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,
visitors of our instance will NOT be exposed directly to bad content (that’s fine)
anyone reading our Network page will see we’re somehow networking with bad servers (ambiguous and bad-looking)
visitors of instances hosting bad content will be exposed to our content, so we may gain some audience (but are you interested in such visitors? I’m not)
instances hosting bad content will benefit from our content as they syndicate it to their audience (I don’t like that)
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 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:
on a Peertube instance currently NOT followed by videos.scanlines.xyz, find a channel you want to subscribe to
open a video in that channel, click the ‘Share’ button
copy the resulting URL and and paste it into the Search field of your own instance
in the Search results, click on the video
the video from the remote instance now opens inside videos.scanlines.xyz, and finally you can click ‘Subscribe’
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
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
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:
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😺.
I’m trying to figure out whether the scary privacy message “Watching this video may reveal your IP address to others” that shows up on embedded Peertube videos (with reason, I assume) would disappear if we were to disable webtorrent.
If the message would disappear, and if our instance currently doesn’t need webtorrent, and if disabling and re-enabling webtorrent is supposed to be smooth (it would “break federation with PeerTube instances < 2.1”, but I’ve checked already that wouldn’t be our case), I would consider to disable it until actually needed for a reason (of course, scanlines members willing to play with this feature like @robp would be a good reason to keep it enabled or re-enable it).
(note: one can customize the embedded player to hide the privacy warning message, but that’s not my point and it’s not always possible anyway)
i’ve tried different different combinations of the settings for HLS and webtorrent being toggled on or off, and i’m pretty sure the message was still there. as far as i understand it, the message would apply to any playing method which supports peer to peer, since the users are sending data back and forth to each other as well as to the main server. i understand that the message is a bit scary from a user experience perspective but i personally don’t feel it’s something to worry about, considering the context (an experimental server on a lovably scrappy DIY community forum)
I messed with my idea more yesterday, and the tl;dr is that it doesn’t seem to be working.
I uploaded a very small video (webdriver-elbow) and was trying to use webtorrent-hybrid to seed all available video qualities. My understanding is that webtorrent-hybrid seeds via WebRTC in addition to normal bittorrent peers. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be uploading video to the web client . This moots the rest of my idea of automatically backing videos with torrents.
I picked through the peertube documentation and bug trackers, and it seems like at one point this may have worked, but not longer does now. As far as I can tell, the only official way to buffer a peertube instance is through another peertube instance in redundancy mode. This is more heavyweight than my original idea. I may look into this again in the future, because I’d still love to know how to throw some excess bandwidth towards this peertube instance
I just went through 27 follow requests and rejected them all (none of them was focused on, or in most cases even featuring, video art or similar topics)
At this point I’d just disable the ability to send follow requests, and replace that with an explicit call to get in touch.
What do people think? (related: is there any way for people out of Scanlines to contact us without joining the forum? maybe it’s unfriendly to require that. I’m available as a contact if needed)
. This moots the rest of my idea of automatically backing videos with torrents.