Misc things about Peertube and federation, video art cooperative sites, archives, streaming

@bobbypharaoh maybe you want to upload your streamlines performance onto https://videos.scanlines.xyz ? (or i can if u prefer)

theres an option to import from url (eg youtube) as well

of course if anyone else here is interested in alternative video platform should try it too !

also, any plans for streamlines_02 yet ? (@palomakop , maybe should start a new thread for this)

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i was thinking similarly and was going to try and make an account on the videos platform for archive of streamlines performance (tho i have not yet because i’ve been moving!)

also excited to try it out more generally once i have some time.

as for streamlines_002, no plans have yet been made!

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sounds good !

re accounts, it is using the single sign-in from discourse , so can only create accounts from scanlines. although there is a root account which could be used as ‘system’

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oh, i didn’t realize that! good to know. perhaps we can just make a “playlist” or something then

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uploading to the videos page right now

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I’m assuming everyone knows about the Internet Archive. We’ve been trying using the Archive to host our videos since we are copyleft / pro-sharing diehards; we don’t trust corporations in general, and we don’t trust them specifically about hosting our content.
Results are mixed when it comes to streaming performances, at least on this side of the Ocean: we live in Berlin and apparently the Internet Archive stutters often, for us and for other people living here. YMMV.
We’re currently in the process of choosing what to upload to video.scanlines.xyz. Most of our current recordings are 3-4 hours long and take ~1.5GB, but I guess it’d be best to upload shorter and smaller files.
So here’s a test - embedding from Internet Archive. Very NSFW like anything we do:

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i hang out on the archive and there can be streaming issues stateside as well. ive heard a lot of different folks talking about desiring a non corporate video hosting platform for video artists, perhaps a thread could get started here about starting a video art focused co op site? also @edk has expressed some interest in a video art focused 24/7 streaming channel as well, perhaps the two ideas could be folded together as folks could opt in their uploads as an option to be included into an aggregate 24/7 streaming channel?

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I know it’s not much, but we’ve got about 50 hours of content to add to a platform/channel like that.

Can’t wait to see what the squad comes up with!

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@andrei_jay @videopunks I’m curious how you find the videos.scanlines community video hosting platform we have ?

or what you are imagining is something else altogether ?

Obviously we can add to what is there if there’s any Interest / feedback / resources

Or pivot completely

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side note, i have been to the internet archive server room and it’s amazing what they do with the resources they have.

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welp i don’t exactly know all of the details of peertube yet, but basically where to host fairly large numbers of fairly large and long video files and with what quality do they get played back would be the main concerns on my end for hosting the educational stuffs i make. im cautiously down to shell out for some more server space to host the giant amount of content i have and continue to produce but it also might end up being cheaper if there was some kind of a coop involved on that side of things? and i think other folks have expressed interest in trying to do some kind of bandcamp for video/ undervolt and co type thing as well which i’m pretty uninterested in personally but there could still be enough underlying overlap in goals to fold together into a larger thing as well?

from a more abstract and pragmatic viewpoint another question i have is what reason does anyone have to use video.scanlines.xyz over youtube rn? I make educational stuff because i want n00bs to stumble over things, say “whoa that looks cool let me try it” etc etc. rn scanlines.xyz is pretty much kind of an exclusive self selecting audience of folks who are several steps removed from needing some goofball to ramble fun facts about how to use a video mixer. This is not me saying that it is not worth it to try and develop communities outside of youtube for video hosting, i’m more saying that its mights require some level of intentionality and organization to create a reason for more randos to want to hang out watching videos anywhere other than youtube.

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maybe one thing i could do is take the twitch workshop things i stream and host the archives exlusively over here? might be a decent way to build awareness of this place in general as folks seem pretty decently interested in those

and also maybe i can put up the live remix of ghost in the shell that @palomakop and i are doing on sunday night up here as well!

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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…

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@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.

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as we start doing more live streams and inevitably hosting them on here I know we would be able to chip in :slight_smile:

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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/

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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,

  • 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.

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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.