I don’t use jellyfin but my general approach is either:

1. Expose it over a VPN only. I usually use Tailscale for this so that I can expose individual machines but you do you
2. Cloudflare tunnel that exposes a single port on a single internal machine to a subdomain I own

There are obviously ways to do this all on your own but… if you are asking this question you probably want to use one of those to roll it. Because you can leave yourself ridiculously vulnerable if you do it yourself.

You uh… don’t need to tell people stuff like that.

I mean… I have seen some REALLY REALLY stupid drivers so I could totally see multiple people thinking they found a short cut or not realizing the road they are supposed to be on is 20 feet to the left and there is a reason their phone is losing its shit all while their suspension is getting destroyed.

But yeah. It is the standard tesla corp MO. They detect a dangerous situation and disable all the “self driving”. Obviously because it is up to the driver to handle it and not because they want the legal protection to say it wasn’t their fault.

As if I weren’t already on enough watch lists:

Consumer drones aren’t conducive to “a 9-11”. They just can’t carry enough explosives. A terrorist attack using drones will be isolated attacks on public gatherings and likely not even put a dent in the M-4 tax we pay every fucking day.

Also: Defense against drones actually isn’t all that hard from a military and hardpoint standpoint and mostly uses existing tech. The same mic arrays that installations use to triangulate gunfire? Picking up drone motors is of comparable difficulty and gives a pretty fast angle to point the baby phalanx (or net guns) at. Would be HORRIBLE in an area dense with civilians but would protect anything that “we” actually care about (military resources and whichever politicians trump likes this week). Chaining the net gun/tiny gatling gun to the sensors with a human in the loop so it doesn’t violate any treaties covers that.

The reason they are so ridiculously effective in Ukraine are because Russians have horrifically bad opsec and tend to leave armored vehicle hatches open (even at bases) and have sprawling unfortified trench lines that are only designed to keep infantry out.

I think the basic issue is that you seem to have the maximalist goal of wanting PeerTube to be at similar numbers to YouTube, and missing that, you don’t see anyone finding worth in it - so I will argue against that point, hoping I did not misread you there.

No, my point is that there is no reason for a Content Creator to actually put effort into Peertube (or even the youtube alternatives that they aren’t co-owners of). And there is no path toward that.

For the same reason many thousands of people can download 4k movies and shows concurrently via torrents with just a few dedicated seedboxes

People run seedboxes because they get something out of it: Private tracker access.

You apparently are happy to donate your bandwidth. Good for you. I suspect you would think otherwise when a video “goes viral” and you suddenly get a call from your ISP telling you they have decided you are hosting a business and that you need to pay for a different internet plan. PLENTY of people learned this the fun way back in the 90s/00s.

The real costly part is storage, bandwidth is surprisingly affordable considering the project we are talking about

In the context of file hosting, “bandwidth” is usually used as a catch all for both the raw bandwidth of a single node AND the requirements of a CDN. Otherwise that server gets hugged to death, everyone is angry, blah blah blah. Again, this is a lesson we learned in the 00s.

he influx in audience a “big creator” could mean to an instance, as well as with it potential support in donations both directly and indirecty, could very well outweigh the addional costs

Ah, so now content creators are working specifically to support Peertube. Which means their effective operating costs have just skyrocketed because now they are paying for their own hosting AND paying for all the time and materials to make the video in the first place.

Which is WHY Youtube became so massive. Paying for your own hosting is REALLY expensive and tears into already thin margins for the vast majority of Content Creators.

I’m assuming I missed a valid scandal here that led to closing of an instance, but - Lemmy (and PieFed, and mBin) is very much alive and we are discussing on i

This board is on the dot world instance. Back when Luigi allegedly popped that guy, dot world was leading the charge in terms of complete nonsense CYAs to protect the instance from getting a knock from the FBI equivalent. Similarly, I have my account on the dot zip instance and we have very weird rules regarding the UK because of their data privacy laws.

Or, to be an old again: Every even semi-public FTP server goes the same way. Everything is great. Then you suddenly realize that porn has appeared out of nowhere. And, best case scenario, it is the kind of porn that gets people arrested (because it can get SO much worse…). The same issue came up with file sharing back in the day. And it is why a lot of lemmy/mastodon instances have very specific rules regarding image hosting and NSFW content.

