yeah video social media is way ahead with algorithms and content. I still think they need to exist and keep pushing for this idea

I'm not affiliated with peertube...but yes it does enable/support streaming: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube#video-streaming-even-...

Docs:

https://docs.joinpeertube.org/use/create-upload-video#publis...

https://docs.joinpeertube.org/admin/configuration#live-strea...

Yes. But a click on the link will provide a more detailed answer.

This does: https://safebots.github.io/Safecloud

I designed it in order to stream videos and get paid without worrying about getting deplatformed

Two weeks ago it was covered in a respected security publication: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/06/19/safecloud-browser...

It's coming out soon, but if you're adventurous, you can try it on GitHub already.

Edit: I posted it on HN right now as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48763565

This is exactly why TikTok won. It is so much cheaper to iterate ideas on 10” videos.

You make non interesting 20’ YT video? Well too bad your 80 labor hours & equipment time are lost.

FOSS server software shouldn't be seen as a platform. It should be seen as software that can be used to create a platform. Federation makes it technically a platform but just barely. Mastodon is barely a platform - mastodon.social is, and kolektiva is a different one.

PeerTube is software you could use to make a video streaming website like Nebula.

You can publish to both and even better your own domain that simply points to your video hosting provider. Long term you want to own your distribution channel as much as possible, while using YouTube as your lead generation tool to drive true believers to your site and premium distribution channel not owned by YouTube. Otherwise, you will always be subject to platform risk via YouTube's whims which has destroyed many content creators. That's the long term winning play IMO and it doesn't preclude tools like FreeTube.

Creators get 60% of youtube's ad revenue from youtube.

What does Peertube pay?

There is your answer. If people want good stuff, there needs to be money flowing to the source of it. The internet desperately needs to shed this "everything good is totally free" mindset, because what it actually manifests as is "I love taking without the requirement of giving".

Lemmy is pretty ok actually. The lack of big user base is more of a feature than a bug.

> most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video.

I get your point, but many of them fail to hit some hundreds of views due in large part to all of the large, professional channels that are spending hundreds of man hours as week producing content.

If the production was less professional do you think total viewership hours would drop significantly, or would it be distributed across more channels?

its fine for the genre of video thats just someone narrating while filming with there phone and almost no editing. if someone is doing something interesting, i prefer this to something well produced, its more candid and relatable, and lacks the artifice most projects designed for youtube have

Having your own distribution has it's benefits as a fall back or alternatives, in addition to publishing elsewhere like youtube.

The cost of creating and editing videos going to come way down, there's already ways to do it in the past few years.

I heard that main source of income for some professional YouTubers are Patreon and sponsorships. Ad revenue is dead last and very unstable. Also, if you are building your business on single platform, which one day might decide that your content does not adhere to their rules - that's a high risk to take.

Maybe the purpose of Youtube going forward is to be a quarantine for content whose purpose is to be monetized.

It doesn't have to be for your use-case. e.g. KDE has their own instance. It would perhaps be a good fit for MIT to host their OCW videos, or for Khan Academy to host their material, or people sharing conference talks, or governments, or quick home DIY videos, or vlogs and idle musings, or hobbyists showing/discussing their thing they like, etc. Videos that are meant to help people to better themselves or collaborate fit better on a platform that doesn't try to be a constant sales funnel.

You say your target is $500-$1000 per video and let's assume you do videos weekly. That would mean your optimistic goal is $4500 a month. Let's say you create a voluntary donation subscription at $5 per month for people willing to support your work. That means you would need 900 true fans, patrons, or whatever other label you want to give them to hit your $4500 goal. That's a 0.9% conversion rate from subscribers to donators. Doesn't seem that impractical when looked at in those terms. This is often the default monetization model for small podcasts because RSS feeds don't have built in ad revenue the way YouTube does.

There are 100M+ channels uploading on YouTube regularly and only 2-3M of them are monetized. Not everyone wants to upload videos on the internet with the explicit goal of making money. Professional creators are a very tiny minority, and a platform like YouTube will always be better suited for them (your "small" channel with 100K subscribers is actually in the top 0.5-0.1% of YouTube). There is no reason for Peertube to go after this specific demographic.

People don’t really want another step in the already arduous process of making videos - especially when the return on investment will be $0. This website will die off in a couple years and everyone who wastes time on it will be worse off for it.

