Self Hosting a Peertube Server
date: 2022-04-15
RetroEdgeTech is publishing videos again! The big deal is that I am self-hosting a Peertube server.
Peertube is part of the Fediverse in that it federates, or talks to other servers. For instance, you can comment on one of my videos without having to have an account on my server, it can be an account on any other Fediverse server. For example, on one of my videos someone from peertube.biz made a comment, even though my server is video.retroedge.tech. In contrast, Youtube does not have a feature like this. You have to have a Youtube account to comment on Youtube videos.
I can also decide what channels to federate or share through my peertube instance. As of right now, I have followed, at the server level, Chris Were and Privacy & Tech Tips. That means that their videos show up when browsing videos on my server, even though they didn't publish the videos on my server, but on another peertube server.
So far, I am really liking how peertube works. There's a lot more to it, for example, it uses a peer to peer tech like bittorrent so that the bandwidth for the video download to the viewer isn't just coming from the originating server.
My son did most of the work to set up peertube on a self-hosted Devuan server, which is on physical hardware that we own. Devuan is one of the Linux distros featured in My Top 4 Distro Recommendations.
My Top 4 Distro Recommendations
The challenge of using Peertube is that people can't as easily find your videos, especially if they only use Youtube when looking for videos to watch. I embrace that challenge! It is my goal to show that it is possible to be a successful video creator without using Youtube.
Sharing and promoting videos is done more naturally, without the influence of tech giants. People can choose to subscribe to my substack email newsletter to be notified about the videos I publish. Or they may follow me on my starnix.network fediverse account and see me share links to my videos there.
It's a way to take back ownership and control of video publishing. I don't have to worry about Youtube taking down one of my videos because I talk about a topic they don't like because the videos are on my server, not Youtube's. Peertube is a way to host and share video that isn't prohibitely expensive. That's the idea anyway. We'll see how well my little server handles a lot of video downloads, but I think the way peertube uses peers to share the load will make a difference.
Go, therefore, and watch some of my videos!
https://video.retroedge.tech/c/retroedgetech/videos
tags: #video #peertube #server