Archived: JoinPeerTube

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PeerTube is a decentralized video hosting network, based on free/libre software. Join the federation and take back control of your videos!

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PeerTube, a free software to take back control of your videos

Logo of PeerTube, developed by Framasoft

Free software to take back control of your videos

PeerTube, developed by Framasoft, is the free and decentralized alternative to video platforms, providing you over 600,000 videos published by 150,000 users and viewed over 70 million times

What is PeerTube?Layer 1See the instances list

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Missing Halloween

Written, directed, produced and animated by Mike Inel, Missing Halloween is a short animation about a boy meeting his best friend to celebrate Halloween, making trick-or-treat. The Animation mashed sad stories with beautiful animation. The black and white drawings are beautiful and the story, although a little sad, is very poetic.

Copy-Me

Copy-Me is a media debunking the myths of copyright and copying. On this channel you can find 2 webseries. The Creativity Delusion is a multi-part video essay on how our misconceptions about ideas and the way brains work impact our views about creation. These also extend to intellectual property. And of course, this videos are under a free license, without any sort of restriction.

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Blender

The Official Blender Foundation PeerTube instance give you access to videos presenting the evolutions of the 3D creation software, tutorials and animated films supported by the Blender Foundation. All videos published on this instance are under Creative Commons Attribution licence.

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What isPeerTube?

PeerTube aspires to be a decentralized and free/libre alternative to video broadcasting services.

Our aim is not to replace them, but rather to simultaneously offer something else, with different values.

A federation of interconnected hosting services

PeerTube is not meant to become a huge platform that would centralize videos from all around the world.

Rather, it is a network of inter-connected small videos hosters.

Anyone with a modicum of technical skills can host a PeerTube server, aka an instance. Each instance hosts its users and their videos. In this way, every instance is created, moderated and maintained independently by various administrators.

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You can still watch from your account videos hosted by other instances though if the administrator of your instance had previously connected it with other instances.

This is just how a federation works!

And there's more! PeerTube uses ActivityPub, a federating protocol that allows you to interact with other software, provided they also use this protocol. For example, PeerTube and Mastodon -a Twitter alternative- are connected: you can follow a PeerTube user from Mastodon (the latest videos from the PeerTube account you follow will appear in your feed), and even comment on a PeerTube-hosted video directly from your Mastodon's account.

Open-source, free/libre license code

Mainstream online video broadcasting services make money off of your data by analyzing your interactions so that they can then bombard your with targeted advertising.

Peertube is not subject to any corporate monopoly, does not rely on ads and does not track you.

Most importantly, you are a person to PeerTube, not a product in need of profiling so as to be stuck in video loops. For example, PeerTube doesn't use any biased recommendation algorithms to keep you online for hours on end.

All of this is made possible by Peertube's free/libre license (GNU-AGPL). Its code is a digital "common", that belongs to everybody, instead of a secret formula that belongs to Google (in the case of Youtube) or to Vivendi/Bolloré (Dailymotion). This free/libre license guarantees our fundamental freedoms as users and allows many contributors to offer evolutions and new features.

With PeerTube, choose your hosting company and the rules you believe in.

YouTube has clearly gone astray: its hoster, Google-Alphabet, can enforce its ContentID system (the infamous "Robocopyright") or its videos recommendation system, all of which appear to be as obscure as unfair.

Direct contact with a human-scale hoster allows for two things: you no longer are the client of a huge tech company, and you can nurture a special relationship with your hoster, who distributes your data.

With PeerTube, you get to choose your hosting provider according to their terms of use, such as their disk space limit per user, their moderation policy, who they chose to federate with... You are not speaking with a huge tech company, so you can talk it out in case of any issue, need, desire...

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About peer-to-peer broadcasting and watching

The PeerTube software can, whenever necessary, use a peer-to-peer protocol (P2P) to broadcast viral videos, lowering the load of their hosts.

In this way, when you watch a video, your computer contributes to its broadcast. If a lot of people are watching the same video at the same time, their browser automatically send smalls pieces of the video to the other viewers. The server resources are not over-exploited: the stream is split, the network optimized.

It might not look like it, but thanks to peer-to-peer broadcasting, popular video makers and their videos are no longer forced to be hosted by big companies, whose infrastructure can stand thousands of views at the same time... or to pay for a robust but extremely expensive independent video host.

Who is behindPeerTube?

Peertube is a free/libre software funded by a French non-profit organization: Framasoft

Our organization started in 2004, and now devotes itself to popular education about digital technology issues. We are a small structure of less than 40 members and under 10 employees, well-known for the De-google-ify Internet project, when we offered 34 ethical and alternative online tools. As a public interest organization, over 90% of our funding comes from donations (tax deductible for French taxpayers).

Thanks to our crowdfunding (from March to July 2018), Framasoft were able to employ PeerTube's main developer. After a beta release in March 2018, release 1 came out in November 2018. Since then, several intermediary releases have brought many features along. Several collectives have already created PeerTube hosts, laying the foundation for the federation.

The more people use, support, and contribute to PeerTube, the quicker it will become a concrete alternative to platforms like YouTube.

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