You need to build a product so good that my statement above sounds INSANE. Not just “I think he’s wrong” but “dude absolutely no way. Everyone will want this. Are you stupid?”

And this is not that product.

Edit: yeah. I was curious so I went searching for ASMR videos. The default search brought some (terrible-looking) ones up, but half of them were in French? I sorted by views instead, and even though I literally only searched for “ASMR”, there were no longer any ASMR videos near the top of the results. For something trying to compete with YouTube, this is a very mid experience. Nobody is going to waste time migrating.

Alright, you're hosting on FreeTube (paying for hosting & bandwidth costs) - how are you making money? Most YouTubers don't want to run their own ad network or sell a physical product. Sponsors make deals conditional on YouTube engagement metrics.

Someone is still hosting the content and paying for resources just like with every other service distributed or not so it doesn't really add anything new to the equation.

The plan is the same as it always has been. It's no different than running an open FTP server.

If you only seed videos you have full legal rights to (creative commons [as long as you follow the license terms properly], public domain, or videos you personally created yourself, therefore own all rights to outright), then where's the worry? If you choose to seed copyrighted videos, well then that's all on you to handle the legality (or lack thereof) of I'd suppose... :shrug:

It's developed by a french company, so that confusion can't be that critical.

The problem is that YouTube isn't just a video hosting platform. We have many of those. The problem is that YouTube is a business platform that lets you makes money from your business, as long as your business is mainly comprised of publishing videos. No amount of open-source software quality can replicate thousands of dollars flowing into your pocket. Small creators who aren't making money anyway may use small platforms - but then they forfeit their chance to ever become big creators with lots of ad money flowing into their pocket.

Snarky lemma: In French, is the trend of things going worse to worse?

Realistically, how many viewers will be retained should YT shut the OP down? Right now, that number rounds to 0. Practically speaking, YT is free internet video streaming for long-form videos on the US market.

Nobody is going to go to OP's personal site to watch videos. They are going to fire up YT and eat what the algorithm feeds them.

The reason PeerTube and Nebula are important is it provides the potential for a true alternative destination for people looking for videos. Once these platforms have an enough content to draw an audience naturally, then content creators will be able to survive a post-YT world.

For people like the OP, it's probably best to follow the model video games do with DRM. Post on YT first, to get the ad revenue, then repost on other platforms after some time to build up an alternative subscriber base. Presumably, in-video sponsorships will pay for these views as well, even if there's no direct ad-sense like revenue model.

The feds will go after the instance admin that is sharing pirate content.

They can't shut down the service because there is no single service. They can go after individual servers, and that is fine. The admin is responsible for what happens on their server.

Let's go for "PearTube" then.

I am still a bit upset that I got banned without even a warning. I tried to adhere to policies and figured if anything was wrong, I'd get a warning at least, and then I'd know better what the limits are. Unfortunately there is little recourse and even less feedback.

Even more annoying is that it terminates your YouTube account entirely, so now I can't even login to use it. And I was a premium subscriber, too!

The best thing about YouTube is their agreements with rights holders to allow music and revenue sharing easily, which makes it very simple for creators and remixers etc to not get their stuff removed via DMCA.

> You can publish to both and even better your own domain that simply points to your video hosting provider.

That one is likely the best use case while one monetizes on YT waiting for FreeTube to gain more popularity. Worth also for keeping a safer online accessible backup in case things go south with the YT channel being taken down for any reason, be it bogus copyright claims or else. What I'm not sure of though is how long until Google changes YT rules to disallow linking or even mentioning competing, or perceived as such, services. Companies always do that: I'm a Ebay user since 2008, 100% feedback both as seller and customer, hundreds of positives not a single negative or neutral in 18 years, but a while ago Ebay in their infinite wisdom blocked a listing of mine because I added the links of the documentation needed to use the device I was selling; no way to appeal successfully or have it restored, they evidently either used a monkey or AI to detect what they identified as an attempt to contact the customer outside of Ebay, for a €30 item nonetheless. Years ago they didn't enforce such idiotic limitations, so I wouldn't put any trust on YT to remain consistent with their current rules.

I’d prefer 60% of millions and millions of viewers over 200% of the 8 people on peertube. Percentages aren’t that important here.

