I want these things to implement peer to peer caching, so that when 10 people are watching the same video, only one downloads from youtubes own servers.
Then it's just a matter of letting people add their own videos directly to the service and it can become fully independent of YouTube.
The problem with P2P video is that it's expensive to host and most of the people using it are going to use it for child abuse. It makes it not realistic.
If I search for The Best of Both Worlds but open the video to find it's csam and not st:tng then I've unwittingly started watching, and thus potentially seeding, the csam.
But even simple checks like the number of seeders on a torrent will defeat a vast majority of this problem. I would not expect a torrent with 1k seeders to be csam for e.g.
I understand the worry, and it is a difficult problem worth thought but the alarmist virtue signalling helps absolutely no one, victims included.
That might work for popular culture. It's probably a good strategy if you want to watch the latest superhero movie.
I listen to the Butthole Surfers and Amboog-a-Lard - I'm willing to bet a good portion of their material has less seeders than much illegal content do.
Are you not describing perfect as the enemy of good?
A product doesn't need to serve EVERY human on earths needs, just enough of them that it can become large enough that established legacy solutions need to adapt.
I get why you might think this wouldn't be a fit for YOU but rather than argue against it from a niche viewpoint instead maybe look at how if it did exist it could be good for many.
> If the system is truly distributed it means you might not be able to participate without hosting or transmitting CSAM.
Depends on the P2P architecture. With something like bittorrent / webtorrent you will be distributing CSAM only if you download it yourself first. Otherwise there is no way for any CSAM content to appear on your device. The fear that an algorithm may spread CSAM on the network by making you view one accidentally is a legitimate concern though.
I tried using Peertube but finding an instance whose content policy fits what you're meaning to upload and responds to sign-up requests isn't trivial. It's basically perpetual storage they're offering for free so I get it, maybe the real surprise is that youtube makes so much money off of us that they can afford this
Found one in the end when I didn't have a choice anymore and put renewed effort into it (Google's algorithm won't let me into my account anymore, saying they don't have enough information to verify it's me (username, password, recovery email.. not enough apparently, but there is nothing else), so I'm a Peertube exclusive now) but iirc I can't use it for everything, like if I wanted to upload something in Dutch I'd have to find a new server that allows my language
Delivering the bits is not the hard part of making a successful video platform. It's other stuff like recommendations and content discovery that is actually useful, allowing creators to monetize enough that they want to be on your platform, navigating legal issues, fighting spam and abuse, and getting enough users to sign up and start using your service.
Delivering the bits is a part of it though. When youtube changes its api in a way that forces NewPipe to change its algorithm, they have to push out a change that forces users to update the app. This is annoying because naturally you won't find NewPipe on the app store so updating the app is tedious for users who use it. The parent's workaround fixes some or all of this nuisance, depending on how implemented
I don't find ads tedious at all. In fact, since I grew up with ads on tv, I miss them. The commercial break was a scheduled time to get a snack, go to the bathroom, get a snack, etc. Today's platforms put the ad breaks in such awkward spots that doing those things is a lot less natural. IMO, it's not the ads that after the problem; it's the way they are used.
So you don't miss ads, you miss a scheduled break. You literally said you walk away when they happened, so you didn't even see them.
That's fine and there are tools to get that scheduled break back - even the official YouTube app has options to remind you to take a break every X min of watchtime and there are some very advanced general screentime limiting apps out there.
As you say YouTube ads aren't scheduled well and they're too short and unpredictable to even go to the bathroom during. Integrated ad reads are even worse in that regard.
You bring your phone or tablet to the bathroom, or are you playing YouTube on an unmovable TV set?
I did without a TV set since I moved in a larger home. Previously I could listen to the TV anywhere in my home, now I can't so instead of pinning me in a place I moved my TV into my phone and tablets. Everything is in an app anyway and for free to air TV I got a couple of RPi 3 with a TV hat and the TVHeadend app.
And when I have guests everybody is watching something different on their phones most of the times.
Can't you just do "ota" updates like codepush used to do? ie shove a JavaScript asset with whatever is needed and allow the app to pull it at runtime?
Smarttube on Android TV just pulls its own APK so you just need to click Install after it downloads and opens it.
NewPipe dev here: We discussed something like this, but decided against “hot loadable code” like JavaScript snippets. Instead, we notify the users when a new version of the app is available. However, this features is opt-in due to privacy concerns. Maybe we should make it more obvious that this feature exists.
