Hi. I am relatively new to PeerTube. It’s an interesting project for self-hosting video platforms. Especially the remote runners feature for transcoding videos remotely is a nice feature. I am now running a PeerTube instance myself on my own server at home for about a month or so, but as a “standalone” instance. However I seem not to understand the purpose of the federation feature at all, so I hope someone can enlighten me please.
As far as I see, a PeerTube instance (let’s call it instance A) can follow another PeerTube instance (instance B). Instance A will then show all own videos and additionally all videos from instance B. But it looks like PeerTube does not make it obviously clear where a video is actually hosted. If a user goes to instance A, then from his point of view it looks like instance A is hosting all videos and all users are registered on instance A - especially from the point of view of 99% of regular users, who never even heard about “PeerTube” and may think that the website is just another video platform. There is no indication, no redirection, nothing. PeerTube is only showing a tiny little info “Origin: [link]” under the video, but clicking on it doesn’t redirect the user to that other PeerTube instance. Instead the user stays on the same website and simply gets an overview of all the user’s videos - again, similar like on YouTube, when you click on someone’s name to go to their channel and get a list of their views, but in case of PeerTube the user stays on the same instance. In fact, I didn’t found a single link allowing a user to go to someone else’s instance.
Is my understanding correct so far or did I horribly missed something? I don’t want to sound pessimistic, but how is that fair? If one huge PeerTube instance lists many videos from multiple other PeerTube instances, then users will have no incentive to go to other websites / PeerTube instances anymore, since they already have all videos in one place, am I right? This one big instance profits from other videos without having the burden to host these videos or pay for the storage or the traffic. The servers who are actually hosting the videos become just faceless data providers, because their videos are remotely integrated into another website’s interface, which pretends to be hosting the foreign videos. If this is how the federation feature works, than it combines all the worst disadvantages, compared to other video platforms, like YouTube (they are also centralizing videos on the internet, but at least they are paying for their own servers and hosting everything themself). Especially for PeerTube, I assume that most PeerTube instances are being operated by schools, companies or mostly normal people at home, who have barely enough resources to host their own instance.
Wouldn’t it be much more fair to simply redirect users to other PeerTube instances, depending on which video they click? For example if a user clicks on instance A’s video, he stays on the same website, but if he clicks on a video which is hosted on instance B, he will be redirected to the website / server of instance B to watch it there.
Sorry, I really do not want to bash on PeerTube. The project itself is great, but I am either missing something here or I really do not see the benefit or purpose of the federation feature as it is implemented currently. Or let me ask it differently: Why should I go to individual PeerTube instances, if I can just stay on the biggest one and watch all videos there? 