(Note: I thought I published this one back in July! I guess not… it was sitting in the “Drafts” folder. So here ya go!)
I mentioned I recently got a 360 camera and I’ve been having some fun recording videos of my bike rides.
There’s a playlist called: Bike Riding.
It’s on YouTube. Sigh… What!? Not on Peertube!?
Okay, so what is Peertube? Check out joinpeertube.org. (And maybe read the docs.)
PeerTube is a federated video platform. Like Mastodon is for short form posting. (See there used to be a web site called “Twitter” but it’s a Nazi site now…)
See peertube.tv, but also peer.tube… and maybe tilvids.com, and makertube.net, and even urbanists.video.
PeerTube is clearly a good alternative to Corporate Video Platforms like YouTube. Viva La Federation!
But also… things cost money. I thought about using a PeerTube server for my videos, but a few things made me have pause.
I have absolutely no intention of “monetizing my content”. I don’t want to make money from these videos. I just want a place to store, share, and publish them. That said, hosting videos (especially long & large videos) does cost money.
A 6 minute video is about 1 gigabyte in size. I could easily make videos much longer, multiple times per week. That’s a lot of disk space…
If I were to use PeerTube I would feel guilty unless I started donating each month. But if I upload to YouTube I never feel guilty about chewing up their disk space or bandwidth. Fuck ’em!
YouTube takes advantages of users but am I taking advantage of them in this case? Do I get the better end of the deal? Free video hosting for me, right?
Maybe I am overthinking this… or thinking about it wrong? Maybe I should put all these videos on urbanists.video, and help build an alternative to YouTube.
Like I said, I don’t care if these videos get any views, I don’t want to make money with them… maybe I do want to try to build community, built an alternative, and help people avoid using YouTube.
Maybe I should move to PeerTube.