I checked right now: I installed both NewPipe and PipePipe from F-Droid but both apps notify me about new versions and I always download and install them from the notification message bypassing F-Droid.
NewPipe dev here. Just like @nijave said, we offer OTA updates. Apps in android are capable of updating themselves this is why we show notifications when a new update is available. However, due to privacy concerns this automatic update checking is an opt-in feature, which you will have to enable in the settings first.
You could have local caches of the users recently watched videos on their machines as available seeds. bittorrent now also supports http based init seeds so you could create torrents with a verified sha of a youtube mp4 downloaded once or something like that.
if someone is seeding that video cause they recently watched it and it remains on their local cache, you could get the bits from there vs hitting youtube servers
That works if you fix everything to a single quality and codec. YouTube videos tend to have something like 20+ variants that can get dynamically switched between while the video is playing (adaptive streaming).
The client can pick the optimal encoding and quality which makes that quite a bit more difficult. A user on a modern device that can hardware decode HDR av1 will have a file cached completely useless to a browser that can only do SDR h264.
I think there is a sort of network effect needed to make it become reasonable.
I'd be interested in seeing data that supports this.
Netflix reported in 2025 something like 30% of traffic was av1. I think smartphone and PC support are fairly robust but under the impression streaming devices are still quite terrible unless it's a Chromecast.
AVC/h.264 is the only thing I know of that's pretty much universally supported at this point. I found a Facebook/Meta report citing some consultant provided data that VP9 was a close second. Limiting to devices from the last few years, HEVC might work.
Why is that the right tradeoff? It seems like the Plex/Jellyfin ecosystem has landed on keeping high quality persisted and hardware accelerated transcoding for everything else. Put another way, transcoding capable caches.
this is exactly why i worked on webtorrent ~13 years ago <a href="https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent
Peer to peer died because (1) a lot of the world, especially outside the US, has terrible upload/bandwidth, (2) HTTPS CDNs got _really_ cheap, far cheaper that p2p technologies like BitTorrent+WebSeed.
There are a minority of users who care about being able to host videos that violate YouTube/TikTok/Instagram policies. Unfortunately, a significant part of that minority is working with infringing or illegal content, which both prevents ad networks from working with you and attracts attention from law enforcement.
Minor correction on (1): upload isn't worse "outside the US" as a rule. A lot of Western Europe (Portugal, Spain, France, the Nordics) has widespread FTTH with symmetric or near-symmetric plans, often better uplink than typical US cable. The weak-upload argument holds more for mobile-first regions and for DSL/cable-heavy markets. But I agree the conclusion probably stands either way: most viewing is on phones behind CGNAT, and that kills P2P regardless of how good home fibre is.
The CGNAT problem is solvable in the majority of cases via multiple solutions (tailcat/DERP, for example), but that certainly doesn't make a mobile connection's upload any better for sure.
Meh - you can block ports inbound without state tables. I think you're ascribing purpose to what i imagine is a sclerotic and dysfunctional entity.
When i was 20, i was reflexively cynical, because it let me pose as intellectual without the burden of having to learn or think. As an adult, i find that pose very fucking obvious.
My interest was piqued by the concept of natting ip6, and why an isp might do so, and why cgnat might be disabled if you ask the isp to disable ip6.
...bb-but I thought cynicism was the same thing as experience![1]
No but seriously, I agree it is primarily "we can't be arsed to change our methods".
"Primarily" is not everything; the other 10-20% is the long tail of everything else. Europe is getting much harder on filesharing[3][4] because of business interests, and - despite the much better regulation - there's probably some "you shouldn't be hosting things on a residential connection anyways, pay us for a business connection peasants" like in the US[2].
Of course, all these ready-made restrictions are then easily adaptable for abuse (when's the next Chat Control proposal anyways?), so there's not much pushback from above...
Cynicism is easily a thought-terminating cliche, but it is unfortunately earned nowadays, especially as a coping mechanism for a feeling of helplessness against the usually stupid, sometimes malicious forces at play (Hanlon's Razor doesn't account for weaponization of stupidity).
Sure, but cgnat doesn't defeat filesharing, because of your STUN and your DERP and what-have-you.
It's common, at least in the UK, for residential lines to block smtp inbound. That's an ACL, which is operationally ~free. NAT does not serve the purposes you've outlined.
Some cynicism is warranted about, e.g. chat control, but it's better explained by good-faith desire to fight egregious crime coupled with low care for the privacy invasion. Other people have different values to you and me.
