User:22decembre/PeerTube

PeerTube is a free software, under AGPLv3.0 licence, designed to host vidéos in a decentralized manner with peer to peer. It was started in 2015 and supported by Framasoft. It works via a federation of instances ran by several entities. Its aim is to provide an alternative to centralized platforms such as YouTube or Dailymotion.

History
In 2015, as he was student and could not find an alternative to YouTube, Chocobozzz began developping a peer to peer protocol to share videos. He was contacted in 2017 by Framasoft, which had a campain called Contributopia, which aim is to create alternatives to centralized platforms. In order to support him and his work, notably on improving the design and usability, Framasoft hired the developper.

In 2018, Framasoft launch a crowdfunding on KissKissBankBank. A first beta is released in March 2018 and the first stable is announced for Octobre 2018.

In June 2018, a ferw months only after the first beta, 113 instances are publicly available on the web, host more than 10,000 videos.

Technology
PeerTube uses WebTorrent technology. Each server hosts a tracker torrent and each web browser viewing a video will then reshare it. This allows to share the load between the server itself and the clients as well as the bandwidth used (P2P technology).

Each PeerTube server can then host hundreds of videos, or more. In order to go further, servers can follow each other and federate. Each server will also reshare all videos from the instance it follows. The software uses PostgreSQL databases.

This federation can host collectively a large number of videos without having the same infrastructures as the web giants, each server staying under the sole administration of a distinct entity.

PeerTube uses the ActivityPub protocol, a new W3C web standard, in order to allow decentralization and compatibility with other services such as Mastodon or Diaspora*. It is for example possible to comment a video on an instance from a Mastodon account. This can create a whole « ecosystem », as opposed to the GAFAM platforms. This ecosystem aims to be resilient against censorship and DDoS, GAFAM being an example of SPOF.

Références
Category:Peer-to-peer Category:Video hosting