They have a soft limit of 2TB traffic/month, so you're probably not gonna get very far on that platform.
I run a very high traffic site on a hobby budget and my experience is that you're probably not gonna get around shopping for dedicated servers. That is if you want 500TB - 1PB of traffic per month to be in any way affordable. Forget AWS, Heroku and all that stuff. They're roughly twenty times (literally) more expensive.
You could put a CDN in front of the static content (the videos are likely 99% of YouTube's bandwidth), and you could use Heroku for serving the few kilobytes of HTML.
> You could put a CDN in front of the static content
Most are still way more expensive than dedicated server traffic and "fixed price" CDNs like Cloudflare are going to give you the boot if you serve >100TB on their 20 bucks plan and/or a lot of larger files.
Thanks for the suggestion. Currently I am just running the hosting off of a Backblaze B2 account. It's still super cheap right now, if it ever gets expensive I will definitely look into a VPS or Dedicated Server, but hopefully there will be a pretty solid community around the NodeTube source at that point.
You could use WebTorrent which is P2P in the browser, the issue is exposing people's public IP addresses which I really don't like, so I would never run it in prod unless it was a user opt-in, but not a big priority for me at the moment.
Heroku has an ephemeral filesystem I'm not sure how you would really serve content from Heroku. Better is to use a service like BackBlaze to host. 2000 GB -> 20$/month using their service.
This is what they write about their "unlimited traffic":
> Traffic usage is unlimited and free of charge. Please note that our unlimited traffic policy does not apply to servers that have the 10G uplink addon.
The main advantage that keeps people using YouTube seems to be discoverability (and of course momentum). Would it be feasible to make a search engine that aggregates across YouTube and some of these alternatives to facilitate gradual transitioning, or are there technical/policy limitations to doing that?
Honestly though there's something to be said for an up and coming platform. I mean I just uploaded some stupid video of Bill Gates and it is on the way to 2k views on NodeTube right now, I think there is a first-adopters bonus to being the first to adopt a new platform. And I have some good plans for monetization as well, really the big issue is breaking the monopoly YouTube has. Maybe once that happens they'll actually not treat their creators like crap which would be a win in and of itself.
Monetization is a big deal, but I've got to believe it would be cheaper to cut out the ad middle men. If I could pay $0.5/mo to each of the ~20 channels I'm subscribed to on YT, I'd totally consider that (if adblock wasn't already doing the trick). Are ads still a better deal for the creators in a scenario like that?
The goal here is to get enough of an OS community behind NodeTube that there are a lot of different sized instances out in the wild. At that point with ActivityPub the idea is to federate them and allow servers to index eachother's content, that's the vision at the moment.
Bing Videos already does something similar, where video results from a bunch of different sources are presented in their player, so you can get away with not actually knowing where your video is hosted.
I think the image and audio uploads are a good first attempt at differentiation, although it does open you up to competition from two other specialized giants (imgur, soundcloud), so now you've got a war on 3 fronts.
I'd instead focus on differentiation specific to video uploads to attract a niche of YouTube users.
YT is over 10 years old, so they've covered some major ground and solved many infrastructure problems that you haven't. They also have distribution via apps on pretty much every smart device. Between Vimeo and YT, video hosting is arguably a solved problem unless you can find a hard to replicate feature that they can't and is important to a niche of users.
Best of luck, but seriously consider whether you're passionate enough about this project that you will put in the effort to grow it to a point where you've found that niche and users are supporting it in some way to the point where it sufficiently covers your costs and time.
The response I've gotten to this project has been incredible, it just needs to get in front of enough eyes where the OS community behind it grows a bit and we get several instances up. The code is bomb, it will go viral with some eyeballs, I have no doubt about. Thanks for the warning but I know a deadend project when I see one and this isn't it lol.
NodeTube also has monetization, livestreaming, lots of epic stuff. Enough interest on Github and this thing will go to the moon in my opinion.
> it will go viral with some eyeballs... Enough interest on Github and this thing will go to the moon in my opinion.
I'm only offering this feedback as someone who has been down a similar path, and I sincerely hope for the success of the project. You're expecting or at least hoping for lightning to strike. Consider the case where if it doesn't and you need to move forward. It's the intellectually honest thing to do, and will cover the most likely scenario.
I love the idea and have been wanting a good OSS YT alternative for some time now. My initial impression from looking at the code and browsing the demo site is that this project is very much in it's infancy and has a long way to go before I'd consider running it in production as an admin or frequenting the site as a viewer. E.g. code smell, poor comment functionality, UX issues, minimal documentation and examples...
Something I think would help bring in contributors is an architectural diagram and/or blog post on how the subsystems fit together.
Best of luck to all involved, it won't be easy but it's certainly a worthy goal!