It's hard to reconcile an EU government in anyone's pocket with gdpr and dma, which afaics serve citizens and no big interests. Like most governments, the EU is somewhat fractious and incoherent, so it's not a given that everything they do is citizen-friendly. But i, for one, accept that law enforcement should exist; accept that this is inevitably a trade-off against citizen rights; concede that preventing the next bataclan is nigh-on impossible; and understand why some might, to that end, desire greater power to comb through conversations. I don't agree, but i also don't need to assume conspiracy. At heart, the problem is not that all government is evil - although you're welcome to that view - it's that thick pillocks vote without any consideration of nuance.
They aren't actually doing that, as far as I've seen.
There are a number of big ISPs in Europe that that have a "new" native v6+CGNATed v4 platform, and an "old" native v4+no v6 one. That's where a lot of the "I had to ask the ISP to disable v6 to get inbound connections" comes from -- the actual relevant part was getting out from behind CGNAT, and the loss of v6 was just a side-effect caused by the ISP moving you to their old platform.
Inbound v6 should generally work on those ISPs. If it didn't... I'd be tempted (perhaps unfairly) to blame the user for not configuring things properly, or their software for not supporting v6. A lot of people will give up and blame a problem on v6 when they would have found and fixed it instead on v4.
It's much more of a storage space problem and a device running 24/7 problem. With the desktop of yore you can just leave them running and attach cheap HDDs to them for media storage. Nowadays, most people have laptops -- which are explicitly closed for most of the time -- and phones -- which doing 24/7 upload on will kill your battery life. And neither support 3.5" HDDs.
BitTorrent is certainly built around the idea that upload can be slow. Even if user have upload 100x worse than download, 100 seeders can saturate a leacher, and then the leacher becomes a seeder.
The problem is just that he doesn't stay a seeder forever, because of the other problems.
Phones are charging ~8 hours a day whilst you sleep though. And few people mind the phone seeding stuff on your home WiFi whilst charging. Many users could also spare 32gbytes for seed data too, especially if the app was smart and automatically reduced the store size before the phone started to notify you of low storage space.
If a typical user uses preertube 30 mins a day, that still gives a 16 to 1 ratio between seeding and leeching, and a 1024 to 1 data storage to data viewed ratio, meaning there is a good opportunity for a big back catalogue.
3- Also, this is rebroadcasting, technically a textbook definition of piracy even when that content might normally be obtained for free, especially if the content began encrypted.
(Because some laws are stupid. Please support right to repair and DMCA reform.)
And we haven't yet found a way to solve recommendations for full P2P networks without making them trivial to game via sybil attacks. This makes truly decentralized P2P unusable in ways most people use Youtube.
YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok (especially) are becoming stricter and stricter about the kinds of content they allow to exist and spread on their platforms. Right now I think an alternative is non-viable but it's increasingly possible that won't be the case in the near future.
Yes, because the amount of pirated content floating around was not 1/100th the amount that is out there now, and obtaining content is easier than ever. Especially when you have a sanctioned "library" that hosts it all for you for free.
1. The audience changed. Billions of people came online in the 2010s on smartphones, streaming works better for them.
2. For most people bandwidth did not increase at the same rate as video file sizes during that period, streaming could do smart things like serve transcoded media sized to fit your screen and internet connection. It's only recently with HEVC and AV1 that video file sizes have caught up.
3. Streaming can be easily monetized, p2p generally cannot.
How do you verify you get the right data from your peers? With torrents we know the correct hashes for each block. YouTube probably doesn't do this.
With no end in sight to the increasing cost of storage I can't imagine a worse time to put the burden of video storage onto users.
Even forgetting that issue, the last thing I want is to use some unknown, unpredictably changing residential connection for my videos. Google has invested in a powerful edge network so they can server my videos lightning quick.
The economy is collapsing, be patient. The administration has ended all of the main ways liquidity was created and now there's a liquidity crisis.
At current prices, pledging $5 worth of storage while the app is installed is enough to cache 20 hours of video. It's not too bad.
> the last thing I want is to use some unknown, unpredictably changing residential connection for my videos
YouTube only buffers a handful of seconds. Let's say other users would only be used to buffer 30-60 seconds in the future and if it drops below 15 a fast server is used. Does that solve your worries?
Can you give a reason you don't want data from that dude? Because the design I outlined can only make your buffer bigger, never smaller. The absolute worst case of phone guy dropping out still leaves you in the same place youtube puts you by default. So there's no downside.
