Techie talk: PeerTube & Self-Hosting
Reposted from my technical blog
I recently wrote up these posts for my technical blog and I wanted to share them with you here.
We don’t love PeerTube enough
Corporate media platforms are a mental prison
I’m old enough to remember the days when people were beginning to recognize that putting all our video hosting eggs into the YouTube basket was a bad idea. People were just starting to realize that a single corporation having control over a huge portion of the Internet’s cultural history is a dead end. During this time many platforms spawned branding themselves as a better ‘YouTube Alternative’, only to struggle with little to no actual reach to the general public. Eventually people began to recognize that was truly needed was a “Decentralized YouTube” that could let everyone be in control of their own video platform.
In hindsight, even the very few people who are willing to escape Google’s walled-garden will actually venture away from corporate platforms. Since the beginning, I was skeptical that increasing the amount of corporations hosting the Internet’s video culture going from 1 to a dozen is itself a radical democratization of the information landscape. If anything, this shift has merely been an adaptation of the corporate media control system to dominate (and elevate) particular content niches.
The major competitors to YouTube are just that, competing at the same game. They are not truly any more interested in giving their audience a voice than Google is. While sincere attempts can begin with good intentions, the problem is that you can not dethrone Google without becoming Google. In fact Google couldn’t even be what it was without turning on their own stated principle of “Don’t be evil”.
Corporate video platforms are always going to need to use the finite space in their audience’s attention to market to them, this is why almost every ‘YouTube alternative’ has the same ‘featured page’ that I once remembered to be criticized as even YouTube going too far to push editorialized content on the public.
This is why there is such a radical distinction between the so-called ‘alternative media’ and actually independent voices. While Rumble tries to brand itself as an improvement to YouTube’s draconian speech crackdowns, it seems that it comes at the price of being inundated with advertising for sketchy supplement pushers, and dubious investment schemes. It’s worth noting that if you pay for the privilege, X now gives you the opportunity to serve non-trivial video content on that platform.
It seems that many have successfully escaped YouTube, but not corporate control over online expression. As they say “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”. The new paradigm is fundamentally the same as the old paradigm, just managed by a cartel instead of a single corporate entity. As far as I’m concerned the difference is negligible.
Many solutions, hardly any coordination
One advantage of time passing alone is that the three primary resources in cyberspace are much more inexpensive than in the past. The cost to store a personal collection of video at reasonable quality, and serve it over the web is constantly falling. One could argue we don’t even need a decentralized “YouTube alternative” because the open web is already well-equipped to address this. Thanks to HTML5 video is a first-class content form on the web that has many features. Many content management systems like Ghost or WordPress can include local videos on your sites, and static site generators are also perfectly able to include videos on even small sites. The simple fact is that the web doesn’t even really need centralized video hosts anymore, those willing to reclaim their own territory in cyberspace are able to use a wide variety of tools to serve their own video.
But the root of the issue ends up being reach. Hardly anyone wants to produce media to an audience of nobody. If the intention is to get the word out, or share with others, reach is certainly critical. Again, this is a circumstance that the open web already has a solution for. RSS is a fully decentralized system for media syndication and sharing. If more people fully embraced the open web and even more ambitiously, the social web (AKA the Fediverse) essentially all of the problems caused by corporate media control would be systematically eliminated. The problem is that people have been taught to expect all their online media in one place. The toil of navigating through different websites and apps is a tremendous hurdle for the public to overcome.
We’re always going to have to contend with smartphones as much as we may dread them. Yes, they are a beachhead for corporations to push products and surveillance on the people, but there’s also a reasons why people just can’t put them down. The vast majority of the public for a long period of time is going to be doing the majority of their computing on a smartphone such as an iPhone or Android device. Only the small minority of people who care about reasonable privacy and security guarantees will be running GrapheneOS. Perhaps the Librephone will eventually save us, or the public will mass abandon smartphones all-together, but I don’t anticipate that being anytime soon.
