This month I decided to donate to the Peertube crowfunding campain, in order to make possible a future with a usable alternative to YouTube.
What is Peertube? Let me quote Framasoft:
PeerTube is a software anyone can install on a server, to get a data-friendly video-hosting platform, called a PeerTube Instance. PeerTube combines:
○ A free-libre license, that guarantees code transparency and legally allows you to use and contribute to the software;
○ A federation system, to widen the audience of the videos you host by syncing your instance with the ones you choose to (within the federation);
○ Peer-to-peer streaming, to make streaming resilient and fast when a video goes viral.
This is for sure an interesting project.
Framasoft, a French non-profit advocating for Free Software is sponsoring the main developer, Chocobozzz, in order to allow him to work full time on the project. They already made a campain of few months ago to release the beta version.
As of today, we’re already a beta 9, and Framasoft wants to continue Chocobozz’s contract to get to a V1. For that, they need money from us, so they started a crowdfunding project on KissKissBankBank. I’m writing my blog post a bit late but I’m glad to say the campaign has closed a few minutes ago, exceeding everyone’s expectations. Indeed, Framasoft raised more that 56 000€ out of a 20 000€ goal.
This will allow the dev to do even more work for the V1 and adding more features. All the details are the KKBB page.
As for me, I have already been hosting 2 Peertubes instances for a few months now: peertube.xyz and peertube.moe, but I still donated to allow Chocobozz to do great stuff.
I’m still perplexed about the project, especially the P2P aspect, and I’m not convinced that it will succeed, yet. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, and peertube is probably our best change at it, so here we go.