PeerTube news!

This version comes with a small technical challenge that we're proud to have overcome! This new feature won't be as visible as a graphical change, but it will make hosting a PeerTube platform easier, more resilient and cheaper.

Let's see what it's all about :)

This is a resolution: video transcoding

Video transcoding is the process of converting a video file into different formats that can be played on different devices. In simple terms, it takes your video file (for example, mp4) and converts it into different formats that can be read by web browsers, applications, etc. Transcoding is done when a video is uploaded to the PeerTube instance, during live broadcasts or when editing your video with the PeerTube Studio.

In addition to the formats, transcoding allows you to have different video qualities (from pixel mush to the possibility of seeing an ant when zooming in on a panorama). These are the famous '720p', '1080p' and so on.

The problem is that transcoding 4k videos of kittens requires a lot of server computing resources (called "CPU"). Even a small kitten. And big CPUs mean big prices. It's a shame to have to rent a more powerful server just to transcode faster one big video a month.

If only we had a solution... 🤔

This is an evolution: remote transcoding

The solution we propose: remote transcoding! The idea is to let the servers of the PeerTube platform broadcast the videos, by having the ability to run transcoding tasks on other computers (for example, remote servers, that could be dedicated to the task, that could be shared, etc.). You can find out how to do this in the documentation.

We explain here how to set up one of these remote servers by installing a "PeerTube runner" on it. You can even turn your personal computer into a runner using command lines, just long enough to transcode your videos! Yes, it is THAT flexible!

For the more tech-savvy among us, this feature was inspired by Gitlab runners for their architecture and BOINC for their ease of use. This is one of the strengths of free-libre softwares: rather than reinventing the wheel, we take inspiration from the work of those who were there before and build a new brick for those who come after us!

You can find out more in our documentation.

You can see how it's done on this video and also learn more from this video of Jeena (who shares his chronicles as a PeerTube platform administrator on his PeerTube instance, of course) presenting how remote transcoding works.

This is a (French) revolution

With the federation of video catalogues, the peer-to-peer broadcasting in the event of a video's success, the redundancy of videos for PeerTube platforms that want to help each other, the possibility of storing videos on a dedicated server... PeerTube has always aimed to democratize online video hosting and distribution.

Remote transcoding takes a step further by encouraging the pooling of CPU-intensive tasks and (we hope) encouraging communities to work together. From now on, a PeerTube platform can be hosted on very low-power (and therefore low-cost) servers.

In addition, this new feature has been designed to, in the future, enable other CPU-intensive tasks to be performed remotely (such as audio-to-text video transcription).

A technical feature like remote transcoding isn't exactly sexy. These developments are not the easiest to fund, especially through donations. We'd like to thank NLnet for supporting us and giving us access to NGI0's funding programs that funded this feature!

These are improvements

In addition to remote transcoding, 5.2 includes a number of improvements:

• RSS feeds for podcasts: a first building block has been developed to allow your PeerTube content to be integrated into podcast players!
• Mouse-free navigation: if you like to navigate using only the keyboard, you'll love some improvements!
• The Studio feature (introduced in version 4.2), which allows you to edit an uploaded video, has finally been documented (even though it is incredibly simple)!
• Define the visibility of a replay: it is now possible to define a different visibility for a replay than for a live. This means you can make a live public, but make the replay private (or vice versa, or whatever)! This feature was developed by Wicklow, a PeerTube development intern: thanks to him!
  

  

This is a call for donations

Remote transcoding is brand new: we need your feedback on how to improve it (and you can also just tell us you like it). The best place to do this is our forum).

What's next? PeerTube is on its way to v6, towards the end of the year. In this version you'll be able to password protect videos (thanks to Wicklow!), get a preview thumbnail by hovering over the playback bar, add chapters to your video and even upload a new version of your video. In short, we've got a lot of work to do!

Do you want to help us improve PeerTube? You can do so by contributing to the software, sharing this information and (if you can afford it) making a donation to our not-for-proft, Framasoft.

Thanks in advance for your support!

Framasoft

Version 5.1 of PeerTube has been released! On the menu: moderation of account creation, a button to resume live broadcasting, improved management of external authentication plugins... and other useful developments. Let's take a tour of the new features!

Moderated account creation requests

First new feature in this minor release: account creation requests can now be validated a priori by administrators.

When this feature is enabled and a person registers on an instance, they will have to fill in a field (such as "Why do I want to create an account on this platform?") and then wait for their registration to be validated before they can access their account.

The moderators see the different requests and can accept or reject them.