The problem isn’t just media being available, it also needs to be reasonably ‘within reach’ for people’s habits. Convenience is just a derogatory term for user experience innovation. Corporations have had the resources to reasarch, implement and refine, both helpful and dark patterns that shape how people interact with cyberspace. An interesting attempt to address this is Grayjay that aims to provide a “one stop shop” to the entire multimedia landscape of the web. Despite the many criticisms people have with FUTO and the fine details of how they license their software, I think this was a sincere attempt that should be learned from. That said, AntennaPod leverages RSS to effectively do what almost anyone would want out of decentralized media. Just give me a feed so I can watch what I want, when I want. I would go as far as to say that in a truly independent cyberspace, AntennaPod is all anyone would need. But people want more, they want interaction, they want robust discovery mechanisms, and they want an ability to conveniently post media. Thankfully there is such a solution PeerTube.
PeerTube: everything we could ask for
With the way the corporate media dominates the digital information landscape, one would be forgiven for presuming there was no actual solution. While some people may be able to read an entire Libre Solutions Network treatise on the mindset and long journey of making actual change, most people just want a simple solution they can use today to address their problems. Thankfully, that solution is actually here. By running or joining an independent PeerTube instance, you are directly liberating a portion of the online media landscape on behalf of others. With a relatively small investment in time, and resources individuals and communities can directly work to provide a truly better alternative to corporate video platforms.
It is a genuine shame that PeerTube isn’t more popular amongst those who crave a truly independent media. I personally feel responsible for not promoting PeerTube enough, and this piece is a small gesture to atone for that. It is my belief that dissidents across the political spectrum, and even the general public are “sleeping on” what is an immense game-changer when it comes to online media and entertainment. More adoption of PeerTube alone would drastically reduce the harmful impacts of algorithmic manipulation, privacy invasion, and the “dumbing down” of online media as a whole. This likely sounds ’too good to be true’ but the real catch is that we have to want it enough. We need to be willing to invest the effort and resources to build a better digital landscape, rather than wait for it to be provided for us.
A high-quality video CMS
PeerTube is not just a game-changer on the big picture, it’s a technical marvel demonstrating just how different online media can be. The user interface has all the features an ordinary person would expect, but also a lot more enhancements that make it a first-class video repository. Simple things like automatic transcription, compression to multiple different sizes, and even a mobile app are things that can make PeerTube more useful than simply having video files on your web site.
For those interested in running their own instance, PeerTube is an investment in a well-indexed video repository. I wholeheartedly believe that the future of online media and culture looks bright if people seize the opportunity to provide room for creatives and educators to share their work outside the pressures and influences of algorithmic manipulation and opaque monetization. PeerTube also supports a wide variety of ways to customize how your instance looks, so you can truly make it expressive to your needs. As a Free and Open Source (FOSS) project, with the right support, we can only expect PeerTube to get better and better over time. This can’t be said of corporate media platforms.
Structurally solving the actual problems
Love RSS feeds? PeerTube supports them out of the box. You can add any PeerTube channel to your AntenaPod app, or whatever RSS tool you use. But if you want actual engagement, rather than just a one-way conversation PeerTube is a full-fledged member of the Fediverse. This means that any “social web” application can comment on PeerTube videos. Reach both incoming and outgoing is greatly enhanced by this. But if that’s not enough decentralization for you, there’s a reason it’s called “PeerTube”.
PeerTube allows those watching the video to contribute bandwidth to each other. By “sharing the load” this can drastically reduce the bandwidth costs of serving videos in particular circumstances. This doesn’t eliminate all the costs, but is a significant way to “level the playing-field” for smaller operators. In previous versions this was done through WebTorrent but now has switched to WebRTC and HLS. In practice this has some trade-offs but I can definitely defend the change.
In my opinion, the biggest game-changer of PeerTube is that independent operators can finally break free of many of the incentives that fuel the ’enshittification’ of digital media. Without algorithms prioritizing particular video formats and length, people are free to create for quality rather than to publish. This can help work towards a radically different media landscape that lets people drive virality rather than corporate algorithms and government imperatives. It’s a relatively small thing, but PeerTube also features the addition of funding/donation information on a per video and a per channel basis, meaning that what’s possible in the future is unbounded with the right support.