It is great you have had a good experience. Others won’t and will rapidly realize just what they are doinating their bandwidth to.

And audience-wise, it already is a fitting niche for people you disregarded

Great. I didn’t “disregard” anyone. But you have to understand that You Don’t Matter. Because all those things that you (and I) hate about modern video content? That is done to make money.

Google are constantly running analytics to figure out what length of video is most profitable for them in terms of storage, bandwidth, and monetizability. Content Creators are constantly figuring out what Google wants to get a video promoted to the front page AND what will make people not only click that video on the front page but also keep watching so that they can get the metrics that get them those sponsorships.

And its great that you and the people who like Peertube don’t care about that. But that gets back to the same exact point I have been making the entire time: if creating content for a platform can’t even meaningfully offset the cost of creating that content in the first place, the VAST majority of people won’t and you are basically left with the independently wealthy people.

Already mentioned it elsewhere in the thread but this is a story as old as history itself. Creating art costs money. Canvas and paint costs money. Having the time to stay another day to look at that landscape for just a bit longer costs money.

Having a good camera and mic costs money. Having the newest fanciest cell phone with the auto stabilizer so you don’t need a rig costs money. Having the time to learn and use that video editing software costs money. Having the time to keep your head clear enough to really do a solid edit costs money.

And same with the Maker Youtube style content or even the DIY content. Having that second CO2 canister to do another run? Or even just having a piece of wood and a clamp so you can show how that dishwasher airgap actually works without needing to try to angle a camera into a tight corner.

Hell… being able to Go To The Zoo on a less popular day? Guess what that costs?

And taht is the fundamental issue. Yes, there will be people who make content and some of it will be genuinely awesome. But there is also a pretty massive ceiling that will basically mean only independently wealthy people have the time and resources to do a “good video”. And… we kind of actually saw that in the early days of youtube where a LOT of the old hats are from rich families or have cash from their startup being bought and so forth.

What peertube (and basically all the youtube alternatives) lack is any way to move on from that.

To reiterate and expand: The life cycle of a successful youtuber (or twitch streamer or whatever) is:

1. Create content at severe personal cost
2. Qualify for ad revenue. Offset some of that cost but still require a day job. Gauge popularity based on ad revenue
3. Qualify for a referral link for online retailers. Actually make genuinely good money that can potentially lead to this becoming a full time job. Well, not so much after the honey nonsense is likely going to make all this go away but…
4. Qualify for sponsorships at decent rates. THIS is where things can reasonably become a full time job and you can start making true Art rather than fitting a build in between your normal job
5. Get popular enough that you can get enough of a following that people actually WILL “just put some money in the tip jar”

Peertube et al only really exist starting on step 4 (because you can bet most instance owners would strip or hijack those referral links…). And… no company people will want to deal with is going to be sponsoring content that goes to a fraction of the audience that is also predisposed to consider any form of marketing or capitalism a personal insult.

Which basically leaves 5. Which… we are already seeing. linus media group LOVES to pretend Floatplane (which might actually use Peertube under the hood, I forget) is some mega successful business. But he still does youtube content front and center and Floatplane mostly exists for him to profit off a few other youtubers and to encourage his rabid fanbase to give him more money. And there will likely be other creators who decide to “support Peertube” while still primarily making Youtube content. And… they will just crash the ecosystem while getting nerd/FOSS cred.

Yes. Discoverability is the real key. Which also is not at all addressed on peertube and, as I mentioned above, mostly still comes from youtube for the creators who have branched out to other platforms.

A Michael Reeves can get away with just having a kofi and making massive bank because of how big he has gotten… from youtube. Whereas even a Not An Engineer has a channel that lives or dies by collabs and shoutouts from other youtubers (I do suspect he has an independent source of income though).

Also… you put even Not An Engineer on your peertube instance and he is going to consume a disproportionate amount of bandwidth. Let alone a Michael Reeves who would crash the entire fediverse during his annual video.

