I read many comments on how PeerTube isn't sustainable as a YouTube alternative and, while it's certainly true right now, are we sure it will be the same in the near future?

The platform is growing and the new mobile app is making great progress; I can certainly see some people investing in a major instance some day, accelerating the platform adoption.

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[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 19 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

I have a server with less than 100gb that's running it for a year so far. No issues and even has a channel with 100 or so subscribers (literally my dog).

It's p2p capabilities make it pretty easy to distribute videos. And the server admins have the ability to toggle if they want to host other videos from other instances or not. They even have the ability to host specific individual videos if they want to support certain creators. Its a very intelligent system.

If anyone wants to take a look, we have a couple different communities/channels/videos over on !peertube@lemmy.world

[–] nimpnin@sopuli.xyz 19 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

For small-scale stuff like that it will surely work. It’s unclear if it scales to youtube volumes. Maybe it doesn’t have to though, small scale stuff is valuable too.

[–] obsidianfoxxy7870@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 points 19 hours ago

Also to be fair I feel like YouTube has a large amount of deadish Internet content or just content that can't exist in a landscape that doesn't reward getting clicks (think Mr. Beast and similar).

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 11 points 19 hours ago

Yep no reason to scale until you need to scale.

Everyone wants it to be YouTube. With ads and algorithms and....

Just let it be peertube. It works now.

[–] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 7 points 19 hours ago

I think P2P has stood the test of time. Torrents scale extremely well, any large scale video would have so many peers the server wouldn't have to participate at all. These days most torrents easily saturate my gigabit connection no problem with just a handful of peers. Torrents tends to spread like wildfire.

The main issue would be storage space, but I think a lot of YouTubers would be perfectly okay with spending $5-10 a month to pay for the storage costs with all the benefits you get from not being tied to YouTube's ToS and policies. It's a drop in the bucket compared to the earnings from sponsor spots.

[–] Auli@lemmy.ca 5 points 20 hours ago

And? Now scale up to YouTube size allow more creators

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 2 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

100 subscriber is NBD. Let's talk when you have thousands or even millions of active users. At some point you're going to hit a wall if you were to hypothetically scale up. Costs of service would need to be covered somehow.

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 0 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

I'm not sure peertube HAS thousands of viewers

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 4 points 18 hours ago

It does but that's beside the point. We're discussing a hypothetical future.