Not seizing this opportunity would be a BIG mistake
Many of us lament the ’tik-tok’ brain and lack of attention span of the youth, if not the general public at large. But can we truly say we tried everything to ensure they inherit a better media landscape? Do we not have the responsibility to foster a culture that provides real meaningful alternatives to corporate slop? It is easy to critique others choices to validate our own decisions. I believe it is a duty of the modern person to proactively support building independent culture and its preservation. That said, we must also contend with the constraints and realities of our time. Because of this and all the above, I believe that PeerTube is an indispensable tool for building a better digital future. The sad fact of the matter is that many people are just waiting for cyberspace to become less hostile and predatory, but it falls to all of us to do what we can to change it.
I have been pleasantly surprised that even my relatively obscure project The Libre Solutions Network, gets a non-trivial amount of views via my own PeerTube Instance. When I compare view stats against the SubStack publication with over 1000 people signed-up, I am genuinely impressed that those following my projects over the open web will hit comparable watch time. What this tells me is that while you will certainly get higher surface engagement numbers on larger platforms, deep meaningful engagement is only to be found on the open web. Fostering a better digital culture requires us to make decisions with this in mind, and align our efforts accordingly.
This is fundamentally a collective action problem, not a technical one. Corporate media is entrenched because of massive network effects, but this is far from insurmountable. In a time where the plan seems to be trading the spark of human expression and creativity for regurgitated AI slop, quality and meaning are at a massive premium. The public is starved for authentic cultural expression and representation and there is so much potential in the tools we have to provide that. PeerTube is a real chance for us to experience something better than YouTube and its competitors ever could have been.
If you can, please donate to support the project!
How to get started
Go to the website and learn more about PeerTube.
PeerTube channels to consider
You can already start using PeerTube today by checking out these channels. You can bookmark them, use the app, or their subscribe via their feed.
(My project) Libre Solutions Network
Self-hosting: Speed, decentralization and efficiency
This post is an attempt to navel-gaze on the finer points of self-hosting your own sites & services. I’m going to put down some of the important but easily over-looked considerations that can really make a big difference. The goal is to help plan to make the most of the hardware you have access to without breaking the bank. There won’t be too much in-depth technical details, but more of an overview of things to think about to guide decision-making. If you’re looking for specific instructions, Reclaiming Territory in Cyberspace is a good place to start. I’m also writing this as a reference to myself for any future server-side projects I intend to build.
I dream of a future where ordinary people express themselves from social web sites & systems that are wholly their own. This requires a bit more than mere static sites. If speed was the only consideration, we could all simply put our data on a rented cloud servers leveraging high-performance SSDs and memory. This has two major problems; cost, and lack of independence. For significant amounts of data this would cost quite a bit, effectively filtering out anyone interested in sharing non-trivial amounts of multimedia content. Realistically, if we want a vibrant open web, people are going to want fast sites & services without too much overhead.
The good news is that local storage and compute is relatively cheap. Self-hosting in 2025 means that your largest constraints are bandwidth and latency. With some clever techniques, you can intelligently leverage limited cloud resources to make the best of your personal systems. By optimizing your setup, you can make the most out of even relatively trivial computing resources. Today the bar is quite low to be able to broadcast so much to the world.
Speed is relative. Some systems and services are inherently faster than others. Static sites are king when it comes to speed on the web, but with proper care other systems can be relatively close. In addition to the privacy risks, serving sites and media from your home is generally not advisable. Your home internet connection won’t be able to handle any non-trivial amount of burst traffic, and will likely leave your visitors waiting to load any media. This gets much worse in situations where residential users only have access to so much bandwidth during a given month.
Gotta go fast, while doing more with less
With enough of the big picture out of the way, let’s consider practical steps. Regardless of what systems and services we choose to run, we have to contend with physics and real-world costs. Hardware can only work so hard and data can only move so fast. The goal is to make the best use of available resources by contending with their limitations. In some situations it may make sense to be extremely selective, but in others it may make sense to take advantage of everything that is available.
Consider the following table, outlining the trade-offs of retrieving data from various methods:
The point of this chart is to point out that there are inherent trade-offs when it comes to leveraging particular resources. You can specialize by focusing on a few, or handle the complexity of trying to ‘have your cake and eat it too’. By understanding this, you can understand that there are opportunities to leverage (but not necessarily depend on) particular tools to help enhance your systems.
