this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2026
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I really wish PeerTube would take off, or any other alternative.
I think PeerTube should be for hobby purposes. I mean, here's where I am coming from. I am from a period of the internet, where you were not meant to be e-famous. I still at times, believe this. Look at what happened when the idea of the tiniest bit of fame and success people allow to get to their heads when they realize that they can just make videos and profit off of them.
Nebula.tv has been pretty good. I'm considering the lifetime subscription.
I wish PeerTube worked. For a while I tried just leaving in running on the theory that it might help out, but it didn't seem to do anything. Not sure if I'm doing it wrong?
I'm running a private, unfederated node; it works. I watch TILVIDS whenever I can find something on there.
This is not an "if you build it, they will come" scenario,
There's no monetization, so there are almost no content creators.
Creators generally don't do it for free.
Good creators rely on income from the videos to produce higher-quality videos
Youtube: surfaces creators' videos pays creators hosts the videos handles CDN
Peertube: The creator pays to host the video (largely against their ISP's wishes) There's no surfacing There's no payments If you're lucky peertube doesn't need CDN.
Even if they go all patreon, they're still not getting that extra cash, surfacing, and free hosting that youtube does.
We need some kind of FOSS Patreon and to have Peertube do some kind of partner/recommendation engine.
I'm not shilling for LMG, but something like Floatplane would make sense. You pay per creator for their extra content and ad free viewing and the cut goes in favor to the creator. Of course Floatplane has to also make money. They're not in it to serve you ads or use your data to make money. If that took off I could easily see people paying 3-5 creators monthly to watch their videos ad free with extras on one platform.
Nebula has more and is cheaper. I had some interest in Floatplane. Last time I looked at it, Youtube was cheaper for my use case and them not listing creators up front is bad news.
Same, dude. The power users will assume everyone has the time to assemble/learn the skill of setting it up. That being said, it’s on my list of things to figure out one day!
yeah, one of the responses lower down made me realize why PeerTube is unlikely to be a success any time soon - it's not something the typical YouTube user has to deal with.
What did you want it to do?
Did you set up a node? Did you promote it & grow a user base? Federate?
I wanted it to not be dog slow, because every one I tried spent all its time buffering. I’m not really sure how the architecture of it works but it seemed to suggest some kind of p2p thing so thought that leaving the window open might seed it? But either it didn’t or just nobody was interested.
you are not seeding by just leaving the window open on any peertube page. you are only seeding the specific video you have opened, if you have opened one, and probably not the complete video just the last segments you still have cached. this p2p sharing is mostly for when a certain video gets popular, to help with peek load, and for live streams. if the video was buffering for a long time it's probably because the server did not have enough upload bandwidth, and no other viewer had the video segments.
there is another load balancing system that peertube supports, they can clone videos fromneach other and help serving them: https://docs.joinpeertube.org/admin/following-instances#platforms-redundancy
don't know why you got downvoted, this is 100% truth
It never buffers for me, but I do have a full gig and super low latency
Could be a zillion reasons for this. Need an actual instance to debug
Even though it's no longer tractable for the casual hobbyist (me) to run a node, Invidious is still usable thanks to absolutely heroic effort by the ~4 organizations still willing and able to invest the crazy infrastructure needed to prevent GOOG from blocking them.
https://docs.invidious.io/instances/
You can't really monetize PeerTube though, so you're never going to get full time creators there. Media distribution has always been a choke point. Always will be. Short of a non-profit foundation and a unionized creators guild joining forces to operate a decentralized subscription video platform, you're never going to have a real alternative. I mean... there's Nebula which is basically that, but who goes to Nebula, it's full of lefties and educators and theatre people.
Lots of channels have a link to their Patreon or a tip jar; lots do live reads.
You can monetize PT with Patreon, but you can monetize YT with Patreon and get paid twice.
That's why YT has 5 9's of the creators.
Sure, but then you're still bringing a for-profit company into the mix. PeerTube is your loss-leader and Patreon is your main platform.
Some channels use Ghost instead of Patreon, including one of my favorites Anders Puck
I'm with GreenBeard on this and was always saying that monetization is the biggest peertube problem. Patreon and such are not an ideal option, subscription is IMO. A subscription that would be distributed through authors fairly, but that's not an easy task I suppose.
liberapay can do that already. but apparently they don't have the necessary API for integration: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/1586#issuecomment-459100710
Like I said, Nebula does it and it's pretty good. Hard to get on as a creator unless you have a proven follower base elsewhere though. They're still mainly using YouTube as a farm league.
Might be interesting to see Nebula set up a fund for PeerTube creators and start using that as a farm league, but I don't know that they have the subscription revenue for that yet.
So they, too, can enshittify your whole experience? Or are they somehow immune from capitalism??
Ah, it’s federated. Makes sense.
a certain instance can, but that won't affect the network as a whole that much. you hop over to another instance and done. the developers also could, but it's open source, it can be forked by dedicated server operators. It's also developed by a nonprofit, so there's not abig risk, and thry have a good track record.
It's a federated network of open source servers, anybody can host it. So, I think we are pretty safe. For now.