webtorrent VS PeerTube

It's because of the kind of content that is shared. BitTorrent serves a lot of content you are not allowed to redistribute, so having an open gateway immediately puts you at risk of aiding the distribution of content. But it does work, someone even made something native to browsers so browsers themselves can share content: https://webtorrent.io/. There are even fuse "gateways" to make it native to your computer and pretend the files exist locally: https://github.com/search?q=bittorrent+fuse&type=repositorie...

IPFS doesn't seem to be used for that kind of content much, it seems to be targeted more towards web-native content (html pages, images, that kind of stuff). It's probably safer for Cloudflare to run this.

title. I have some experience with c++ but not much with torrent libraries. (webtorrent, stremio)

You can stream torrents

If it fits your model, WebTorrent[0] can offload a lot of bandwidth to peers.

[0] https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent

Then https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent could be used to actually download the videos in browser, the idea being here though, that you would at least seed out as much as you got. Enabling other's to access videos without requiring creators have the infrastructure to push a video to 1000s or more clients at once.

I assume you've seen https://webtorrent.io/ ?

PeerTube is a decentralized and federated alternative to YouTube. The goal of PeerTube is not to replace YouTube but to offer a viable alternative using the strength of ActivityPub and P2P protocols.

Being built on ActivityPub means PeerTube is able to be part of a bigger social network, the Fediverse (the Federated Universe). On the other hand, P2P technologies help PeerTube to solve the issue of money, inbound with all streaming platform : With PeerTube, you don't need to have a lot of bandwidth available on your server to host a PeerTube platform because all users (which didn't disable the feature) watching a video on PeerTube will be able to share this same video to other viewers.

If you are curious about PeerTube, I can't recommend you enough to check the official website (https://joinpeertube.org) to learn more about the project. If after that you want to try to use PeerTube as a content creator, you can try to find a platform available there to register or host yourself your own PeerTube platform on your own server.

The development of PeerTube is actually sponsored by Framasoft (https://framasoft.org), a french non-for-profit popular educational organization, a group of friends convinced that an emancipating digital world is possible, convinced that it will arise through actual actions on real world and online with and for you!

Framasoft is also involved in the development of Mobilizon, a decentralized and federated alternative to Facebook Events and Meetup.

If you want to contribute to PeerTube, feel free to:

    * report bugs and give your feedback on Github or on our forums (https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/)

If you're looking for YouTube alternatives, you might be interested in PeerTube. PeerTube is to YouTube what Mastodon is to Twitter. (Plus PeerTube and Mastodon use the same federation technology. You can follow PeerTube accounts from inside Mastodon and vice versa.)

Hey! Just a rando here, but I would be interested in hearing your opinion as to where Peertube does well with this wish list and where it needs improvement.

https://joinpeertube.org

https://framablog.org/2023/11/28/peertube-v6-is-out-and-powe...

If you are curious about PeerTube, I can't recommend you enough to check the official website to learn more about the project. If after that you want to try to use PeerTube as a content creator, you can try to find a platform available there to register or host yourself your own PeerTube platform on your own server.

> YouTube (and other mainstream providers) solves user stories. The user story is "I want to find and watch interesting videos" and they nail it.

You miss another user story: IT department wants to self host a video distributing platform on their intranet and users need to embed video in intranet CMS (blogs, wikis, etc.) and they will watch those videos at home, at the office and in between places.

Thinking audience and monetization, basically it's thinking "youtube clone", and that narrows outlooks on what peertube brings to the table.

> The user story for this, judging by their homepage (https://joinpeertube.org), seems to be "I want a boring lecture on how bad Big Tech is"?

    What is PeerTube?

Exactly what you described exists and is called PeerTube.

https://joinpeertube.org

https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube

> Why don't you or someone else try starting one?

https://joinpeertube.org/

There are several instances, but that is not the solution to what the parent comment is pointing out. Videos are being published on YouTube because of network effect; it has become the defacto platform.

There already is an alternative to youtube. Peertube https://joinpeertube.org/

The problem is most content creators are only publishing on YouTube, so that is where you have to go. If you are a content creator please publish on peertube so we have options. If you know a creator, likewise encourage them to publish there.