What you are describing is “if you build it, they will come”. Which is patently false. Ad revenue gets worse and worse every year but it usually is essential to even offsetting parts and labor for a video for smaller creators. I think it was Gamers Nexus that discussed the different tiers of monetization in the context of the honey scandal, but the basic idea is that ads are what let you know if a channel has any legs and referral links are what keep you alive until you are big enough for a sponsor to care.

Which… is also the issue. The kind of sponsors who would fund a peertube video (and just look around at how fediverse folk view ANY form of monetization of the content they consume…) are going to be more bluechew than not, if you catch my drift. And they aren’t going to pay much.

Which gets back to: Peertube as a concept is great for official tutorials and MAYBE blog posts by “nobodies”. Why would anyone go out of their way to join in decentralized hosting of that? And while it is conceptually a great way to “can’t stop the signal” an important video… it either rapidly becomes liveleaks or we see the same thing that happened with Lemmy where the instance owners get a phone call from their local FBI equivalent and rapidly say “I don’t want that smoke”.

But Peertube as something people would even want to browse or create Content for? I have yet to see any path toward that that isn’t “Well, people really love the ideologies of FOSS so they’ll do it out of the goodness of their heart”

And good for you.

But it is the fundamental issue with art. Art needs funding whether that is a patron or a tip jar or whatever. Canvas and paint costs money. Being able to spend an extra afternoon looking at a landscape costs money. Having time to edit and revise your script costs money. And so forth.

And same for youtube. It is the difference between being able to “get it right” versus just using the footage you have and “making it work”. Hell, I love videos that explain how to do basic repairs that I should have learned long ago. And having the money to set up a free standing pipe or cut a bathtub spout in half works a lot better than trying to hold a camera to record yourself replacing a dishwasher airgap and not actually capturing where the clips were.

The issue with “Algorithms” is that you need a lot of data to generate recommendations… which tends to mean centralized (or a LOT of data scraping).

Which is why stuff like Nebula and Floatplane and Ian McCollum’s latest “apolitical” side hustle all are still 100% dependent on Youtube. Hell… I actually still subscribe to Legal Eagle and NileRed on Youtube so that I know when they have a new Nebula video.

And just to be clear: None of the above (including Peertube in general) is competing with Youtube. Well, Floatplane says it is but that is because linus sebastien is a dipshit con man. But it still speaks to the fundamental issue of where Content comes from and what it takes to have the time and resources to do a “good” video.

The problem is that it is just a fundamentally un-profitable platform for creators. Ads don’t work (… period but also) because of the decentralized nature of it. Any instance/frontend that added ads would be shunned in favor of those who don’t. And any video hosted only on a single “instance” would rapidly cost way too much if it ever became moderately popular.

Which means there is no reason for Content Creators to… care. So the best it can ever get is “early youtube”. And people SAY they want early youtube videos but everyone is deeply spoiled by the difference between a video that was made in a week of after work tweaking versus weeks of full time planning and editing.

Which is why peertube in general is one of the “fediverse” products that… I feel really weird about. I forget if Floatplane/Weapons of Guntube/whatever use it or something they rolled themselves, but this really feels like the kind of software project that has the end state of getting “adopted” by a corporation and the major devs hired on as consultants.

Like, twitter (mastodon), reddit (lemmy), and even instagram (??) make sense to me and are very conducive to self hosting since… they are message boards and that is how we used to roll. But video is expensive and hard AND needs incentives to create “good” content for it.

And if it sticks, good. But it still has the fundamental problem of needing to re-train all your existing employees AND train new staff who haven’t been brought up in that system.

Its on a completely different scale, but plenty of tech youtubers have done the “Let’s get rid of all the Adobe in my life”. Some succeed. Most tend to come down on some variation of “I can do about 99% of what I used to do in these two or three tools. And these ten things are actually genuinely easier and more performant. But we can’t take a month off making videos to get all of our editors up to speed. And this also removes our ability to contract out an edit to someone with the industry standard workflow”. And from my professional experience in different fields, that is true. Hiring someone and then spending a week or a month so they can use YOUR tools becomes a huge burden in not too long of a time.

I really hope Germany pulls it off this time and more governments follow. But I also remember all the other times I have read this story.

I want to say various cities/regions in Germany make statements like this every few years? And they usually end up rolling back when it becomes clear the cost to retrain both existing staff and new staff isn’t worth it.

