A free, general-purpose video sharing platform for the leftist community

TankieTube is out of “beta” and everyone’s invited! feast-1feast-2

Definitions:

  • TT = TankieTube
  • PT = PeerTube
  • YT = YouTube

OpSec

  • Email - Make sure to register using an email detached from your legal identity (remember Stonetoss?).

    The software requires an email address, however, I’ve disabled the verification requirement. This means you can register using something like [email protected] and it will totally work—unless the address is already taken (in which case you should get better material!).

    You would need a real address, of course, to have the option of resetting your password. The only other thing I use email for is explaining and notifying users of any moderator actions I take against them, as a courtesy.

  • P2P - The peer-to-peer feature allows the software to scale tremendously well when serving the same viral video to many people at the same time (supposedly at least 1000 concurrent viewers, easily, with a wimpier server than ours).

    A downside of the feature is that it can reveal your IP to a subset of people watching the same video at the same time as you. [Read more]. Therefore, it is recommended to either:

    1. Use a VPN. Or,
    2. Deselect the P2P participation feature in the user settings menu.

Federation

TT users can search and view any videos from instances on the subscriptions list, and the instances following TT can view our vids. I occasionally browse the public index and look for new instances to follow (sometimes they’re a bust). LMK if you find any cool ones.

Mirroring vids, as in multiple copies on multiple servers, is done when instances implement something called redundancy, but I haven’t looked into that much yet.

Fifty Channels!

The major difference from YT is that TT users can create up to fifty (50) channels (the default is 20 but I bumped it up). Channels are analogous to Lemmy communities, except that PT doesn’t yet support shared channels with more than one author/user (I believe it’s a planned feature). Create a channel for every weird niche topic that you want!

I’ll eventually create a style guide. If you want to sync or archive a YT channel, then I’d prefer that you create a unique TT channel that corresponds to it for better organization.

PT has an automatic channel syncing feature, but I have it turned off right now because it was overloading the transcoding queue.

The TankieTube Homepage

The YT homepage is built by a sinister algorithm customized to distract and exploit you. The TT homepage contains whatever-the-fuck HTML I choose to type with my paws. Determining what to put on it will be a big and ongoing decision. If you’ve made a channel relevant to the site’s theme, send me a message and I’ll probably pin it!

About the Outro

The music is La Danse Des Bombes, a great song about the ecstasy of armed combat in defense of the Paris Commune of 1871, which I discovered thanks to comrade [email protected]. PT is French software, so I think that’s neat.

The sound effects are sampled from a video of the Al-Qassam Brigade resistance fighters in live armed combat against Israeli occupation forces. The sound effects correspond to a :hamas-red-triangle: hamas-red-triangle scene in the video.

Underneath it all is a 140bpm beat by “K1 The Producer”.

History & Goals

I started out with a $15/mo VPS (run by Nazis, as it turned out) and have migrated/upgraded the server twice since then. It’s now using the most powerful dedicated server available from Freakhosting at ~$230/mo💰🥴, because I wanted it to not suck. It has a Ryzen 9 7950x3D, which is ~32 times as fast as the first server. It still doesn’t have the transcoding throughput to keep up with YT syncing without creating a double-digit hour backlog.

The transcoding power can be boosted by renting additional servers for use as remote runners. It all depends on the amount of support the project can get…

Donation Link 🥺👉👈

I’m afraid to add it up, but I’m sure I’ve sunk at least $600 into various TT expenses since I registered the domain on 2023-10-27 and started playing around. I didn’t want to ask for donations until I was sure I knew what I was doing.

Another goal: making the PT vids embed properly in Lemmy!

  • TankieTanuki [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
    25·
    2 months ago

    Okay, yeah, maybe I shouldn’t joke about this stuff (I love jokes though).

    The only person or thing that ever “sees” my decrypted private keys is my ssh agent (his name is Stanely—kidding!—it’s OpenSSH), and only for brief moments. I use ed25519 and they never leave the home Linux PC that generated them.

    I’ve hardened the server’s /etc/ssh/sshd_config by disabling password login and root login. It only accepts PubkeyAuthentication and MACs sha2-256 and sha-2-512.

    Only one user is on the allowList to use SSH, and I’ve double-checked the file permissions of/in the corresponding ~/.ssh directory: authorized_keys has a chmod of 0600.

    nftables blocks all inbound traffic except for the obviously necessary ports 80 and 443, 51820 for WireGuard, and my super secret, random port for my ssh logins (I know that doesn’t do that much but, meh). The standard SSH port 22 is blocked.

    • Zvyozdochka [she/her, pup/pup's]@hexbear.netEnglish
      15·
      2 months ago

      Exposing SSH to the public internet, key authentication only or not, is kind of scary. I’d really recommend only allowing SSH connections through a private VPN.

      Ignore the double post, website broken for a second and threw an error so I reposted boohoo

      • TankieTanuki [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
        11·
        2 months ago

        OH! nftables also drops any incoming ssh connection unless the IP matches the two or three VPN endpoints I use. They are public (paid) VPN endpoints though.

        I have another, smaller webserver where I plan to create a private WireGuard endpoint. Then incoming ssh could be restricted to the local 10.x.x.x whatever subnet used. Is that closer to what you had in mind?

    • ProletarianDictator [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      13·
      2 months ago

      This is good practice for something like a desktop machine.

      Servers, especially explicitly communist peer-to-peer filesharing servers, require a degree of bulletproofing beyond this. Every chud or lib who can use the command line is gonna want to own your box, let alone more capable people or entities. All it takes is one CVE, and a PeerTube instance, nftables, and openssh is a lot of exposed surface area.

      Idk, maybe I’m more paranoid than most, but I’d at least look into containerizing this setup. There’s a lot of hardening that can be done, but containers probably give you the most bang-for-buck effort-wise.

        • ProletarianDictator [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          3·
          2 months ago

          Not sure why, but I’d assume it’s because the devs don’t use docker in the development process, so it’s less tested. Also might be WebTorrent having networking quirks, but idk. Docs also say something about not being able to handle changing hosts, which might be relevant, but that wording is ambiguous, so I’d normally think they mean “hostname”

          • TankieTanuki [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
            3·
            2 months ago

            They don’t (officially) support changing the instance domain name or object storage providers. It was probably trying to say that. The developers are French so the English translations are sometimes a little off.

                • ProletarianDictator [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  3·
                  2 months ago

                  Framasoft is a non-profit according to their site. Dont know where I saw govt funding, but I think the French govt gives them an alotment.

                  They seem alright:

                  At Framasoft, we dream of a better world. We don’t want to encourage a current system that is problematic (surveillance capitalism). We want to contribute to another system, which favours the commons. A path of hope, that is!

                  → It’s political, because we are going against the grain of a capitalist vision where personal data is a source of enrichment for multinationals.

                  → It’s political because preserving our freedoms is fundamental to maintaining a not too shabby democracy.

                  → It’s political because we want to cooperate with those who defend this vision of the world.