As for upside, is fewer ads enough to tempt you? That's the easiest one to do if the fast servers need much less bandwidth.
AFAIK Newpipe is mobile only, so I don't really see how that'd work.
P2P is great on desktop computers (and, in the modern age, Smart TV boxes), where your network connection has no data cap, there are no battery concerns, you're unlikely to be behind CGNAT (common for cellular data connections), and the app can surreptitiously minimize itself to tray instead of closing itself outright, making you an unwitting seed.
That's what PeerTube does. If enough people are watching the same thing, the clients start to serve blocks of the video to other clients, taking load off the hosting server. There's still only one hosting server. It just scales for popular videos.
Nobody uses PeerTube much. I put technical videos on Hardlimit because it doesn't insert ads. I don't care about "discovery"; they're for a tiny audience that comes in from postings elsewhere. Works fine for that. The client side is all Javascript in user's browsers.
(One of the) NewPipe devs here: I've been dreaming of something like a Worldwide Video (WWV) for a while. Essentially, instead of having one huge platform you would have many smaller platforms. These would talk the same content language, like HTML/HTTP for the Web, so you could have Video browsers like PipePipe, NewPipe or others that could aggregate and display the content from these platforms. Peertube kind of goes into that direction, but the Peertube network just like other similar platforms/systems have many problems right now. These often suffer from lacking content moderation, a strong network effect towards bigger platforms and a well scalable content provisioning (CDN costs money and P2P is complicated) for example.
londons_explore · · focus · HN ↗
Then it's just a matter of letting people add their own videos directly to the service and it can become fully independent of YouTube.
MisterMunchkin · · focus · HN ↗
kitchi · · focus · HN ↗
This is deeply unsubstantiated and does not help contribute to a constructive debate. Please consider thinking more carefully.
api · · focus · HN ↗
If the system is truly distributed it means you might not be able to participate without hosting or transmitting CSAM.
It’s also been used as a deliberate attack, which is known as “pissing in the pool.” Flood the system with CSAM and copyright infringement.
choo-t · · focus · HN ↗
dotancohen · · focus · HN ↗
kitchi · · focus · HN ↗
I understand the worry, and it is a difficult problem worth thought but the alarmist virtue signalling helps absolutely no one, victims included.
dotancohen · · focus · HN ↗
I listen to the Butthole Surfers and Amboog-a-Lard - I'm willing to bet a good portion of their material has less seeders than much illegal content do.
monkeywork · · focus · HN ↗
A product doesn't need to serve EVERY human on earths needs, just enough of them that it can become large enough that established legacy solutions need to adapt.
I get why you might think this wouldn't be a fit for YOU but rather than argue against it from a niche viewpoint instead maybe look at how if it did exist it could be good for many.
Dylan16807 · · focus · HN ↗
dotancohen · · focus · HN ↗
Dylan16807 · · focus · HN ↗
Peertube has moderation.
thisislife2 · · focus · HN ↗
Depends on the P2P architecture. With something like bittorrent / webtorrent you will be distributing CSAM only if you download it yourself first. Otherwise there is no way for any CSAM content to appear on your device. The fear that an algorithm may spread CSAM on the network by making you view one accidentally is a legitimate concern though.
palata · · focus · HN ↗
Not sure it is a reason for making hammers illegal?
api · · focus · HN ↗
KolmogorovComp · · focus · HN ↗
WithinReason · · focus · HN ↗
szolonh · · focus · HN ↗
Aachen · · focus · HN ↗
Found one in the end when I didn't have a choice anymore and put renewed effort into it (Google's algorithm won't let me into my account anymore, saying they don't have enough information to verify it's me (username, password, recovery email.. not enough apparently, but there is nothing else), so I'm a Peertube exclusive now) but iirc I can't use it for everything, like if I wanted to upload something in Dutch I'd have to find a new server that allows my language
prmoustache · · focus · HN ↗
adrianmonk · · focus · HN ↗
idrios · · focus · HN ↗
carlob · · focus · HN ↗
cout · · focus · HN ↗
franga2000 · · focus · HN ↗
That's fine and there are tools to get that scheduled break back - even the official YouTube app has options to remind you to take a break every X min of watchtime and there are some very advanced general screentime limiting apps out there.
As you say YouTube ads aren't scheduled well and they're too short and unpredictable to even go to the bathroom during. Integrated ad reads are even worse in that regard.
