All good discussion points on this thread, I think.
I just want to note that donating to the Internet Archive is a Good Thing that everyone should consider doing, if they’re in a position to do so financially in these challenging times. You get what you pay for…
@andrei_jay personally I am also uninterested in working on a “bandcamp for video” / paywall service (isn’t that just bandcamp anyway ? )
The reason I asked how you found Peertube / videos.scanlines was in response to your Previous comment about wanting a “non-corporate video hosting platform for video artists” / “co-op” - which is exactly what I had in mind with this peertube experiment.
However there are many ways that this (and any community / ethical alternative ) can never compete with YouTube , and that’s ok too. I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t put your videos on YouTube if you feel that is the right place for them. Critical mass on the platform / The Algorithm / people stumbling on your videos when watching quake speed runs Will never happen on scanlines.
Personally I intend to use it to embed videos in other places on the internet (here , github, my personal website, sharing on socials maybe ) where these things don’t actually matter so much and discoverablty is a separate concern.
The other huge difference is the cost to use the service. Obviously storing large about of anything online is never free. I did a bunch of research and setup to run videos.scanlines videos from a static object storage that costs $5 per terabyte Per month, and which I’m very excited about because this seems like it could actually scale and be economically viable for this community. I don’t think it will be possible to actually store large amounts of video Anywhere for much cheaper than this. There is currently a peertube upload limit of 20gbs per person but this can easily be lifted if a few people are even willing to contribute a small amount.
Still though for many people contributing a small amount is still hard / especially when YouTube is “free” - you would have to already not be happy with other aspects of their business to be looking for alternatives.
as we start doing more live streams and inevitably hosting them on here I know we would be able to chip in 
Nice find by @VisibleSignals, possibly the only Peertube instance (other than Vidicon) I’ve seen that it’d make sense for us to follow (maybe after some interaction with them, it’d be great if someone was in touch with them)
https://diode.zone
edit: diode.zone also features interesting terms of usage / code of conduct
edit: with regard to content, we could also consider https://sleepy.tube/
On the other hand, I think we need to take a decision about other instances following us.
On Mastodon, bad servers get blocked all the time. I guess it’s just the same for Peertube?
Every week new instances start following us. It’s currently 24 (we only follow 1, Vidicon): https://videos.scanlines.xyz/about/follows
Some seem to be OK (if rarely interesting), but some prominently feature angry memes, “controversial thinkers”, anti-vaccine activists and some of them host full proper hate propaganda and right-wing content (I’m not linking, but think ‘Gab’ or ‘kekmaga’). For brevity I’ll just call such content and instances “bad”.
As far as I understand,
There may be an argument in favor of federating even with bad servers, because this keeps the whole network more resistant. I don’t buy that. As far as I see it, any decentralized network that needs racists to be part of it in order to survive is flawed by design.
Edit: I meant “We can’t vet every new instance”…) – We can’t vet any new instance and their moderation. I propose that we simply block any instances by following us, and only allow the same instances we follow.
I agree.
Sleepy Tube looks great!
[edit] Oh… except most of the good video art content I see is actually coming from Scanlines via Federation lol
[edit2] and algorithmic.tv - Informationen zum Thema algorithmic.
i agree we dont want to be followed by bad instances. we should block any that the content is hate propaganda & right wign content
is there the option for instances to send follow request and we decide to accept or deny ? coz if we dont allow anyone we dont follow to follow us, then we could miss out on discovering something interesting… it puts the work on us to discover similar instances in the fediverse… which could be more work than just vetting instance requests ? im not too fussed either way just thinking outloud
i helped ron set up the sleepytube - there will be more content there and potentially some cool integration features with sleepycircuits coming in the future… hoping to find some more time to collaborate on this in future
(this is a technical workaround I just found. But it’s also related to what we’re discussing)
Peertube workaround - How to to subscribe to channels on non-federated instances
You can subscribe to channels (not users) on Peertube instances not followed or following your own instance. Let’s say you have a videos.scanlines.xyz account:
It is completely configurable on a per instance basis. just enable manual approval.
