Why should you feel concerned about PeerTube ?

See this article if you don’t know about PeerTube yet.

We are currently running a crowdfunding campaign to pave the road to version 1.0 of PeerTube !

What is PeerTube for those who are able host a video-tube ?

If you are a system administrator, PeerTube is a software you can install on your server to create a video hosting and sharing platform : it is like having your personal ‘YouTube’ at home that is called *an instance* of PeerTube.

There are already some FOSS (free open-source software) that can do the same thing : this is the principle of decentralization. The main advantage of PeerTube among those other softwares is that a PeerTube instance can connect to other instances using the ActivityPub protocol (also used by Mastodon, a federated Twitter alternative) and share each others’ catalogue : this is federation. Federation makes it possible to create a large catalogue of videos without one having to pay for a datacenter in order to host everyone’s videos. It also makes you more independent : your instance, your rules.

Hosting a PeerTube instance can be interesting for a person, a group of persons, an association, a company, a public institution etc.

The resources needed are not huge. For instance, a small server (with for example 2 vCore and 2GB of RAM) would consume on average:

CPU -> nginx ~ 20%, peertube ~ 10%, postgres ~ 1%, redis ~ 3%

RAM -> nginx ~ 6MB, peertube ~ 120MB, postgres ~ 10MB, redis ~ 5MB

What is PeerTube for those who wants to upload their videos online ?

PeerTube allows you to upload your videos to a platform that you choose by yourself. Each platform has its own terms of service, moderation and federation policies… and you can choose the one that suits you the most. It is also possible to contact the instance’s administrator for more information, if you have a problem, or any needs. You can find a lot of existing instances with open registrations here. The “about” page of each instance should give you some details about its policy.

In case your video has a lot of success, PeerTube has a way to keep it available and bypass the bandwidth problem a server can encounter. When there is more than one person watching your video, PeerTube uses the WebTorrent protocol to share it between all people watching it.

What is PeerTube for those who want to watch videos ?

You become a real actor of the diffusion of the video that you are watching, you participate in a healthier use of the Internet. However, the video player adapts to you : if your installation doesn’t enable P2P diffusion, you still can stream the video directly from the server.

For us, the most important thing is that PeerTube considers you as a person and not a product : there is no tracking and profiling in the software. The source code is open because we think the transparency of the code is key to the privacy of users.

PeerTube is not just open-source, it is a free/libre software. Because it has an AGPL, if someone adds a modification to the code, the modified software must also use the AGPL license : this guarantees the respect of users’ fundamental freedom.

PeerTube is made for y’all and by y’all

PeerTube is just in beta for the moment. Its development is supported by Framasoft, a french nonprofit association that promotes free software (and very well known in french-speaking countries for the « De-google-ify Internet » campaign which propose 34 Free, Libre, Open Source Softwares alternatives to Google, Facebook, Doodle, etc). Because it belongs to everyone, it needs everyone’s help to grow and mature. Either with a financial help or with development, translation, new ideas… Help us spread the word among non french-speaking communities !

Learn more on https://joinpeertube.org !