PeerTube is a decentralized and federated alternative to YouTube. The goal of PeerTube is not to replace YouTube but to offer a viable alternative using the strength of ActivityPub and P2P protocols.
Being built on ActivityPub means PeerTube is able to be part of a bigger social network, the Fediverse (the Federated Universe). On the other hand, P2P technologies help PeerTube to solve the issue of money, inbound with all streaming platform : With PeerTube, you don’t need to have a lot of bandwidth available on your server to host a PeerTube platform because all users (which didn’t disable the feature) watching a video on PeerTube will be able to share this same video to other viewers.
If you are curious about PeerTube, I can’t recommend you enough to check the official website to learn more about the project. If after that you want to try to use PeerTube as a content creator, you can try to find a platform available there to register or host yourself your own PeerTube platform on your own server.
The development of PeerTube is actually sponsored by Framasoft, a french non-for-profit popular educational organization, a group of friends convinced that an emancipating digital world is possible, convinced that it will arise through actual actions on real world and online with and for you!
Framasoft is also involved in the development of Mobilizon, a decentralized and federated alternative to Facebook Events and Meetup.
If you want to contribute to PeerTube, feel free to:
- report bugs and give your feedback on Github or on our forums
- submit your brillant ideas on our Feedback platform
- Help to translate the software, following the contributing guide
- Make a donation to help to pay bills inbound in the development of PeerTube.
YouTube got traction before Google bought it and before Google bought it they tried to make Google videos and failed, what peertube lacks is contributors
And discoverability, it still has ways to go on the social networking integration. I still don’t know how to go from watching a peertube video on a peertube instance to liking/boosting it on another fediverse service, even if I wanted to.
That said, I have been following Peertube for a couple of years, and the progress has been incredible. It makes sense to create a solid foundation for video playback first, and a lot of people seem to not understand the extent of the innovation Peertube has made in that regard. Social media tools obviously come second after providing a solid service, and I have no idea it will develop in great ways in the coming years. :)