It is technically different and there are trade offs, but that isn't much of an argument - at the end of the day we need to send yea many bytes of data from server to client with a known format. I watched a PeerTube video yesterday and it was the same experience as watching a YouTube one. Some company could implement YouTube by running large servers as peers if the unit economics made sense and it'd work.

The problem PeerTube has is that there isn't demand for what it is doing because YouTube is a pretty good video custodian. Although everyone seems to be sensibly alert to the risk that they eventually go bad, right now it works. Obviously don't expect any video currently on YouTube to be available in 20 years though.

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bawolff 4 days ago | parent [-]

> I watched a PeerTube video yesterday

But did you watch it from a site operating at scale? Its easy to be youtube at low scale.

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MavropaliasG 4 days ago | parent [-]

PeerTube is built to scale, the more users the better bandwidth because you stream from peers

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bawolff 4 days ago | parent [-]

That's nice in theory. In practise though im doubtful. Churn is going to be much higher on something like peer tube than something like traditional bit torrent. Access patterns might also potentially be distributed badly for some videos.

Not to mention the long tail of less popular vidros.

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MavropaliasG 4 days ago | parent [-]

Why don't you go and watch some videos on PeerTube and see the practice for yourself?

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bawolff 4 days ago | parent [-]

Because peertube is not operating at scale so the issues i mentioned wouldn't be present.

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roenxi 3 days ago | parent [-]

If the issues you are worried about aren't present yet, then logically right now it would be a comparable to and a competitor with YouTube. People in the main don't avoid web services because of hypothetical technical problems that might exist in the future but that the design seems superficially resistant to.

PeerTube actually does have technical issues in there here and now, but the number one problem is just that YouTube is an excellent service preferred by both users and advertisers and PeerTube doesn't seem able to outdo it in any meaningful way.

	▲	bawolff 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> If the issues you are worried about aren't present yet, then logically right now it would be a comparable to and a competitor with YouTube By that logic, AWS free tier is a competitor to youtube.