Yeah, they aren’t unbiased, they are more hesitant perhaps than other outlets on the other end of the bias spectrum - but not covering? Covering up? The biggest headline result when I just visited bbc.co.uk was about the starvation campaign.

Their bias can actually be somewhat helpful - it lends legitimacy to what they are reporting on, and makes it harder to claim that it’s “just biased pro-palestine pseudo-journalism” or some crap like that.

My first account was on .ml roughly 5 years back, when it was basically the only instance. I had heard about there being a FOSS alternative to Reddit - but I quickly lost interest because the community was just too small back then. Re-activated my account when the API exodus happened, because there was finally a community large enough to provide a lived-in feeling. Have only gotten more dedicated to the Fediverse ever since.

Ah, I am sad to hear that. And sorry that has been your experience.

As only an amateur coder, I can’t weigh in how serious the issue is, but I’m gonna take your word for it, without any other person involved adding input. I hope it’ll end up in a state, where the project can still sustain its growth in both features and users.

Congratulations Ruud & Rest - everyone at the foundation really, it’s just fun to say Ruud & Rest! I’m excited to see how this will develop. PieFed does have a lot of features already, that I do miss for Lemmy, and the communication from the main dev has been great so far. (An opportunity to post links to his PeerTube channel, as well as his Liberapay profile).

A great addition to the “Threadiverse” in particular, and the larger Fediverse!

You actually make a great point. Really, for me it was mostly a quick idea because I had been musing about PeerTube’s streaming capabilities in a different comment thread, and about how it leverages the P2P mechanism, so it was fresh on my mind that I wanted to stress-test my own server somehow (and I wanted to learn how to set-up OBS with chat and stuff for PeerTube). Then, while “working” on the canvas, I had the sudden: “Hey, I’d love to set my pixels while zoomed in, while also watching the whole field zoomed out”-thought … but of course that would just as easily be possible by just having two browser windows open 🤷

If nothing else, I got some promising data showing my server can handle several people tuning in to live streams at the same time - and I am also using this to test how my server handles someone wanting to encode a 24h+ VOD from a stream, so that will be there, too - probably for another time-lapse in addition to the official ones.

Done and done - it was about time I got an account there anyway.

That has been my impression of present dynamics and historical data, too - boom-bust-cycles of either some other platform fucking up or there being curiosity from some synergetic effect, then the initial wave breaking over time - but usually also leaving behind at least more (genuinely active) users than before the wave. For Lemmy, one can definitely see some reduction in activity, I think - not dramatically, but I do think it’s noticeable if you spend a lot of time here. E.g. unlike during the last Exodus, I see more of “the same users” than before. There’s still enough content, it does not feel dead by a long shot, and who knows when the next wave may hit.

That wave-like character makes it hard to estimate organic growth too, at times. The mass influx of users dying off over weeks will give shrinking numbers there, even if some users from organic growth who are more likely to stay and be active than “mass exodus users” may still join there. Also, users moving in between MBin/PieFed/Lemmy will fudge numbers, but they are essentially in the same ecosystem.

What’s it like for you?

There’s a lot of different degrees of dreaming, and it’s still kind of a mystery to science why exactly we dream like we do.

At the most basic, it’s usually just something your memory gets rid of immediately, just leaving you with a vague memory of a memory of a sensation, I think you experience those as well.

And on the other end of the spectrum are dreams, which basically are like being in actual situations, acting and experiencing something as if you are actually there, feeling “real” for the lack of a better word. Those then can range from realistic and mundane to surreal and extraordinary. Most interesting here is, that the surrealness is usually not perceived as such. A remarkable feature of most dreams is, that their internal logic, even where it would make no sense in real life at all, is in-the-moment perceived as just what is natural. (e.g. people appearing and vanishing, places morphing into different places, etc.)

Then there are lucid dreams, where you “wake up” to the fact, that you are in a dream, and sometimes even get a certain amount of control over the world and situation you are in. I have had those at times in the past with some medication. Including really interesting ones, like with ones where I ended up confronting my grandfather and parents, my brain clearly working through some memories in some way.

Then there are dreams that feel like movies or video games, with different degrees of being “in” what is happening, feeling more like an observer.

