The difficulties we are having with PeerTube

[Ben Cooksley]

On Sun, 31 Jan 2021, 9:30 am Paul Brown, <paul.brown at kde.org> wrote:

> 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.
>

Has this federation been proven to work reliably and be effective?

This may seem like an unusual question, but given how much trouble Matrix
causes I do have to ask.


> - 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...
>

Bandwidth isn't an issue, the CDN is provided by CDN77 - who have quite a
bit of bandwidth at their disposal.

Failing that we can always leverage download.kde.org or files.kde.org
(which are both guaranteed to be HTTPS) which also have quite a bit of
bandwidth too.


> 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.
>

Has the Mastodon universe reached the critical mass where these benefits
are tangible?


> - 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
>

Cheers,
Ben

-- 
> Promotion & Communication
>
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