I agree this is a real issue, however hopefully a solution is that creators will upload their videos to both sites (ie YouTube is their primary but also upload to peertube at the same time) which is pretty easy to do and eventually a site like peer tube might reach that critical mass with enough content

Not really sure how people need to be explained this, but for whatever reason, this most basic of information is seemingly skipped over. Even if peertube wants to pay 65%, that's just a bigger percentage of nothing.

I've found the same with Mastadon. It has a pre-eternal-September feel to it.

Sponsorships are definitely the highest if a youtuber actively engages in them, ad revenue vs patreon depends highly on if you have i.e. a small but highly active fanbase of core fans, versus a wider more general audience that you entertain a bit.

I think people should be more aware of the perverse incentive of YouTubers saying, "my guaranteed source of income is very little and unstable guys, I need you to also subscribe to my patreon" where - could YouTubers perhaps have a reason to act like their ad revenue is very little? In my experience, while ad revenue isn't great, for any decent-size YouTuber its still enough to live on and in any case it always stays a significant income stream.

If YouTube becomes a quarantine for high-quality content, then it will also become a quarantine for viewers.

the fundamental issue a lot of people here don't seem to get is that high quality videos that people want to watch are expensive to create. Besides the huge amount of high-skill labor, there's also just production costs, software, equipment, upkeep, etc.

At the very least, ignoring all other costs, a single person making good videos somewhat regularly is a full-time job. People who make entertainment also need to eat and pay rent, the money has to come from somewhere.

Then there's even less reason to host outside of YouTube, why would I want to host a server that costs money if I'm not making any money from the videos? It works for those who want to own their content and verify its safety, or for ideological reasons such as supporting OSS but I'm not sure why the average user would care about PeerTube.

Then start loading ads.

Youtube's biggest threat ever died in the cradle because they foolishly thought users would volunteer money to them.

No one with capital and capability looks at youtube, looks at youtube's audience, and says "Yeah, 30-40% ad-blocking and 4.5% paying for premium, these are the people I want to build services for!".

Do you have precise suggestion of what to improve? I'm genuinely interested.

Online video sharing doesn't have to exclusively mean professional "creators" who make content with hollywood-like budgets and expect massive returns. There are 100+ million accounts regularly uploading on Youtube and only around 2-3 million of them are in the partner program. The overwhelming majority get nothing.

Same reason why the Linux desktop often suffers on the UX/UX front: people naturally drawn to these projects tend to lean heavily technical, and highly technical circles have a bad habit of driving out less technical contributors through devaluation of their work and lack of agency within the project among other issues.

That sort of work also tends to be less well-compensated than that of SWEs which makes it more important to be paid for work (which most FOSS project cannot do).

The matter of compensation or donation can be handled completely separately. Creators can be supported on other platforms like Liberapay, Patreon, Kofi, and many creators are supported that way.

If we are talking about clickbait and making money from getting unwanted ads in people's faces, no thank you we don't need more of that.

Has it normalized? When I first tried Lemmy it was mostly communists talking about communism. Then after some Reddit drama it seemed to be a bunch of people complaining about Reddit.

I generally like smaller sites, but those topics weren’t exactly engaging for me.

There are many people who believe everything must be a grind to get rich. I wish more people stepped back and did things online because they were fun or educational, not because it was monetized.

Voluntary donations are practically impossible. Sure, you get the odd straggler, but it’s so, so rare.

I have the most popular NSFW LoRA (actually a LoKR but whatever) for at least one major text to image model on CivitAI.

Once it blew up I made a Patreon, maybe 6 months ago? I get $50 a month from it. I doubt that even covers my electricity costs for training.

Podcasts and videos do have the advantage of being able to ask for people to donate with every podcast/video, but people just aren’t inclined to give their money away when they don’t have to. It’s a rare trait.

At that point I'd just make a Patreon (that offers various benefits including exclusive videos not on YouTube) while also monetizing via YouTube ads and sponshorships.

Yet those 2-3M channels get the lions share of the views. It is a two-sided system. And if you want to attract viewers, you need what they want to watch. Looking on the front page of peertube the most viewed video I see has 29 views. If I sort by hot, the "hottest" video has 692 in a month. If the intent is to publish videos to have people watch it, PeerTube is clearly not the place to do that.

The problem is that big creators have many subscribers, because they're the only ones making videos people want to watch.

