PeerTube and LBRY

I have many problems with YouTube, who doesn’t these days, right? I’m not going to go into all the nitty gritty of it in this post, but here’s a video from a LBRY advocate that does a good job of summarizing some of the issues by using clips from YouTube creators:

(link to the video if the embedded video above doesn’t display)

I have a channel on YouTube for which I have lots of plans for. I started making videos last year and created 59 episodes for Debian Package of the Day. I’m proud that I got so far because I tend to lose interest in things after I figure out how it works or how to do it. I suppose some people have assumed that my video channel is dead because I haven’t uploaded recently, but I’ve just been really busy and in recent weeks, also a bit tired as a result. Things should pick up again soon.

Mediadrop and PeerTube

I wanted to avoid a reliance on YouTube early on, and set up a mediadrop instance on highvoltage.tv. Mediadrop ticks quite a few boxes but there’s a lot that’s missing. On top of that, it doesn’t seem to be actively developed anymore so it will probably never get the features that I want.

I’ve been planning to move over to PeerTube for a while and hope to complete that soon. PeerTube is a free software video hosting platform that resemble YouTube style video sites. It’s on the fediverse and videos viewed by users are shared by webtorrents to other users who are viewing the same videos. After reviewing different video hosting platforms last year during DebCamp, I also came to the conclusion that PeerTube is the right platform to host DebConf and related Debian videos on. I intend to implement an instance for Debian shortly after I finish up my own migration.

(link to PeerTube video if embedded video doesn’t display)

Above is an introduction of PeerTube by its creators (which runs on PeerTube so if you’ve never tried it out before, there’s your chance!)

LBRY

LBRY takes a drastically different approach to the video sharing problem. It’s not yet as polished as PeerTube in terms of user experience and it’s a lot newer too, but it’s interesting in its own right. It’s also free software and implements it’s own protocol that you access on lbry:// URIs and it prioritizes it’s own native apps over accessing it in a web browser. Videos are also shared on its peer-to-peer network. One big thing that it implements is its own blockchain along with its own LBC currency (don’t roll your eyes just yet it’s not some gimmick from 2016 ;) ). It’s integrated with the app so viewers can easily give a tip to a creator. I think that’s better than YouTube’s ad approach because people can earn money by the value their video provides to the user, not by the amount of eyes they bring to the platform. It’s also possible for creators to create paid for content, although I haven’t seen that on the platform yet.

If you try out LBRY using my referral code I can get a whole 20 LBC (1 LBC is nearly USD $0.04 so I’ll be rich soon!). They also have a sync system that can sync all your existing YouTube videos over to LBRY. I requested this yesterday and it’s scheduled so at some point my YouTube videos will show up on my @highvoltage channel on LBRY. Their roadmap also includes some interesting reading.

I definitely intend to try out LBRY’s features and it’s unique approach, although for now my plan is to use my upcoming PeerTube instance as my main platform. It’s the most stable and viable long-term option at this point and covers all the important features that I care about.