In general - dreams feel like actual situations, with varying degrees of vividity and control and varying degrees of sensuality (with some, you can hear, see, touch and smell, others just have sight or sound). And they can range from mundane things to fantastical stories. And can range from insightful, to joyful, to genuine horror that doesn’t leave you after waking up for a while.

Do you enjoy, dislike or analyze your dreams?

Personally, I enjoy dreams, even when they are full of negative emotions, there is usually something interesting to reflect on. I remember reading a German study recently, that came to the conclusion, that how vivid dreams are and how much you remember is at least partially also influenced by preconceptions about dreaming and “training”. The most obvious, for example, is a dream journal helping with more clearly remembering dreams, as memory usually fades quickly after waking up, so catching the memory and putting it to paper as quickly as possible can help.

For others, dreams can become more of a nuisance where they keep reliving traumata, without any closure beyond re-traumatisation and exhaustion. For those, too, there is at least some hope in that things under our control seem to be at least a part of the equation of how vivid and well-remembered dreams can be.

Is it really a window to the subconscious for you?

I’d say so, but I’d caution to not pay too much heed to “objective” theories of dream interpretation. What is pretty well proven, as far as I know, is that dreaming plays some part in memory, and that it is fed by memories. But how exactly that can be a reflection of the unconscious mind is, in my opinion, so heavily subjective, that answers like “seeing this in a dream means that” at least feel like nonsense to me.

E.g., when I dream of seeing myself in the mirror with scars and pustules all over my body, that has a meaning that will be related to me, that could completely differ in meaning from the same dream for another person. And not every dream has to be profound there, too. E.g. simple dreams of good food or of sex can be as surface level as they seem. Another example here is a common phenomenon of having dreams of needing to go the the bathroom (which I occasionally have before waking up) - where that is as simple as it seems - very simply reflecting what is happening in the not-yet-awake psyche.

Recently? The worst was accidentally drinking coffee too late in the evening a few days ago, which, sadly, was more than enough to mess up my well-being for several days at this point in my life.

When I was living in a boarding-school like arrangement for people with disabilities once, they had really sensitive smoke detectors and if you tripped them needlessly, you were in for a hell of liability, because they immediately caused complete evacuation pocedures and an automated emergency call where not just a small contingent of firefighters were called. One night, one person forgot their pasta boiling on the stove and fell asleep on the couch in exhaustion - so deeply and long, that all the water boiled away and the noodles burned and tripped the alarm. That exhaustion cost them several thousands of Euros.

I think there is some aggression here directed at me that comes from stuff other people in the thread have been throwing at you, so I have some understanding for the aggressive tone, even though I wonder why you are that emotionally invested, or at least, why your language seems to reflect that to that degree at this moment. I don’t think we will be able to change each others’ mind either way. But I feel like I should address at least a few points, where I think your estimations are at least off (again, not completely untrue):

No, my point is that there is no reason for a Content Creator to actually put effort into Peertube (or even the youtube alternatives that they aren’t co-owners of). And there is no path toward that.

Okay, that at least makes the context more understandable to me. And for the big ones, I still agree. For a lot of others, I think even now publishing on both can make genuine sense, it’s surprisingly cheap, or even free utilising one of the many established instances, to have additional reach with a passionate and growing community. And I do think that with further growth, there is potnential for it to attract more than just people doing it “out of the goodness of their heart.” And I do think it is not doomed to be a “fundamentally un-profitable platform”. Even now, with just a few months running, I have a surprisingly large chunk of costs covered by donations already, which I did not expect.

People run seedboxes because they get something out of it: Private tracker access.

And people run PeerTube instances for a multitude of reasons. Some financed by donations, some out of pocket, some by non-profits. They get the same out of it, as any of the other big Fediverse instances, sometimes just community and pride, sometimes a genuine side job, some non-profits have employees having it as a main job, too.

I suspect you would think otherwise when a video “goes viral” and you suddenly get a call from your ISP telling you they have decided you are hosting a business and that you need to pay for a different internet plan.