63stack · · focus · HN ↗
pmontra · · focus · HN ↗
I did without a TV set since I moved in a larger home. Previously I could listen to the TV anywhere in my home, now I can't so instead of pinning me in a place I moved my TV into my phone and tablets. Everything is in an app anyway and for free to air TV I got a couple of RPi 3 with a TV hat and the TVHeadend app.
And when I have guests everybody is watching something different on their phones most of the times.
wolvoleo · · focus · HN ↗
ThePowerOfFuet · · focus · HN ↗
john01dav · · focus · HN ↗
nijave · · focus · HN ↗
Smarttube on Android TV just pulls its own APK so you just need to click Install after it downloads and opens it.
the-scrabi · · focus · HN ↗
e12e · · focus · HN ↗
F-droid enters the chat.
pmontra · · focus · HN ↗
the-scrabi · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
maybewhenthesun · · focus · HN ↗
tough · · focus · HN ↗
if someone is seeding that video cause they recently watched it and it remains on their local cache, you could get the bits from there vs hitting youtube servers
nijave · · focus · HN ↗
The client can pick the optimal encoding and quality which makes that quite a bit more difficult. A user on a modern device that can hardware decode HDR av1 will have a file cached completely useless to a browser that can only do SDR h264.
I think there is a sort of network effect needed to make it become reasonable.
Dylan16807 · · focus · HN ↗
nijave · · focus · HN ↗
Netflix reported in 2025 something like 30% of traffic was av1. I think smartphone and PC support are fairly robust but under the impression streaming devices are still quite terrible unless it's a Chromecast.
AVC/h.264 is the only thing I know of that's pretty much universally supported at this point. I found a Facebook/Meta report citing some consultant provided data that VP9 was a close second. Limiting to devices from the last few years, HEVC might work.
Dylan16807 · · focus · HN ↗
darkwater · · focus · HN ↗
nijave · · focus · HN ↗
tough · · focus · HN ↗
xgulfie · · focus · HN ↗
transitivebs · · focus · HN ↗
palata · · focus · HN ↗
osndejciencjen · · focus · HN ↗
t2r3121 · · focus · HN ↗
There are a minority of users who care about being able to host videos that violate YouTube/TikTok/Instagram policies. Unfortunately, a significant part of that minority is working with infringing or illegal content, which both prevents ad networks from working with you and attracts attention from law enforcement.
kmeisthax · · focus · HN ↗
hashdava · · focus · HN ↗
t2r3121 · · focus · HN ↗
mitxela · · focus · HN ↗
dzikimarian · · focus · HN ↗
psd1 · · focus · HN ↗
bilegeek · · focus · HN ↗
psd1 · · focus · HN ↗
When i was 20, i was reflexively cynical, because it let me pose as intellectual without the burden of having to learn or think. As an adult, i find that pose very fucking obvious.
My interest was piqued by the concept of natting ip6, and why an isp might do so, and why cgnat might be disabled if you ask the isp to disable ip6.
bilegeek · · focus · HN ↗
...bb-but I thought cynicism was the same thing as experience![1]
No but seriously, I agree it is primarily "we can't be arsed to change our methods".
"Primarily" is not everything; the other 10-20% is the long tail of everything else. Europe is getting much harder on filesharing[3][4] because of business interests, and - despite the much better regulation - there's probably some "you shouldn't be hosting things on a residential connection anyways, pay us for a business connection peasants" like in the US[2].
Of course, all these ready-made restrictions are then easily adaptable for abuse (when's the next Chat Control proposal anyways?), so there's not much pushback from above...
Cynicism is easily a thought-terminating cliche, but it is unfortunately earned nowadays, especially as a coping mechanism for a feeling of helplessness against the usually stupid, sometimes malicious forces at play (Hanlon's Razor doesn't account for weaponization of stupidity).
[1]<a href="https://youtu.be/v0VA6u8cTxE?t=540" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/v0VA6u8cTxE?t=540
[2]<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18238827">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18238827
[3]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_surveillance_in_Europe" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_survei...
[4]<a href="https://torrentfreak.com/?s=europe" rel="nofollow">https://torrentfreak.com/?s=europe
psd1 · · focus · HN ↗
It's common, at least in the UK, for residential lines to block smtp inbound. That's an ACL, which is operationally ~free. NAT does not serve the purposes you've outlined.
Some cynicism is warranted about, e.g. chat control, but it's better explained by good-faith desire to fight egregious crime coupled with low care for the privacy invasion. Other people have different values to you and me.
