PeerTube is to YouTube what Mastodon is to Xitter

Open Source
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For developing an online presence and an audience, video is tough. YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion have the position and infrastructure to handle the bandwidth and video scaling that makes web video accessible and scalable across many types of devices, with varying throughput rates.

I created a PeerTube account months ago in an instance called MakerTube.

Per Wikipedia:

PeerTube is a free and open-source, decentralized, ActivityPub federated video platform.

…

As an ActivityPub platform, PeerTube is part of the federated network known as the Fediverse.

I haven’t played with it much. I just published my first video today (it’s a must see if you have pets and a guitar effects pedalboard).

But what I like about it are the same things I like about Mastodon:

  • Open Source
  • Portable
  • RSS

With the RSS capabilities, I may be able to do something similar to what I do with Mastodon: Use the RSS to trigger an IFTTT applet that automatically publishes my videos to YouTube.

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Wow! I’ve seen peertube videos linked to from other places but had not realized that it is open source and activitypub friendly.

Good to have activitypub and fediverse on our radar, so I added tags for those terms. Nextcloud, Discourse and Mastodon are all open source and fediverse.

Nextcloud can be used to share videos and let people watch them online but the experience is fairly rudimentary and likely not scalable. You wouldn’t want to go viral and have hundreds of people watching your video at the same time.

Discourse does pretty well for short videos of small file size, e.g. for sharing troubleshooting screencasts, but not so much for large file size movies.

But if you know you need to stream movies, you can always get a beefier server and get a decent experience on either Discourse or Nextcloud.

That said, having a peertube server to accompany your Discourse and Mastodon is appealing.