PeerTube is fantastic with its decentralized model that prioritizes user privacy and control. However, it still struggles to gain widespread popularity.
What do you think could be done to enhance PeerTube’s appeal and functionality, possibly even becoming a serious alternative to YouTube?
Isn’t Napster a desktop app for streaming? That’s a very different kind of software. Peertube needs to provide content to several people, make it accessible to potentially the whole internet. It connects you with hundreds of other instances and hundreds of thousands of other videos, accounts and comments. All of that needs to be organized, handled and stored somehow. There is just no way around a proper setup. I mean you also can’t build an entire house with just your trusty Honda Accord and a cordless drill at your disposal. You need professional tools for that. And sure, you can build a dog shed with that. But it doesn’t really help discussing “adoptability” of houses if they were to be constructed with just a cordless drill, if physics doesn’t allow for that… The answer is to just use docker-compose in this case. It’s easy to use and does the proper set up.
I’m talking about the original Napster, which would function shockingly close to how PeerTube presents itself. The only thing missing from there original Napster would be a media player.
If that can be done in the 1990’s, there doesn’t seem to be a reason why it can’t be done today.
I think we had several of those. I remember a few other projects that did some peer2peer content delivery and streaming. I’m not sure. Usually with those, people start complaining that it’s “too complicated” because they need to install some software just to watch a video. Or they want to watch it on their phones and that’s kind of impossible with p2p without draining the battery real fast. Or they’re used to videos playing almost instantly (from using YouTube) and now it needs to buffer (more than) a few seconds for less common or trending videos and that’s inconvenient, too.
And the crowd on the internet and usage patterns have really changed over the last decades.