Well, it wouldn’t be my ISP, as it’s not my home connection, but my server provider. But, point taken. So far, stress tests haven’t yet produced the risk of what you are describing, to my knowledge. Might happen, might not, you seem to have experience, which I respect. But I also know that experience might not translate to different situations and dynamics properly at times, and I also respect the people in the broader PeerTube community running instances with their own experience also greater than my own not agreeing on that point as unambivalently.

Ah, so now content creators are working specifically to support Peertube. Which means their effective operating costs have just skyrocketed because now they are paying for their own hosting AND paying for all the time and materials to make the video in the first place.

Actually, you misunderstood what I meant here. What I meant was a large content creator just generating a growth in community for an instance, some of which will be supporting the instance on their own, with the content creator maybe also adding donations if they want to. Again, everything I have heard from the community currently active on PeerTube, some of which having been active for Years, indicates costs scale better than your estimate seems to indicate, including, again, from people more experienced than me, and with some exceptional videos already in the 100ks of views.

Great. I didn’t “disregard” anyone.

You kind of did with:

And people SAY they want early youtube videos but everyone is deeply spoiled by the difference between a video that was made in a week of after work tweaking versus weeks of full time planning and editing.

Maybe you did not mean it that way, but claiming “everyone” is a statement that disregards people you claim are not existing in “everyone”. Speaking of disregarding:

But you have to understand that You Don’t Matter.

I mean, that’s what I mean with, why do you seem so emotionally invested. What are you trying to do? Save us all from investing resources into PeerTube? Just end up “winning” this argument for winning’s sake?

If creating content for a platform can’t even meaningfully offset the cost of creating that content in the first place, the VAST majority of people won’t and you are basically left with the independently wealthy people.

And people passionate about things, which is an important group. E.g. I am living on disability payments that are subsistence level (in a western European country, so it is overall okay, with some general frugality “life hacks” and cutting back on what others may think of as essential), yet I am investing a lot out of pocket into the Fediverse just because that is what I want to do. I am well aware I am not the average person, and not indicative of the vast, vast majority of people, but it is still another type of engaged person for platforms like that at this stage of development, that provide spaces and community already for PeerTube, that others grow within synergetically.

But more broadly, content is not created for PeerTube exclusively at this point of growth anyway, with only very rare exceptions, so almost no one is creating costs just for PeerTube right now. The question is of course - if PeerTube could generate 100ks or even eventually millions of views regularly with additional growth - would it be an attractive platform to put effort into? So, concerning some of the points you made there:

Peertube et al only really exist starting on step 4 (because you can bet most instance owners would strip or hijack those referral links…)

Not what I have seen actually happening with referral links for the channels that publish on both platforms and have them (e.g. Gardiner Bryant), so you speak of hypotheticals here, when there are already situations where this is not happening in this way. And there has been no drama, no flaming comments, no “boycott his instance” calls.

As for your 1 and 2 concerning the life-cycle of content creators, I do agree with it, but don’t think skipping step 2 in itself is completely impossible with a different culture and community. Some things that have helped offset it for the few creators I know of exclusively publishing on PeerTube are things like their already existing Mastodon communities being able to very easily interact with their videos without having to change their favourite medium, as well as:

Get popular enough that you can get enough of a following that people actually WILL “just put some money in the tip jar”

My experience has been, that this is at least somewhat mitigated by there being an on average greater willingness on the Fediverse in general to support things via donations, again anecdotally, I was surprised that I got some so early on in my “fuck it, I’ll just start hosting Fediverse stuff now out of pocket because I want to and I cut back on other stuff”-journey. At this point, not at all enough to carry anyone, but I never claimed PeerTube is able to that that on its own right now, just that the potential exists, IMO.

Your point is taken, and I agree - I also don’t see anyone professionally publishing on PeerTube as their only platform any time soon, unless they have outside revenue (e.g. I have an art collective publishing their professional content on my instance for independence and conviction reasons, but their main revenue stream is of course their events themselves. Still, there is a degree of additional promotion they get for free for being part of PeerTube instead of just self hosting.)