Storage localization
The main point of self-hosting is to keep your data under your control. This is best done with your data on machines you control, rather than cloud providers. This has another significant advantage, storage devices themselves are often relatively cheap. You can store your data on high-end SSDs, and make what you want accessible to either your network or even the public. This can be a LOT cheaper than buying large amounts of cloud storage at the price of some initial cost. That said, if you intend to serve a large volume of data, or to a large audience, trade-offs may have to be considered.
Compute optimization
Just like cloud storage, cloud compute can become expensive quite quickly for demanding tasks. By self-hosting you can pay up-front for your compute needs which often saves you money in the long run. An example of this would be using powerful machines at home as remote runners for a PeerTube instance running on an inexpensive VPS. This would allow you to speed up processing videos without sacrificing on availability to the public Internet. Also similarly to storage, there are serious privacy & security benefits of doing the majority of compute tasks on your own machines.
Mirrors and caching
For small or simple sites and services, redundant mirrors can allow your setup to exist across multiple networks (such as darknets) but a ’thin-cache’ is a simple way of achieving the same goal. By having the external facing server (such as a cheap VPS or mini-pc running a darknet daemon) operate as a server-side cache, you can still reduce the latency penalty of self-hosting. This allows your media to be highly available despite having a relatively modest setup.
Eliminating waste
Since you’re likely dealing with constrained resources, or at least a ‘shoe-string’ budget, it makes sense to optimize things however you can. Even if you’re not aiming to be on the 512KB club, it is absolutely worth your time to consider how you can save your guests time, and yourself resources.
Content: Text is king
It may be worth applying the logic of “this meeting could have been an e-mail” to your own content. If a visual medium isn’t entirely necessary, text may suffice. At minimum, treating text content as a first-class format is critical. Text is universally accessible, and plays nice with text-to-speech systems as well as translation. This also applies to file formats, plain-text data such as html tables and svg images can often be much lighter than images for simple information. With some creativity, a great deal of information can be presented with hardly any bandwidth at all.
Compression: Minimize all the things
Hosting media files can be the biggest challenge for small self-hosting setups. If you’re not familiar with how to compress audio & video files you may be unnecessarily using up loads of bandwidth and storage. For a great deal of content it’s not entirely likely that you need full 4K resolution to get your ideas across. The smaller your media files are the easier it is to mirror them and the faster they load for slow connections. FFmpeg is my go-to for compressing audio & video. Remember that you can always keep your full-quality copies for local use!
Client-side: Make it their problem
With some careful consideration, it can be effective to optimize your setup to have much of the work done on the client-side. At minimum you’re going to want to make intelligent use of client-side caching to reduce load on your services. Another valuable pattern is to lazy load media files on your pages. These simple but effective optimizations can make a big difference on constrained networks.
Network optimization
Since the optimal strategy is to divide tasks between at least two machines, it makes sense to make use of tools like SSH tunnels and VPNs to provide a secure ‘backbone’ for them to communicate. It can be useful to use a cheap VPS to act as the public cache/mirror for your sites & services rather than just purchasing a tunnel to the Internet directly. Ultimately it will depend on your bandwidth and latency as well as the nature and volume of media you’re sharing. The cool thing is that with a deliberately distributed setup, you can make your systems available not only for the ‘clearnet’ but darknets or even nearby networks as well. With enough flexibility the options are truly endless.
Hope this helps!
I am always excited to see more people get into self-hosting and I’m hoping that people find this helpful. In an ideal world, the web would be small and filled with ordinary people expressing themselves easily and seamlessly. I believe that achieving that dream requires for there to be more resources and tools for people to not just self-host but self-host well and effectively. If nothing else I hope that this minor overview can be a small contribution towards that.
I’ve really just scratched the surface of this topic, but there is certainly more to cover.
GREAT Piece Gabriel.
Do you run your instance on a VPS or your own "bare metal" machine? What would you estimate the costs to be for a project such as this:
https://substack.com/@michaelginsburg/note/c-185721292