I agree.
Sleepy Tube looks great!
[edit] Ohā¦ 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 interestingā¦ it puts the work on us to discover similar instances in the fediverseā¦ 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 futureā¦ hoping to find some more time to collaborate on this in future
(this is a technical workaround I just found. But itās also related to what weāre 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. Letās 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 āShareā 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 āSubscribeā
2 Likes
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
4 Likes
Interestingly, the admin at diode.zone just shared that allowing followers by default hasnāt 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 itād 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. Iām not sure what calls are exposed to a general user. No promises on whether this would work out, but Iād be willing to experiment with throwing bandwidth at this 
2 Likes
I followed up to the proposal.
Both āOther instances can follow yoursā and āManually approve new instance followersā 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, hereās a backup:
click to see the old instances list
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
Weāre now following these instances:
- archive.vidicon.org
- algorithmic.tv
- sleepy.tube (currently waiting for approval from them)
I also replied āAs long as possibleā to the āHow long do you plan to maintain this instance?ā question in the About page.
(correction: diode.zone not followed)
2 Likes
Iāve 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. Iāll 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 letās 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 Iām being clear, Iām afraid my English is funny today))
2 Likes
sounds good to me. i donāt really care about our videos being federated to other servers if we donāt like them enough to follow them from our instance.
1 Like
@robp this seems to be about the same idea, but I donāt know much about torrents, nor I can read the scripts that are referenced there, would you like to have a look at it?
1 Like
Sure! Theyāre 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 Iām 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 didnāt see anything on the other link that looked like they were doing this. I looked at the Peertube API a while back and didnāt find anything that exposes the magnet links yet. I should take a look at this more; I got distracted by shiny thingsšŗ.
1 Like
Iām trying to figure out whether the scary privacy message āWatching this video may reveal your IP address to othersā 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 doesnāt need webtorrent, and if disabling and re-enabling webtorrent is supposed to be smooth (it would ābreak federation with PeerTube instances < 2.1ā, but Iāve checked already that wouldnāt 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 thatās not my point and itās not always possible anyway)
1 Like
iāve tried different different combinations of the settings for HLS and webtorrent being toggled on or off, and iām 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 donāt feel itās something to worry about, considering the context (an experimental server on a lovably scrappy DIY community forum)
2 Likes
I messed with my idea more yesterday, and the tl;dr is that it doesnāt 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 doesnāt 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 Iād still love to know how to throw some excess bandwidth towards this peertube instance 
1 Like
You can also type the username@peertube.url in the search and click subscribe. So great!
1 Like
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 Iād 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 itās unfriendly to require that. Iām available as a contact if needed)
3 Likes
thereās an email address scanlines.xyz@gmail.com i made just for adding to the contact page so we wouldnāt have to put any personal emails publicly
3 Likes