But you did claim originally that there are no reasons at all for creators to care (which, granted, you did clarify and moved away from a maximalist position), and claimed it being fundamentally un-profitable to publish there without ads. You also suspected the devs being in risk of selling out and just creating this as a prestige project to do so - which is probably one reason you got backlash, because that betrays a lack of understanding for the project and team behind it. And you noted - “any video hosted only on a single ‘instance’ would rapidly cost way too much if it ever became moderately popular.” - moderately popular is a fuzzy term, of course, but so far, this does not at all look to be the case in scaling stress tests and what I have seen of the actually existing infrastructure. E.g. I’ve seen some French videos getting several thousands of views in hours to a few days, running on what is listed as essentially a laptop at someones private home (which is of course the absolute cheapest tier of hardware employed), and those instances have managed to exist at that scale for years, indicating professional servers would scale up pretty well and can punch way above their weight class when compared to centralised services.

And I do think that even just right now, a few dozen to hundreds additional views from passionate people really interested in your content can be a huge boon to small to medium creators, and that is the status quo at the moment, with growing numbers, growing synergies (e.g. PeerTube being easily embedded in lemmy-ui is quite new) and growing projects to address discoverability (e.g. Sepia Search or the PeerTube Picks add-on) and already more professional exceptions going beyond just dozens of views (e.g. the aforementioned heise instance).

You clearly have a lot of professional and personal experience, that I do respect. The overall dynamics you describe are real - but I suspect you might at least lack some experience with the kind of structures that are currently being built in the broader Fediverse, as well as PeerTube in particular, including the use cases PeerTube already has. Case in point for the latter: The many hypotheticals you employ, which are sometimes, but still not always, accurate to what is an already existing community on PeerTube that has existed for years now.

Yeah, that is very varying from instance to instance, I try to keep outright porn completely out of mine, for example, but allow non-sexualised nudity (within reason), both for my own server and content I federate with. Others, like peertube.wtf don’t allow porn on their server, but allow it in the federated content. Others again just outright ban NSFW content altogether.

Depends, I am not a person that watches a lot of streamers - but if you end up streaming a blind playthrough of Disco Elysium, I am literally addicted to that.

Hmm, I think we have vastly different perspectives on what PeerTube has to become to be a worthwhile product, because I agree with a lot of what you said, but I don’t fully see what the problem is and don’t think the ultimate conclusion - which seems to be “No one would want to produce and/or browse content on there” - is true. I think the basic issue is that you seem to have the maximalist goal of wanting PeerTube to be at similar numbers to YouTube, and missing that, you don’t see anyone finding worth in it - so I will argue against that point, hoping I did not misread you there.

A small thing to start out with, but it is something I have definitely noticed while running an instance these past months, and something people underestimate I think - concerning:

you put even Not An Engineer on your peertube instance and he is going to consume a disproportionate amount of bandwidth. Let alone a Michael Reeves who would crash the entire fediverse during his annual video.

While taken as-fact if those number of viewers just appeared right now outside of organic growth, it might be true, I am not aware of scaling tests that go that large. But PeerTube is ridiculously scalable in bandwidth, thanks to the Peer2Peer nature. For the same reason many thousands of people can download 4k movies and shows concurrently via torrents with just a few dedicated seedboxes, PeerTube can scale bandwidth really, really well. My server has ~300GB reserved to automatically mirror and seed trending, new and popular videos, for example, so it is also not just home internet connections helping with bandwidth security. So I think you are underestimating the scalability here.

The real costly part is storage, bandwidth is surprisingly affordable considering the project we are talking about - the influx in audience a “big creator” could mean to an instance, as well as with it potential support in donations both directly and indirecty, could very well outweigh the addional costs (again - mostly storage). More generally as another anecdote about how scaleable PeerTube is thanks to the underlying tech - Mastodon has been much more of a head-scratcher in scalability for my server resources (A bit of config changes helped there, thankfully, but it is still far less efficient) - and that is with just me myself as a user on there at the moment, compared to ~50 active users on my PeerTube instance, including people uploading videos.

And:

Ad revenue gets worse and worse every year but it usually is essential to even offsetting parts and labor for a video for smaller creators. I think it was Gamers Nexus that discussed the different tiers of monetization in the context of the honey scandal, but the basic idea is that ads are what let you know if a channel has any legs and referral links are what keep you alive until you are big enough for a sponsor to care.

