PeerTube
Well obviously… But as a German I must say there is no possibly to use PeerTube in any legally save way in Germany.
That is not the fault of PeerTube of course it’s the fault of copyright mafia and German politics. Since PeerTube uses P2P to distribute load among all (which is extremely clever and should definitely not change), German law makes you responsible for anything you upload even if it’s in a P2P manner. So if you just accidentally clicked on a video containing Copyright protected Material or illegal content, you are seen as contributor of this content with all consequences.
So imagine going to jail because you clicked the wrong video… This is as stupid as it sounds and needs to change. Sadly German public is not carrying about this enough. I hope PeerTube will become more popular one day so that people are confronted to this insane law more frequently.
Wait, I thought that PeerTube was peer to peer in the sense that the various PeerTube server instances were peers, and not the users clicking and watching videos were peers. Am I mistaken? It seems that in order for the users to peer, they would need to either install a client program that would do that, or make some heavy browser security approvals. If it’s the servers that are peering, then this law shouldn’t apply to the users.
Look up WebRTC
As others have pointed out the clear option is PeerTube. The fascinating thing about PeerTube right now is that the frontend experience actually seems to be best on other services. This is primarily because discoverability between instances is fairly poor due to both federation mechanics and due to the nature of bootstrapping social. Because Lemmy and Mastodon feature their own human driven mechanisms for content discovery this problem is largely solved so long as you are browsing through another platform (the same mechanisms do not seem to transfer well to a youtube like frontend, although nobody has tried yet). Comments made on Lemmy and Mastodon will also federate back to PeerTube so you’re not segregated based on what service you follow from.
You can subscribe to channels from both Lemmy and Mastodon. Check out some popular channels:
!veronicaexplains_channel@tilvids.com
!letstalkphilosophy_channel@tilvids.com
!alliterative_channel@tilvids.com
!kde@tube.kockatoo.org
!lofiorchestra@makertube.net
!random_retro@makertube.netNOTES:
- All of the above are channels. On Lemmy you can only subscribe to channels while on Mastodon you can subscribe to both channels and users. This is important as some videos get federated under the channels and some under the users. I believe this is up to the individual creator.
- Whitelist only is still fairly popular among PeerTube instances so you may not be able to access all creators from your Lemmy instance.
- Federation does not backfill so if the channels appear blank don’t panic. It will fill in with future videos.
- If you follow these channels from Mastodon and then put them in a list you have a feed that is analogous to Youtube’s subscribed page