Hi bavell thanks for the feedback. The codebase itself is pretty robust in my opinion but the documentation it sparse at the moment, it's still very much in its infancy as an OS project, I mean a bunch of really cool features that are built in are not even mentioned at the moment because I haven't had time to get to it yet. So hopefully we can get that documentation to a point where developers feel happy to fork and join in the development, that is the big goal, but thanks for your feedback!
That is so bizarre, there is an old Coinhive implementation that I was testing out but it is totally commented out, I just sent a message to Heroku support I will get back to you super sorry to hear that that happened. That's crazy that Heroku is that strong-armed about this if that is the case, will let you know what I hear back.
Cool to see a youtube alternative. Registered and became the 60th user, however it seems a bit slashdotted already with upload of my first video hanging at 99%, "About" link gives internal error, profile picture not being able to upload. Like the initiative however, keep it coming and hope https://nodetube.live/ will stay around, however understand if you will need ads to make it work financially soon.
Thanks for the support! If you hop in the Discord I can take a look at some of those things with you, the profile pics not working is a known bug with the B2 implementation, meant to get it done yesterday but the site's been going pretty viral so have been mostly dealing with that. Here's the Discord link if you're interested thanks for the feedback! https://discord.gg/ejGah8H
Some people deploy their own Node Tube instances. Each instance has users (creators and viewers) and content (videos, images, comments, etc).
If so, how are NT instances joined together? How does discovery happen? Are users shared between instances? Do you have an about or summary page that answers these and other questions?
Really excited and glad to see YouTube competitors. I think there's a lot of opportunity there. Plus, I watched a video of Bill Gates jumping over a chair and it worked perfectly.
Currently NT instances are not joined together but that is a planned feature using the Fediverse and ActivityPub. Probably the best place to find info is the Github if you scroll down to features, or to ask me in the Discord (also linked on Github). The Readme is super incomplete missing a lot of information on a lot of features but I'll probably have a chance to take care of that tomorrow. Thanks for the interest and yeah that's a classic Bill Gates video had to upload it ;)
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They have a soft limit of 2TB traffic/month, so you're probably not gonna get very far on that platform.
I run a very high traffic site on a hobby budget and my experience is that you're probably not gonna get around shopping for dedicated servers. That is if you want 500TB - 1PB of traffic per month to be in any way affordable. Forget AWS, Heroku and all that stuff. They're roughly twenty times (literally) more expensive.
Most are still way more expensive than dedicated server traffic and "fixed price" CDNs like Cloudflare are going to give you the boot if you serve >100TB on their 20 bucks plan and/or a lot of larger files.
Deleted Comment
This is what they write about their "unlimited traffic":
> Traffic usage is unlimited and free of charge. Please note that our unlimited traffic policy does not apply to servers that have the 10G uplink addon.
I think there's a good case to be made for multiple federated clients and servers to ensure the health of the ecosystem.
There's 3 reasons why they like Youtube:
1. easy-to-use (free, no administration)
2. discoverability, though large channels already have a built-in audience that is self-viral!
3. monetization, typically $1k - $5k/million views/month (eligible above 10,000 subscribers for acceptable content)
The downsides are:
1. "copyrights", which are mostly Youtube takedowns (seldom DMCA)
2. the sporadic nature of payments. You might get $0 next month, or $1000. Very mysterious, so creators rely on Patreon to pay their rent.
3. Occasionally your comments get disabled, related to "copyrights." Then you have to manually re-enable, which is a hassle for hundreds of videos.
Oh, and your account could be deactivated at any time. :)
I'd instead focus on differentiation specific to video uploads to attract a niche of YouTube users.
YT is over 10 years old, so they've covered some major ground and solved many infrastructure problems that you haven't. They also have distribution via apps on pretty much every smart device. Between Vimeo and YT, video hosting is arguably a solved problem unless you can find a hard to replicate feature that they can't and is important to a niche of users.
Best of luck, but seriously consider whether you're passionate enough about this project that you will put in the effort to grow it to a point where you've found that niche and users are supporting it in some way to the point where it sufficiently covers your costs and time.
NodeTube also has monetization, livestreaming, lots of epic stuff. Enough interest on Github and this thing will go to the moon in my opinion.
I'm only offering this feedback as someone who has been down a similar path, and I sincerely hope for the success of the project. You're expecting or at least hoping for lightning to strike. Consider the case where if it doesn't and you need to move forward. It's the intellectually honest thing to do, and will cover the most likely scenario.
Something I think would help bring in contributors is an architectural diagram and/or blog post on how the subsystems fit together.
Best of luck to all involved, it won't be easy but it's certainly a worthy goal!
Some people deploy their own Node Tube instances. Each instance has users (creators and viewers) and content (videos, images, comments, etc).
If so, how are NT instances joined together? How does discovery happen? Are users shared between instances? Do you have an about or summary page that answers these and other questions?
Really excited and glad to see YouTube competitors. I think there's a lot of opportunity there. Plus, I watched a video of Bill Gates jumping over a chair and it worked perfectly.