I don’t know Gamer’s Nexus, and how their numbers broke down, so I have no real grounds of questioning their logic. On the other hand, I do know of a few channels I used to watch on YT publishing their numbers in community posts. Those numbers definitely made me think, that channels that make proper money from ads that would be essential in any way, are not what I would call “small” at all. And I am a bit confused - first you mention it is essential income, then you mention it is in fact mostly useful as a metric for measuring feasibility? I think I may have misread something there.

Which gets back to: Peertube as a concept is great for official tutorials and MAYBE blog posts by “nobodies”. Why would anyone go out of their way to join in decentralized hosting of that? And while it is conceptually a great way to “can’t stop the signal” an important video… it either rapidly becomes liveleaks or we see the same thing that happened with Lemmy where the instance owners get a phone call from their local FBI equivalent and rapidly say “I don’t want that smoke”.

I’m assuming I missed a valid scandal here that led to closing of an instance, but - Lemmy (and PieFed, and mBin) is very much alive and we are discussing on it. It is even a better place for some niche content in the FLOSS sphere, than Reddit is right now. So, I am not certain what exactly you mean by the consequences of something happening to Lemmy?

But Peertube as something people would even want to browse or create Content for? I have yet to see any path toward that that isn’t “Well, people really love the ideologies of FOSS so they’ll do it out of the goodness of their heart”

“Well, people really love the ideologies of FOSS so they’ll do it out of the goodness of their heart” is indeed part of the first wave of the ecosystem. And roughly four years ago, when I first had a look at PeerTube, that was all that was on there - and illegal stuff, and crypto grifters, and conspiracy nuts banned from everywhere else. So at that time, I think you would have been right on the money with the LiveLeak comparison, I could not stand to stay back then, even as a FLOSS fanatic.

Since then, the ecosystem has grown massively - makertube.net and spectra.tv spectra.video for example have a lot of just passionate people that enjoy making and documenting their projects. There’s a bit of a surge of just channels wanting a backup independent of big tech, partially because of the Boycott US movement. Recently, the largest German tech media outlet, heise, have started up their own instance for all their video channels, because they realised that techies are actually on the Fediverse and those are the people buying their magazines. One I couldn’t check myself, but Framasoft have mentioned in their FAQ, that there are some French organisations that host with PeerTube simply for the sake of data sovereignty and lessening dependence (I can’t confirm the scale here - but I have definitely seen a lot of professional level French stuff on PeerTube I could not enjoy, sadly, due to the language barrier). So, the ecosystem has already grown from the days of just being LiveLeak + hardcore Richard Stallman worshippers. Maybe I should adjust my metaphor from the current stage being lichen, and there actually already being a bit of grasses. Nothing on the level of the really big YT channels yet, but definitely a few on the “professionals with a dedicated community” level already.

Every bit of growth makes it potentially [more] interesting for any non-ideologically motivated content creator that wants an additional audience they may not get if they publish exclusively on YouTube. So that is one entry point, that can eventually become relevant to people beyond those that just find the idea interesting - or are driven by paranoia or idealism. That is slow, organic growth with occasional boom-bust cycles, much like with other Fediverse services - but it is growth, beyond just idealists.

And audience-wise, it already is a fitting niche for people you disregarded - people like me who genuinely do like old YouTube. I am still watching YT, there is some quality content that is simply not available elsewhere, like Majuular’s amazing Ultima retrospective which released its latest entry just today. But I have reduced my time on YouTube massively, and I’ve genuinely grown so tired of some of the tropes that have become impossible to miss after I started to spend more time on PeerTube. Artificial lengthening of videos for watch time engagement for example, blue-balling important information for more engagement. “Leave a comment” just for the sake of engagement and the algorithm - often even to the annoyance of the creators themselves who have to hamper their creativity to fit a formula. The several layers of post-ironic clickbait (sadly, that is also present on PeerTube, but to a lesser degree). I know you are fully aware of all those things and they simply don’t outweigh the problems for you, but they are creating an active audience for the PeerTube ecosystem even now, without any of the bigger channels.

So, I guess in the end all I can say is that I don’t share your perspective, both in having PeerTube fully supplanting YouTube as a (necessary) goal and in seeing no potential for the platform beyond tutorials and “nobodies”. None of us has a crystal ball, of course. I might be wrong - but I definitely see more potential than you do, I guess mostly because I have seen it grow and keep growing, in underlying tech and in participating community, over the past years.

