PeerTube: a YouTube alternative you should look into

YouTube is great. It allows you to upload giant video files to its servers, and it allows anyone in the world to find and view these videos with little delay. This requires inconceivable amounts of resources to pull off in every sense: physical, mental, and financial. Google has many large data centers worldwide that all cost hundreds of millions of dollars each. It needs to design, develop, deploy, and maintain extremely complex software not just to manage all of the servers in each datacenter, but to communicate with other datacenters as well, in such a way that compromises neither speed nor data integrity, in spite of race conditions and other nasty networking realities. And this is all, of course,f ree to use. It's almost a miracle. Imagine what the world would be like if this concept didn't work out. The only thing worse than that would be if it only worked once.

Of course, it only worked once. YouTube is pretty much all we have. You only go to Dailymotion when you want to find pirated TV shows from 2007 and you don't care about poor resolution or random foreign subtitles, and Vimeo asks content creators for quite a lot of money while still failing to provide non-negotiables. The Vimeo free tier only allows you to have 3 videos. Three. And that's not a daily upload limit, it's a lifetime limit. But surely, if you hand over a few more dollars every month, you get unlimited uploads? Nope. The next tier up, which costs $20 per month, gets you 60 videos at most. The highest tier, which costs $108 per month, affords you only 500 videos. I'm in a niche where people often post thousands of short videos. Vimeo is just atrocious compared to YouTube, but we have to remember that YouTube is a miracle, and it only exists because... of course, it isn't free. As people love to say, the price is your privacy. But there are no alternatives, and we've just had to accept this reality.

But there is an alternative. It's called PeerTube. It's like Mastodon, the Twitter alternative that's been on the news, which operates on a federated model. Anyone with some technical knowledge and a stable income can open their own PeerTube instance that others can upload videos to, and these instances all interact with each other. Video storage space, is, of course, limited. And although I haven't experienced it myself, there may be some buffering issues if you're too far from the instance you're using. Also, there aren't too many users; you won't become famous from uploading exclusively on PeerTube. But although PeerTube isn't as tangibly good as YouTube, it's free as in speech in addition to YouTube's free-as-in-beer, and that makes PeerTube its own kind of miracle.

"But if it doesn't have users and isn't as powerful as YouTube, what's the point?" my strawman helpfully asks. But the thing is, while you won't get much out of PeerTube as your only platform, you don't have to make it your only platform. If you're a content creator, then you can use PeerTube as a mirror site for your videos. If any of your videos get taken down on YouTube for whatever reason, then your viewers have a backup that they can seamlessly access while you get things sorted out. And there are people who do use YouTube alternatives exclusively, and shouldn't we do our best to give them some content that they can enjoy? Even if YouTube wins monetarily in the end, we can get one small victory over Google every day by adding another brick to the walls of its alternatives; by contributing to its content library, and by browsing its front page every now and again. For all the reasons I've outlined, I'm going to start uploading my videos to a PeerTube instance.