It's hard to reconcile an EU government in anyone's pocket with gdpr and dma, which afaics serve citizens and no big interests. Like most governments, the EU is somewhat fractious and incoherent, so it's not a given that everything they do is citizen-friendly. But i, for one, accept that law enforcement should exist; accept that this is inevitably a trade-off against citizen rights; concede that preventing the next bataclan is nigh-on impossible; and understand why some might, to that end, desire greater power to comb through conversations. I don't agree, but i also don't need to assume conspiracy. At heart, the problem is not that all government is evil - although you're welcome to that view - it's that thick pillocks vote without any consideration of nuance.
Dagger2 · · focus · HN ↗
There are a number of big ISPs in Europe that that have a "new" native v6+CGNATed v4 platform, and an "old" native v4+no v6 one. That's where a lot of the "I had to ask the ISP to disable v6 to get inbound connections" comes from -- the actual relevant part was getting out from behind CGNAT, and the loss of v6 was just a side-effect caused by the ISP moving you to their old platform.
Inbound v6 should generally work on those ISPs. If it didn't... I'd be tempted (perhaps unfairly) to blame the user for not configuring things properly, or their software for not supporting v6. A lot of people will give up and blame a problem on v6 when they would have found and fixed it instead on v4.
psd1 · · focus · HN ↗
mitxela · · focus · HN ↗
foxes · · focus · HN ↗
WithinReason · · focus · HN ↗
serbuvlad · · focus · HN ↗
BitTorrent is certainly built around the idea that upload can be slow. Even if user have upload 100x worse than download, 100 seeders can saturate a leacher, and then the leacher becomes a seeder.
The problem is just that he doesn't stay a seeder forever, because of the other problems.
londons_explore · · focus · HN ↗
If a typical user uses preertube 30 mins a day, that still gives a 16 to 1 ratio between seeding and leeching, and a 1024 to 1 data storage to data viewed ratio, meaning there is a good opportunity for a big back catalogue.
serbuvlad · · focus · HN ↗
Almost everyone I've ever known has problems with running out of phone storage, so I disagree with this.
The seeding while charging and on wifi idea is cool though.
t0bia_s · · focus · HN ↗
floam · · focus · HN ↗
t2r3121 · · focus · HN ↗
fg137 · · focus · HN ↗
gus_massa · · focus · HN ↗
IF I had a penny for every time I heard "unalive", I'd build my own hosting platform.
therealpygon · · focus · HN ↗
(Because some laws are stupid. Please support right to repair and DMCA reform.)
miki123211 · · focus · HN ↗
some_random · · focus · HN ↗
spixy · · focus · HN ↗
I even got 100 times faster upload than 20 years ago...
ranger_danger · · focus · HN ↗
t2r3121 · · focus · HN ↗
2. For most people bandwidth did not increase at the same rate as video file sizes during that period, streaming could do smart things like serve transcoded media sized to fit your screen and internet connection. It's only recently with HEVC and AV1 that video file sizes have caught up.
3. Streaming can be easily monetized, p2p generally cannot.
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
RockRobotRock · · focus · HN ↗
mayli · · focus · HN ↗
zaik · · focus · HN ↗
basilikum · · focus · HN ↗
mvdtnz · · focus · HN ↗
Even forgetting that issue, the last thing I want is to use some unknown, unpredictably changing residential connection for my videos. Google has invested in a powerful edge network so they can server my videos lightning quick.
mitxela · · focus · HN ↗
Dylan16807 · · focus · HN ↗
> the last thing I want is to use some unknown, unpredictably changing residential connection for my videos
YouTube only buffers a handful of seconds. Let's say other users would only be used to buffer 30-60 seconds in the future and if it drops below 15 a fast server is used. Does that solve your worries?
mvdtnz · · focus · HN ↗
Dylan16807 · · focus · HN ↗
As for upside, is fewer ads enough to tempt you? That's the easiest one to do if the fast servers need much less bandwidth.
miki123211 · · focus · HN ↗
P2P is great on desktop computers (and, in the modern age, Smart TV boxes), where your network connection has no data cap, there are no battery concerns, you're unlikely to be behind CGNAT (common for cellular data connections), and the app can surreptitiously minimize itself to tray instead of closing itself outright, making you an unwitting seed.
Animats · · focus · HN ↗
Nobody uses PeerTube much. I put technical videos on Hardlimit because it doesn't insert ads. I don't care about "discovery"; they're for a tiny audience that comes in from postings elsewhere. Works fine for that. The client side is all Javascript in user's browsers.
the-scrabi · · focus · HN ↗