An email is sent directly to the user when the request is processed. The account is automatically created when the request is approved.

In this way, we hope to allow different instances to reopen their registrations without risking potential waves of spam.

New "Resume Live" button

A "resume live" button has been added to the player! The button is red when the player is synchronized with the current live stream and grey when it is not. A single click to resynchronise the live stream is quite handy!

Improved management of external authentication plugins

Developers will be able to take advantage of an improvement to the API for external authentication plugins: define a quota for users, update users or implement an automatic redirect to the external service when a session expires. These improvements were financed by the Department of Public Education (DIP) of the State of Geneva. Thanks!

And more...

This version has seen various improvements to the accessibility of the interface, as well as performance improvements (optimized rendering of the home page editor and more efficient comment retrieval).

Another development worth mentioning is the arrival of two new languages: Icelandic and Ukrainian. Thanks to the contributors for these translations!

We have also fixed many bugs reported by the community. We are now up to more than 4000 tickets processed since the beginning of the PeerTube project, and that seems huge! This time spent improving, maintaining and supporting the software is funded directly by you, through your donations. Thank you very much!

We hope you find this new version useful and we thank again all PeerTube contributors!

Framasoft

We (Framasoft, a small not-for-profit association!) are proud to present our roadmap for the developments and side projects we have planned for PeerTube in 2023. This roadmap combines both the progress we wanted to make to the software and the proposals you have sent us over the last few months.

It is important to note that we are dedicating only one developer to PeerTube (yes, only one!), PeerTube being one of more than fifty projects led by our association.

End of February: PeerTube 5.1

We plan to release version 5.1 at the end of February. Here are the new features we are planning to release:

• Easier management of account registrations (with administrator approval)
• Developers will be able to take advantage of an improved API for external authentication plugins (setting a quota, updating the user, etc.)
• Optimize retrieval of video comments
• Adding a Resume Live button in the video player
• Improvements and bug fixes (including bugs found during the end of December load test, in French)

May 2023: PeerTube 5.2

This May we plan to release PeerTube 5.2, which will feature remote transcoding (feature that received many votes!). This will reduce the power required for a PeerTube server by delegating power consuming tasks to external machines.
Initially this will only be for hosted videos, but will be designed to be able to evolve (for livestreams for example). Quite a technical challenge ahead!

November-December 2023: PeerTube v6

We plan to release the next major version of PeerTube at the end of the year, and the new features are all inspired by your suggestions on our feedback tool Let's Improve PeerTube. You will find:

• Adding chapters to videos
• Displaying a preview thumbnail in the progress bar
• Protecting videos with a password/token
• The possibility to upload a new version of your video

But also...

At the beginning of this year, we welcome Wicklow in the team, for a 6 months internship. This is an opportunity to support the PeerTube developer and to familiarize more people with the code base of the software.

We will also of course continue to fix bugs, clean up the code and improve the architecture of the software and support external and community development, such as the Live-Chat plugin.

Finally, we will work on content curation for our Peer.tube showcase platform (yes, with a dot in the middle!), to allow us to present a gateway to PeerTube, which looks like Framasoft.

PeerTube, like all our projects, is mainly funded by donations to our association. On this roadmap, only the remote transcoding feature of v5.2 is already funded, thanks to a donation from the NLnet foundation.

Do you want to help us achieve this roadmap? You can support us by contributing to PeerTube, by sharing this information and (if you can afford it) by making a donation to Framasoft.

Thank you in advance for your support!
Framasoft

We, Framasoft, have been developing the PeerTube software for 5+ years.

Framasoft is a French non-profit of 38 members (10 employees, 28 volunteers), PeerTube is one of our 50+ projects, and we do all this work with only one developer (who is not event full time on PeerTube). Please note that maybe 2 or 3 among us understand, more or less fluently, German.

On dec. 19th, a journalist from Tagesspiegel Background informed us that a study by German researchers on the use of PeerTube by right-wing extremists was about to be published. He asked us 3 questions about the scope of the problem and what could be done, and we answered him that day.

On dec. 20th, we have been able to get this study (it is available online here) and translate it. This is why it took us time to write and publish a collective statement.

First of all, we would like to thank the researchers of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue for their work. The more we will gain knowledge of how disinformation manipulators and right-wing extremists use PeerTube, the more the PeerTube communities will learn how to effectively protect themselves from such content.

Shared knowledge is shared power.

PeerTube says no to fascists and conspiracy manipulators

Let's be crystal clear: Framasoft's values are fundamentally opposed to right-wing extremism. This is also true for conspiratorial manipulations that lead to hurting and killing people (here is our recently published manifest stating our core values - Warning: may be poorly translated from French).