That said: This gets the national security bump so maybe it will stick. Also nobody on the planet likes to use Teams.

I want to say LevelOneTechs reviewed/discussed a lot of eGPUs a couple years back when they were more of a thing?

If you are capable of setting up your own personal VPN, you don’t need Tailscale. You still may want to use it though, depending on how much of a novelty Network Fun is for you in your spare time.

For me, the main advantage to Tailscale et al is that it is on a per device basis. So I can access my SMB shares or Frigate setup remotely while still keeping the rest of my internal network isolated( to the degree I trust the software and network setup). You CAN accomplish that with some fancy firewall rules and vlanning but… yeah.

In fairness, this is a dot ml board so 404 might get banned for completely different reasons.

… Have you tried? Been a minute since I signed up for my free “account” but I want to say the only requirement was that the email is a real one because you’ll be sent an auth link whenever you login. No identification beyond that unless I choose to pay.

So… if you are truly concerned then use a VPN and a free email service every time you want to read this or any other independent media sites that use the same model?

You know what an even bigger barrier is? Not existing.

Independent journalism is good. 404 is REALLY good (it comes out of all the best parts of Vice’s tech reporting). They have a very small barrier that basically exists solely to fight bots as a mixture of reducing traffic load (keeping costs down) and encouraging people to actually consider supporting said independent journalism.

Instead we have chucklefucks immediately wanting to remove that paywall or outright accusing them of abusing SEO and data scraping and all that. And these are the same people who will then get mad when EVERYTHING is AI slop.

And this ties in directly to what right wingers want in terms of making the populace even stupider and more uninformed.

This is literally why these sites have the free paywall. Some get bypased. In this case, I suspect 404 gave archive dot org access because they rely so heavily on that site for researching articles.

But. Regardless: if you think a journalism outlet is so evil and are scamming everyone… Maybe just ignore them because you clearly don’t think they are worth your time.

Also: republican love people like you who do everything possible to attack independent journalism.

Which is also a wall between bots scraping the articles.

Support independent media.

Because Jellyfin et al are all still very much “open source projects” in terms of UI/UX and it is still “missing” so many features.

For me? The big reasons why I just use plex boil down to:

1. Maybe 80% of the time, I can cache an episode or a movie locally on my tablet when I am going on travel. This is great if I am doing a rewatch of something or don’t super care about The Experience and just want to watch the next few episodes of a show in the evening. With Plex, this is trivial. With SOME of the third party jellyfin apps, this can be sort of worked around but then becomes a hassle to sync watch statistics (which episodes were watched or even where I left off because a buddy wanted to go out for drinks).
2. Remote watching is similarly a mess. Plex has pretty okay-good systems to treat my home server as a “cloud” resource with a single forwarded port. While even that is very questionable security wise, Jellyfin is still “figure it out yourself”. Which can be done with setting up a vpn or using Tailscale but adds additional complexities.
3. Plenty of other “quirks” along similar lines

My personal opinion? For something that only “tech savvy” people are using more or less locally, Jellyfin is fine. For something that “just works”? There is no competition with Plex. And considering how many of the Jellyfin workarounds end up being “just download a copy of the file locally and watch it in VLC”… why would I use Jellyfin at all in that case when I could otherwise just mount a samba share or use Kodi (that is the latest incarnation of XBMC or whatever the samba share frontend we all used to watch porn on our playstations was, right?).

To be clear. I check in on Jellyfin probably every other year at this point? I WANT an alternative to Plex. But… Jellyfin ain’t it.

Which… is basically worthless because of just how many cameras there are out there.

A “fun” exercise a couple buddies and I did a few years (… decade?) back was to just use an afternoon of plugging python packages together and scraping county traffic cam feeds to track someone, with their consent, over a few days. And it was ridiculously easy to get their schedule down basically day one and even get a LOT of data on who they were seeing or where they went after parking just based on when and where the car “disappeared”.

And that is just publicly available traffic cameras. Not the giant mess of speed and red light cameras and all the other crap we have in a modern surveillance state.

So even if people are climbing traffic poles and midlining over to the actual boxes to smash them? Those are even less of an issue than normal outages from rain on a windy day.