PeerTube: An Open Source YouTube Alternative To Beat Censorship

When it’s about watching videos online, YouTube is the first thing that comes to our minds. But the popular video sharing platform is often subjected to censorship in many countries. There are many countries including China and North Korea that ban YouTube from time to time.

Leave the others, recently, even YouTube ended up blocking many legitimate Channels as a collateral damage of its copyright crackdown. Ultimately, the content creators are the ones who get affected due to all of this blocking.

We have told you about many good YouTube alternatives in the past. But for the ones affected by YouTube technical glitch, another open source YouTube alternative exists. It’s called PeerTube (source code available on GitHub).

As the name suggests, the P2P-based video sharing platform is decentralized, just like BitTorrent. People can host videos on their individual instance (a PeerTube server) which has its own audience.

It can be linked to other PeerTube instances using a protocol called ActivityPub. So, the users of one instance also get video suggestions from other instances. Here is a demo server of a PeerTube instance.

PeerTube supports WebTorrent which can cut down bandwidth costs as the people who watch the videos also provide the bandwidth. Still, for the creators, there are costs to be borne for things like hosting and website development. Although there is room for monetization, it’s not that easy.

However, what PeerTube gives creators is the power over their content. It can be any day when your video could get blocked or censored.

PeerTube’s first version came out last year. Its France-based developers Framasoft, a non-profit, have hosted a crowdfunding campaign so that they could continue with the development of the platform

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