PeerTube

[Paul Brown]

On sábado, 30 de enero de 2021 18:25:00 (CET) Ben Cooksley wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 31, 2021 at 1:49 AM Paul Brown <paul.brown at kde.org> wrote:
> > Hello Fellow Promoers,
> > 
> > Talking of videos the other day reminded me of our current PeerTube
> > strategy:
> > we haven't got one.
> > 
> > We did have one, but it went away when the hosting service we were using
> > (peertube.mastodon.host) disappeared and did not come back.
> > 
> > Unfortunately, as long as we don't put up and maintain our own PeerTube
> > instance, we have to rely on the charity of others. These "others" are
> > usually
> > small outfits, often even individuals, that can disappear at short or no
> > notice
> > for any number of reason -- which is what happened with
> > peertube.mastodon.host.
> > 
> > To ensure they will be able to cope with storage and traffic, they often
> > specialise, such is the case of TILVids (https://tilvids.com). TILVids is
> > willing to put up things like our tips and tutorials, but balked at our
> > suggestion of  uploading  also many hours of conference talks. For that,
> > they
> > pointed us to https://conf.tube/, specialised in conferences and where,
> > it
> > seems, someone has already set up a KDE account -- which we would have to
> > take
> > over.
> > 
> > This would still leave us with the problem as to where to post our purely
> > promotional videos, like for Plasma announcements or teasers and stuff
> > like
> > that.
> > 
> > The third option is to go with something like libre.video, which has a
> > much
> > more laissez-faire approach to content, allowing content from
> > conspiracy-nuts,
> > QAnon, nazis, anti-vaxxers and all sorts of scummy Internet low-life... I
> > think I made a list where all items are identical.
> > 
> > To summarise, our options are:
> > 
> > - Try and convince sysadmins to set up a KDE managed PeerTube instance
> > (awesome, but it feels unfair to increase their workload)
> > 
> > - Split our media over several instances (TILVid, Conf.tube, etc.)
> > 
> > - Go with the crazies
> > 
> > - Do nothing, use YouTube and/or just put videos on our CDN
> 
> In terms of comparing PeerTube vs. our CDN, what would be the major
> difference here?
> 
> If there isn't much difference (aside from say allowing for commenting and
> voting)

Note that, for promo and outreach purposes, being able to interact easily with 
followers is very far from a minor advantage.

> then perhaps it would be best if we made use of our CDN - coupled
> with some customised pages for each one providing links to things like
> slides, etc?

Here are a few more advantages I can think of off the top of my head:

- We will be able to reach more people: Posting to an instance connected to 
other instances will allow us to reach a wider audience. 

- Take advantage of peer-to-peer broadcasting: this may be a minor side effect 
of the one above, but all connected instances share the bandwidth of the 
videos they share. I do not see any of our videos going super-viral to the 
point of becoming a problem for our bandwidth, but, hey...

And talking of sharing...

- We will be able to collect automatically related content, thus drawing more 
viewers to our own. You can choose which instances to follow, thus leaving out 
the crazies and irrelevant. You can also filter the videos themselves. Having a 
variety of related videos (reviews, demos, tutorials, ...)  from third parties 
will attract people to our instance and help them discover our own videos.

- We will be able to integrate with other Fediverse services: although a lot 
of the integration features are still WiP, being able to post in one go to 
PeerTube and then have videos show up on our Mastodon account and any other 
existing and future ActivityPub-based networks (say, like when PixelFed begins 
to support video), and being able to reach all of the different audiences that 
follow each network in one go will streamline our posting workflow a lot.

Cheers

Paul
-- 
Promotion & Communication

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