We agree with the results of the study. In our experience, right-wing extremists represent a very, very small share of the PeerTube federation (called the "vidiverse"), but they know how to be very loud, energy consuming trolls.

We should not ignore the fact that, in 2022, if any society is producing fascist and Nazi groups, it is not because of technology, but because of a deeper problem, which is mainly related to the complacency of some governments with extreme right-wing ideas. Nevertheless, it is also true that some technical devices that work on the basis of audience measurement and advertising are the first to disseminate extremist ideas. The Fediverse does not work like that, but we should work to keep it healthy.

PeerTube is free software, we cannot prevent these people from using it. Germany, France and most modern democracies have already introduced laws that can lead Justice to condemn PeerTube administrators who knowingly and willingly host hateful and Nazi content.

What we can do (and have been doing and are willing to continue) is giving PeerTube communities the tools to moderate, protect themselves from and ostracize right-wing extremists and harmful PeerTube platforms.

We "moderate" (read: ban) fascist content from any tool we manage. Thus, we regularly clean the instance index. For example we removed from the index problematic instances, several of which are German. This does not prevent these instances from existing, but at least we try to keep the index healthy.

We need the communities to step up

The study clearly states it: one of the major solutions to such content relies in empowering the communities.

PeerTube-isolation is a blocklist that is maintained in total independence from us. Installing their plugin on your PeerTube platform can help you make sure you won't federate with dangerous content.

We encourage anyone who wants to help to contribute to the PeerTube-Isolation community work. We automatically pull out the instances they block from the index that feeds SepiaSearch, our PeerTube Search Engine.

Our goal is to keep harmful and hateful content isolated in their own federation bubble, where they can be as loud as they want. Thus they won't contaminate others with their dangerous filth. Thus they'll understand they are not welcomed in the PeerTube vidiverse, and they won't have any interest trying to invest it.

In addition, we are always exploring new ways to help PeerTube communities and administrators moderate hate speech and harmful content. If you can think of a feature we could add to PeerTube to help isolating such filth, please share it on Let's Improve PeerTube.

A call to (help) PeerTube instance administrators

That being said, a tool can only do so much.

Instance administrators need help, because they have several tasks to fulfill: system administration (backup, updates, etc.), content curation (do I want to host edutainment videos? original fictions? videos by Queer creators?), federation policies (which platforms do I want mine to follow? which follows do I accept?), moderation policies (and moderation can be needed in the federation choices, content hosted, comments, etc.)

It is a very complex job, and usually you should not to be alone to complete it. It is a crucial job, though. We need instance administrators to have rules about the platform they federate with, so they can enforce their own policies and - hopefully- stop the dissemination of harmful and dangerous content. But it is a lot of work, so it requires a lot of help.

If you want to help, try to join a PeerTube administration team. Offer them help. Report problematic content. If public organizations can provide training, help, and tools, it can always be useful ! But PeerTube is a Commons: we cannot address such an issue unless we work together as a (diverse and plural) community.

Shared knowledge is shared power

The PeerTube communities sure need more shared knowledge on right-wing extremists, their content, their methods, their arguments & fallacies, and how to protect ourselves from it.

But we also need more people helping and taking charge, together, as communities, because we are very invested in keeping PeerTube ecosystem healthy.

🎉 PeerTube v5 is now available 🎉.

For this occasion, we have published a blog post summing up a year of hard work and improvements on the PeerTube ecosystem.

It also presents the new features of PeerTube v5, and what we feel we might work on next year.

• Learn all about those empowering new features on our blog;
• See the code of the V5 by yourself;
• Publish your ideas for PeerTube V6 on Let’s Improve PeerTube (and vote for the ones you’re excited about)
• Support PeerTube by supporting Framasoft, and find out about all our actions.

We would like to thank every person who has contributed to the PeerTube ecosystem throughout the year: y'all are amazing! This year, some features have been directly funded by PeerTube-supporting organizations (see our blogpost). Put together, their contributions represent a small half of our annual budget dedicated to PeerTube (which we estimate at 70 000 €). The other part comes from Framasoft’s budget, i.e. from the donations that our non profit receives from its mainly French-speaking community. To us, it seems almost unfair that it is mainly French speakers who finance a tool that has a truly international scope… So we need your help. Spread the word about our donation campaign around you, especially outside the French-speaking world.

If you want to help us fund our work in 2023 on PeerTube v6 and many other projects, please consider supporting Framasoft, share the address support.framasoft.org on your PeerTube platforms, in your communities that benefit from this alternative.

