As Youtube seems to be experimenting with anti-adblocker’s policies and LBRY doesn’t seems to be a good alternative, I would like to know the state of Peertube. It is free and open source, selfhosted, federated, doesn’t need an account, supports feed readers and it is battle tested. I know that you still need to find an instance if not selfhosting yourself, but I think is the best alternative.
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The reason it was removed before is because by default it shares the video you’re streaming with other users via a P2P network (hence the name PeerTube), which leaks your IP and the video you’re streaming to the internet.
Now, this can be disabled in settings (even without an account), and instance owners can disable it by default. Even if you disable it though, when you stream a video from a remote instance you are still streaming directly from that remote instance, your own instance doesn’t proxy the video. Basically there’s no way to only trust a single instance, you’re virtually always giving some data directly to whatever instance you’re streaming from.
I like PeerTube, I use it myself, but as a privacy tool specifically it gives me pause.
Maybe this isn’t a big deal though, you could argue that self-hosting your instance still gives you control over the client code running in your browser, and there’s no trackers or anything involved like there is with YouTube. Loading resources directly from the source is the way the rest of the internet works, I think we could all agree that everyone hosting their own blog would be better than everyone using Medium or Twitter for example, even though it means connecting to a bunch of different servers instead of a single source. Easy to make the same argument for videos on PeerTube.
I could go either way with PeerTube really.
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Yeah, I agree that it can be ambiguous. But, I still think it is better to mention it over LBRY or some other platform. Also, I don’t think the P2P is a big deal. You can either use a VPN or Tor with it. As for the third party trust, the privacy frontends, as well as any service that you can selfhost and sync tools, have the same problem and they are still recommended.
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Disabling seeding defeats the whole point of peertube though, and puts strain on the server. Better to just use it with a vpn.
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Without seeding it can still be a adless, private, open source, trackerless and federated experience depending on the instance.
If a server has an issue with that then can’t they forbid disabling seeding?
If there is no option to do that then a github issue could be open in Peertube to add that option.
I would like to see Peertube in PG but they should be encouraged to develop onions first.
Ironically youtube has onions indirectly thanks to piped and invidious.
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Peertube currently has only one single full time dev. It’s progressing very slowly 
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This doesn’t means a lot. AFAIK they are a pretty full-featured platform with a polished product, the addition of new features should not be a crucial factor.
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Migrate from YT to PeerTube? Yeah, sounds nice. At first.
In PT there is option to import data as JSON. You cannot export your profile from YT. At least its not obvious.
Google (YT) has robust API; just use it and you will be YT free in, say, 10-15 minutes.
IT people will do it with ease.
Huh? I just imported a YouTube channel to PeerTube a few weeks ago and it worked perfectly, grabbed all 350+ videos. It’s as simple as entering the channel URL, and that’s it:
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I think it’s misplaced to worry your IP address is going to leak if you’re not using tor network/VPN. In order to browse the internet, we HAVE to tell our IP to every website we visit. Yes, now users can see our IP too, but many instances now turn off seeding due to GDPR, at least in Europe. I would be very interested in seeing PeerTube being shown on Video Hosting/Streaming category.
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I’d not want to see PeerTube being a recomendation until they offer a software level lock to either the tor browser or a vpn interface, similar to qBittorent.