PeerTube configuration file
# Allow or not other instances to follow yours enabled: true # Whether or not an administrator must manually validate a new follower manual_approval: false
Interestingly, the admin at diode.zone just shared that allowing followers by default hasn’t seemed like a meaningful abuse vector.
As a random thought, how viable would it be for users to support the server with torrent bandwidth? I have a couple of VPS instances that use around 5GB out of their 1TB monthly bandwidth limit. I think it’d be plausible to script something where I take a feed of videos from the peertube instance and dump the magnet urls into a torrent client. Disk space is a limitation, but it could be rotated out to support the latest videos or streams. Could also put in a cutoff valve when it gets to 80% monthly bandwidth limits. This could basically act as a buffer for some of the month.
I just poked at the Python API a bit. I’m not sure what calls are exposed to a general user. No promises on whether this would work out, but I’d be willing to experiment with throwing bandwidth at this 
I followed up to the proposal.
Both “Other instances can follow yours” and “Manually approve new instance followers” options are now enabled.
I added this note to videos.scanlines :
As of 2021, May 15th videos.scanlines.xyz only allows to be followed by other similarly-themed (audio/video, art, DIY projects) and like-minded Peertube instances; the previous follower list has been reset.
The list of followers has been reset, here’s a backup:
peertube@video.ploud.fr
peertube@tube.dsocialize.net
peertube@totse.tube
peertube@video.antopie.org
peertube@the.jokertv.eu
peertube@peertube.swarm.solvingmaz.es
peertube@spectra.video
peertube@tube.tchncs.de
peertube@tgi.hosted.spacebear.ee
peertube@guggenberger.website
peertube@tuner.rayn.bo
peertube@tv.poa.st
peertube@peervideo.club
peertube@video.fitchfamily.org
peertube@justtelly.com
peertube@watch.libertaria.space
peertube@fediverse.tv
peertube@peertube.1312.media
peertube@peertube.sl-network.fr
peertube@peertube.taxinachtegel.de
peertube@video.qoto.org
peertube@video.magicknetwork.com
peertube@videos.alexandrebadalo.pt
peertube@video.hackers.town
peertube@hitchtube.fr
peertube@video.ploud.jp
peertube@sleepy.tube
peertube@peertube.xhrpb.com
We’re now following these instances:
I also replied “As long as possible” to the “How long do you plan to maintain this instance?” question in the About page.
(correction: diode.zone not followed)
I’ve tried to keep up and manually approve following requests as soon as they got in, but it was too much so I surrendered and I disabled the notifications. Not sure if anyone else is checking them. I’ll try to check them out every once and then.
Everyday there are new requests. Some instances get rejected and then automatically attempt again to follow the day after. Almost all of them are either simply-uninteresting or very-bad.
Maybe for the future let’s consider switching to different settings - if we get relieve us of this burden, in turn we may just actively look for like-minded instances every once and then, and ask them about reciprocal following.
((I hope I’m being clear, I’m afraid my English is funny today))
sounds good to me. i don’t really care about our videos being federated to other servers if we don’t like them enough to follow them from our instance.
@robp this seems to be about the same idea, but I don’t know much about torrents, nor I can read the scripts that are referenced there, would you like to have a look at it?
Sure! They’re basically describing the manual version of what I wanted to do. Hypothetically, other webtorrent clients should be able to support peertube. If someone downloaded the torrent links manually and seeded them on a compatible client, it should support the corresponding peertube video. I messed with this a bit and I’m not clear if peertube was updating the peer list correctly when I tried it. The little bits of script on that page are just how to invoke a couple specific webtorrent clients.
What I wanted to do to was have this be automated with the latest videos on another VPS somewhere. I didn’t see anything on the other link that looked like they were doing this. I looked at the Peertube API a while back and didn’t find anything that exposes the magnet links yet. I should take a look at this more; I got distracted by shiny things😺.