If a channel has 100 subscribers - (except if it's a brand new channel) - it's because people saw the videos and decided, no, I don't want to see this, I'm not going to subscribe.

Put all of those people on a platform together, you will just end up with a platform with more creators than viewers.

> The feds will go after the instance admin that is sharing pirate content.

Unless the service is behind some company name and it was not the admin who upload the stuff. Then suddenly you are just a cloud provider whose job is just to cooperate with the copyright owners.

Nebula is invite only, as far as I can tell, for creators.

PèreTube. Just videos about golf, lawn care, cars, and Fox News clips.

PearTube (PoireTube) would just have the Fox News clips.

Pierre-tube

Why would an admin run a server if they might have the feds knocking at their door? Sure, people might run nodes that host only their content, but they sure are disincentivized from running any sort of shared service.

This is the same problem as TOR exit nodes and why 3 letter agencies run most of them.

Yeah, it's pretty simple. When I go to YouTube.com, I have access to all of the videos on that platform, sorted based on what I'm subscribed to and other things like what I watch. The first thing I see are videos. I'm off to the races.

When I go to https://joinpeertube.org, I'm met with a double hero section that tells me about PeerTube, which is ultimately meaningless to 99% of the population.

When I get to actual content on that page, it's not an aggregate of all of the most popular videos across the federation, it's a description of the types of videos you can find on federated sites with links to the sites and not video embeds. You're telling me on the front page that I have to do legwork to find the videos I want to watch. You're already not competitive. You already lose.

Creators go where users go. If you don't build the platform to attract users, you will not get the volume of content that is required to hold people's attention. There's a reason why people come to YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News, Reels, etc. There are almost no clicks between the user and the content, and the content is plentiful.

Every time I try to use PeerTube, I have to try to find where to find the videos. As someone who's been chronically online since 1995, it's not that big of a deal. I can find them eventually. But that UX sucks, even for me, so it's probably utterly untenable for the vast majority of casual users.

You are trying to compete with slot machines by inventing a machine that makes the user read a bunch of stuff between each pull of the lever. It's not super difficult to see why that is a competitive disadvantage.

Is it possible to just vaguely gesture at everything?

The spacing of every component feels wrong, the font choices are off, the text is too small, there is way too much white space, the "other video" section looks like its just jammed off to the side. The overall feel of the website is very amateurish.

The problem is that all of those accounts that don't earn money don't earn money because they get no views, because they make videos no one wants to watch. I don't know the exact statistics but a simple Google search says that 3% of videos on YouTube get 95% of the views. Remove the top 3% of creators, you remove 95% of views.

The top channels get all the views because they're the only ones making videos people want to watch, and they're monetized because making such content is really, really expensive.

The problem is that beyond creators with "hollywood-like budgets", even just making 1 good video a week is a full-time job. Most creators are not looking to get rich or get massive returns, they just want to survive and pay rent. Which means any channel of any value has to be able to generate at least few thousand dollars month.

UX work is often also a lot heavier and more subjective than the plumbing.

I might open a pull request to support some new video code, and that might only require a few dozen lines over a few files. That's easy to review, and it either works or it doesn't. Worst case they say "our convention is to register codecs as a subclass of X class, but you subclassed Y class" or something equally straightforward.

Let's say instead I wanted to change the workflow to register an account. Now I'm changing a bunch of JavaScript, CSS, templates, I'm adding pages, and I also need to update the backend. Even if someone is that into frontend work, it might take forever to even get reviewed by the maintainers because it's a massive PR.

Plus, now we've moved into subjectivity land: "I'm used to the old workflow," (because they designed it) "The last one was really easy" (for an engineer), "I think we should focus on the backend before we work on the UI," "I don't like this font because the license isn't free as in freedom" etc.

Even if you just mockup something on Figma or whatever, unless you're a maintainer it's probably going to just get ignored as a feature request. Because there's also the psychological aspect of basically being told that the UI you wrote is implicitly bad, if you're the maintainer reviewing the mockup.

Maybe some devs in OSS are married to their horrid idea of how things should work?

Those ad-blocked viewers are important, which is why YT doesn't actually crack down on them.

Those are the people who will happily go to an alternative product. And while that product might start as a pirate YouTube, the one that nabs 30% of YT's traffic can certainly make a pivot to legit. If you're a content creator whose audience is mostly in that group, you're likely to start posting content directly on the competitor's site.