I think you do bring up important points, and ads are indeed a de-facto impossibility (even though, technically, there’s nothing stopping someone creating a plug-in that shows ads, the dynamics you describe would make platforms using it isolated quickly). I would add that, personally, I don’t want to ever have PeerTube go down the ad rabbit hole, it comes with a lot of dynamics that almost make enshittification inevitable - although I heard some Fedi platforms had some success with very selected and limited sale of hand-curated advertisement spots, that really isn’t scalable in the same way.

But while this makes PeerTube uninteresting to the really big players that want or need to maximise their income - I think there is still a lot of potential left. Two of the other big revenue streams are still available - sponsored segments in videos can work basically the very same as on YT. And Liberapay/Patreon/Ko-Fi are still available as well, with Framasoft mentioning looking into enabling better integration for services like it in the future. Another possibility I imagine could work, would be Nebula-like platforms utilising the technology eventually, with local content on the server being fenced-off to paying subscribers, but those registered local users still able to also reach the bigger, free network of videos in the Fediverse beyond that.

There are a lot of mid-sized YT channels, and channels not wanting to compromise on satisfying ad guidelines, that basically only make pennies from YTs normal monetisation strategies and completely rely on sponsoring and patrons. For those, PeerTube is a genuine possibility in the future, after more organic growth. And that growth will have to follow the usual stages of alternative platforms, with currently enthusiasts and hobbyists being the “moss and lichen” to enable growth of “grasses” in the future, to use a metaphor.

this really feels like the kind of software project that has the end state of getting “adopted” by a corporation and the major devs hired on as consultants.

I can understand the fear, but from what I know of Framasoft - if they were prone to sell out, they would not have “wasted” decades on their passion projects, and stubbornly delaying to do more dynamic, non-local, non-French marketing of their “de-google-ify” suite.

EDIT: Good exchange indicative of this I just (at the time of this edit) witnessed on Mastodon:

To be honest, I had the feeling it is lopsided the other way around at the moment: There are quite a few good and passionate content creators, lacking in an audience and interaction. I mean - sure - it does not have the amount of content of a big tech platform like YT, and not enough to binge watch stuff all day long, but I think lack of an active audience is at the moment more pressing - as is discoverability. If not using outside channels - like promoting on their Mastodon accounts primarily - or using places like !peertube@lemmy.world or !peertube@lemmy.wtf to discover things, a lot of worthwhile content right now flies under the radar. And that is excluding unofficial mirrors of YT content, which I tend to avoid.

On the other hand - I know lack of a mobile app has come up at several times in comments on there, and I have myself by now anecdotally heard from a few people wanting to try PeerTube and then being weirded out by the unfinished mobile app in ways that were unrecoverable. In addition, adding more know-how and codebase for mobile applications into the greater FLOSS ecosphere and Fediverse is good in its own right, there is a severe lack of it.

Plasma 6.4 will automatically become the best DE whenever you read the title, but ceases to be so, whenever your eyes look at something different. It’s the “quantum clickbait”-law of video (and news) titles. So, for the sake of quality assurance, please continue to read the title indefinitely, thank you.

So this is a bit of self-promotion, but I can’t think of a better way to link all of them in a neat way: Almost all the channels I recommend (excluding some that are on instances that did not allow mine to follow them, which makes the channel cards not load properly, sadly) are on the landing/home page of my instance, in no particular order:

Follow this link for the overview! - of course you can interact and follow from other instances (including other services like Mastodon). Lemmy does not work properly for following PeerTube channels in my experience, though - don’t know about Piefed and mbin.

You can find a similar collection of channels on the landing page of peertube.wtf as well as a collection in a sticke post on !peertube@lemmy.wtf. too.

Hmm, I think at the moment with how Lemmy/the threadiverse is set up, linking to the piefed.social post instead of the link of the post is really clunky - makes interaction pretty hard. Don’t know if that was intentional to promote the other community, but a cross-post would probably be a better idea?

EDIT: Lemmyverse link, for people interested to interact over there more easily from a different instance - although I think Lemmyverse.link doesn’t work with every client