We hope you will enjoy PeerTube v5,
Framasoft

Hello,

First of all, PeerTube v5 is on its way, as we have just published a release candidate version that will be tested out in the next few weeks. We can't wait to present you the improvements and new features!

In the meantime, we have just published a brand new redesign of JoinPeerTube. It took a lot of work to simplify this website. Our intention is to make it a welcoming tool, a kind of gateway into the PeerTube universe for everyone, especially for non-tech savvy people.

• Get a tour of this new JoinPeerTube (backstage infos included) on our blog;
• Visit the brand new JoinPeertube.org (and share it around you!);
• Support PeerTube by supporting Framasoft (that's us!), and all our actions.

We really hope this new website will help content creators and content enjoyers get a better grip on what PeerTube is and is not, and how to get started.

We, at Framasoft, are a small French non-profit that is exclusively funded by donations (87% of our budget being grassroots donations). We don't really know how to PR and market, especially in English. So most of our funding (that finances PeerTube's development, among other things) comes from the French-speaking audience.

Today, we have reached 27% of our 2022 donation campaign goals. We need you to help us spread the word in the non-French-speaking community that all our projects need support! If you want to help us fund PeerTube and many other projects in 2023, please consider supporting Framasoft.

We hope you will enjoy and share this new Joinpeertube.org,
Framasoft

Bonjour everyone!

We need your help to share and contribute to a new feedback tool: Ideas.joinpeertube.org.

Five years of building the ecosystem of PeerTube

By the end of 2022, PeerTube will be five years in the making! In the last four years, with only one (not even full time!) paid developer, we got:

• From a POC to a fully operative federated video platform with p2p broadcasting, complete with subtitles, redundancy, video import, search tools and localization (PeerTube v1, oct. 2018)
• Notifications, playlists, a plugin system, moderation tools, federation tools, a better video player, a presentation website and an instances index (PeerTube v2, nov. 2019)
• Federated research tool (and a search engine), more moderation tools, lots of code improvement, UX revamping, and last but not least: p2p livestream (PeerTube v3, jan. 2021)
• Improved transcoding, channels and instances homepage customization, improved research, an even better video player, filtering videos on pages, advance administration and moderation tools, new video management tool, and a big code cleaning session (PeerTube v4, dec. 2021)

All of this, in 4 years, with only one employed developer, and financed through donations (please consider supporting us at Framasoft!).

This year has already brought many improvements, and we know what we want to do for the v5 by the end of 2022, but... what next?

Ideas for PeerTube: let's get non-tech-savvy people's feedback

Until now, developers, admins and tech-savvy people could suggest improvements and new features for PeerTube by publishing and commenting issues in the git repository.

Nowadays, PeerTube is gaining momentum and users. It is getting out of the "experts" bubble, and that's a great opportunity. So we need to know what content creators, video-lovers and non-tech-savvy people miss from PeerTube, what changes or new experiences they would like to get.

We need more diverse feedback, so we want to propose a user-friendly feedback tool:

Here is our feedback tool: Ideas.Joinpeertube.org.

• If you know what would improve your PeerTube experience, please add an idea.
• If you see anything in there that catches your eye, please vote for it.
• If you know people who would like more from PeerTube, please share this feedback tool.

We're but a small non-profit

We had to compromise: Ideas.Joinpeertube.org will only be in English, as we don't have enough humans, talents and energy to maintain a multi-languages feedback tool.

Because at Framasoft (that's the name of our association!), we still are a small French non-profit (10 employees, 36 members) funded through donations. PeerTube is one of our 50+ projects (yes, it's a big one, but still one among many).

We need to collect feedback not only for ourselves, but for everyone who would like to contribute to PeerTube ecosystem (core code, plugins, documentation, indexes, moderation lists, etc.).

By displaying to the world what the PeerTube community wants from PeerTube, we will be able (late 2022 - early 2023) to choose what to add to the roadmap for v6, as long as it's within what we are able and willing to do.

But we also hope that other parties will be interested in contributing to PeerTube by developing awaited and upvoted ideas.

Contribute and share!

Now this tool is in your hands. We trust you will contribute by sharing ideas to improve PeerTube, voting for the ideas you like and sharing this tool to concerned people around you.

As we don't have (and can't afford, and don't want) big marketing tools and communication campaigns, the success of this tool (and of PeerTube) lays exclusively in your hands. We know those are capable hands.

Thanks to all in advance for sharing and caring,
Framasoft