I'm guessing OP had their account banned for using a tool like yt-dl too aggressively. Then again, doing that does give a warning.

That was one of the first instances lemmy.world. You can ignore that one because it's very drama-filled. Other Lemmy servers are more chill.

they need a day job to pay the bills then, which does cut down on the scope of videos you can make

if we could have less working hours or cheaper rent or less expensive bills more people could do hobby stuff again ofc. but right now is tricky for that

Yes, there is a reason I said "you would need 900 true fans, patrons, or whatever other label you want to give them". I'm not claiming this is a new concept, I was making specific allusions to Patreon and the idea of 1000 true fans[1].

[1] - https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/

Quite frankly, I don't think you can compare image generation, let alone NSFW image generation, with YouTube and podcasts. You are simply operating in a medium in which this is going to be dramatically tougher, primarily because most people who consume your content are likely there for the content and unlikely to have any relationship to you specifically. But either way, "It's a rare trait" isn't disagreeing with what I said. The successful conversion rate in my last comment was below 1%.

I’ve been a regular lemmy user for a few years now and it’s gotten better. The communists (and fascist) platforms have been de-federated from the major platforms. It’s still full of Reddit complaining from ex redditors. I don’t think that will change.

My login server is lemmy.world, so if you sign up with something else ymmv.

If you want real numbers start selling hard drugs. You don't have to "serve the people". YouTube is a cesspool.

About as likely as opening a grocery store where people can pay through voluntary donations.

I'm a professional YouTuber. The problem with a "donation" system is that, unlike something like tweets or even blog posts which are either free or low-cost to produce, high-quality video is really. expensive. to produce. And people just will not pay if they don't have to.

A good 20-minute video can easily cost 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor to produce. That is, a whole week of labor. And that's not counting expensive equipment, software, licenses, etc.

I cannot run a business on people deciding to give me money for nothing out of the goodness of their heart. And I am still a one-person business, imagine having 5 full time employees. Even YouTubers with millions of subscribers and mature audiences with disposable income often struggle to clear like $5K/month on Patreon. Which, for a multi-person business, is simply not enough. Meanwhile, that same creator might be pulling $20K/month through ads and a similar amount through sponsorships.

YouTube is more similar to Netflix and HBO than Twitter or Reddit. Yes, in theory anyone can upload to YouTube, but the majority of content that is actually watched is at this point produced by full-time creators, some of which are solo self-employed while others are at this point running whole media production companies. And those are the people you need to make a service succeed.

No one donates money. It doesn't happen. Conversion rates across the board are around 1%. And then of those donations, most are the lowest tier/lowest increment.

It's the most annoying and persistent counterpoint brought up in these discussions, but it has no grounding in reality. The most popular contingent of viewers are ad-supported, close behind are ad-blocking, then the last 5% are your subscribers and donators.

that works for people you regularly watch, but what about the people that put out the rare random great video. or a video on a topic when you're trying to fix something. People dont subscribe to those patreons, and thus those kind of creators rely on ad revenue.

Maybe the live where the feds can't get them?

So? Why is that a problem? My wife occasionally watches this old lady who's vlogged every day for over 14 years straight. She averages 150-200 views. The people who try to build a brand end up getting outsized attention so it seems like that must be what anyone would want, but most people actually aren't trying to do that.

Youtube does crack down on them, all the time. Why do you think they are "important"? What are they contributing, and to whom? How does Google benefit?

Well, do you want a platform people watch videos on, or a platform people simply upload videos to, never to be seen?

They half-ass crack down on them. Not even that, it's dime-assed crackdown at best. You get that little "experiencing issues?" note that the bottom of the screen (which goes away after a few seconds), and an occasional 3-5s delay before video starts.

I explained exactly why I think they are important in that entire paragraph. And the evidence I'm right is the fact that YouTube could trivially prevent ad-blockers tomorrow, but they don't. They've tried it and quickly rolled back the changes. Presumably they lost a lot more audience than expected.

It's not an either-or, but generally speaking, a platform centered around getting more people to watch is probably worse to have in the world than one centered around people just expressing themselves to a handful of e.g. family/friends/small communities. Especially if the former is really just a conduit for ads.