This is tricky. I agree that YouTube is terrible... as is Facebook, as is Twitter. We should support free and open alternatives. There are issues, though. As @lydia points out, hosting a video platform ourselves may be complicated. We also have to think of our current followers. If we want to reach beyond the bubble, we will have to maintain our accounts on the most popular platforms because that is where people outside the bubble congregate.

But let's explore this possibility. A half-way solution would be not to host the platform ourselves, but find an organisation that maintains the same principals as us and open and account with them, the same way we don't host our own Mastodon account, but use somebody else's instance.

There is, for example, FramaTube, which belongs to the PeerTube network and seems like a solid organisation. We would still have to post videos to YouTube, but we could use the FramaTube videos for embedding.

Would it make sense to upload Akademy videos? I'm unsure that these are preferable to our primary source for videos being served by our files CDN?

You have a point, @duffus. Serving videos from the files site must be maintained and publicised. I am personally in favour of having ALL videos on the CDN and have that as a repository anybody can dip into or for masse downloading.

I think the main advantage of these video-hosting platforms, and what can attract viewers, is probably the social interaction features. People can comment on videos, share them with over subscribers to the service or on social media, subscribe to and get notified when there are updates to there favourite channels, etc.. All these things can be done really easily. FRAMA has also got a Diaspora* instance and, I think, a Mastodon instance (but I can't see it right now), so we may see an integration with those in the future.

This is the problem: if we open a Framatube account (and I am not against it), uploading a video to this platform is another step in the workflow. It doesn't seem too hard, but it is another account of another social media network that needs maintaining.

This is not a deal-breaker, I think, but something we have to remember: every new social media network we join creates that little bit more work.

framatube.org, the official instance of FramaSoft, has no open registration and I think I read that it is only meant for French videos about free software. Maybe they will change their mind if we would kindly ask them either they want to host KDE's videos.
@paulb Maybe you should ask them for a KDE account, because you do the whole social media thing and you have a longer and much brighter KDE history than me.

Uploading videos to PeerTube has not to be another step in the workflow. I found the very nice python script prismedia (https://git.lecygnenoir.info/LecygneNoir/prismedia/src/branch/develop) which is able to upload videos to YouTube as well as to PeerTube at the same time. Using this, you would only have to adapt the uploading step.

Furthermore, there is another nice python script called Perror (https://git.drycat.fr/rigelk/Peeror/wiki), which, in combination with flexget and youtube-dl, is able to mirror a YouTube channel to PeerTube which would be perfect to easily start our PeerTube adventure without much efforts.

The video with the most views on all PeerTube instances I was able to figure out has 60.000 clicks.

KDE's most viewn video, the release video of Plasma 5.8 LTS (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgH1Clgr-uE), has more than 173.500 clicks. Maybe we can beat them all and have the most viewn video in the whole PeerTube universe (maybe this will be the release video of Plasma 5.13? :-) ), because I think a big part of KDE's clicks on YouTube comes from embedding the videos into the blog posts which will then be replaced by the embedded PeerTube videos.

In T8747#142861, @cahfofpai wrote:

framatube.org, the official instance of FramaSoft, has no open registration and I think I read that it is only meant for French videos about free software. Maybe they will change their mind if we would kindly ask them either they want to host KDE's videos.

Ah, Yes! Maybe another instance then, sow e don't have to set up our own. Let's find one, one that has quite a lot of members and has stable maintenance team.

Uploading videos to PeerTube has not to be another step in the workflow. I found the very nice python script prismedia (https://git.lecygnenoir.info/LecygneNoir/prismedia/src/branch/develop) which is able to upload videos to YouTube as well as to PeerTube at the same time. Using this, you would only have to adapt the uploading step.

Interesting. That is very useful. We would just have to vay slightly our workflow, not add more steps.

Furthermore, there is another nice python script called Perror (https://git.drycat.fr/rigelk/Peeror/wiki), which, in combination with flexget and youtube-dl, is able to mirror a YouTube channel to PeerTube which would be perfect to easily start our PeerTube adventure without much efforts.

Brilliant. Let's find some good candidate instances and list them here, choose one and start working on setting up a channel.

I would give it at least a try and ask the people from FramaSoft either they want to host our videos because FramaSoft is a great organization which shares similar values like KDE, they have one of the two PeerTube instances with the most followers (78 followers) and they are quite reliable I think, so we can be sure that this instance is still running in a few years.

A problem could be that most instances only render the videos up to 720p and I don't know when this value will be increased. I do not have a problem in watching videos in 720p, but maybe other people have.

In T8747#144354, @cahfofpai wrote:

A problem could be that most instances only render the videos up to 720p and I don't know when this value will be increased. I do not have a problem in watching videos in 720p, but maybe other people have.

I think this is a very minor problem. A high-quality 720p video is perfectly watchable.

There's already a KDE-related video on PeerTube: https://peertube.mastodon.host/videos/watch/f9c8545b-7360-42cd-a561-3afc769ab32c (Concept X)

In T8747#144362, @cahfofpai wrote:

There's already a KDE-related video on PeerTube: https://peertube.mastodon.host/videos/watch/f9c8545b-7360-42cd-a561-3afc769ab32c (Concept X)

Seems that this was posted by the private account of Allessandro Longo: https://peertube.nsa.ovh/accounts/1292/videos

I have gone through all instances on https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances and listed the best suiting in the task description.

Personally, I would prefer https://peertube.mastodon.host because they seem to render to 1080p, they have a quota of 20 GB which can be increased, they have a pronouncable and rememberable domain name and the administrator of this instance (https://mastodon.host/@gled) seems to be quite reliable. Which instance would you prefer?

Seems that this was posted by the private account of Allessandro Longo: https://peertube.nsa.ovh/accounts/1292/videos

Yes it's by me, I love PeerTube! I hope to see PeerTube embedded videos on KDE announcements at least, I don't see any disadvantage in usability for visitors...

How do we want to proceed with this task? Have you already looked through the instances and figured out which would be the best instance for our purposes?

In T8747#146400, @cahfofpai wrote:

How do we want to proceed with this task? Have you already looked through the instances and figured out which would be the best instance for our purposes?

I, at least, have not had time, and probably won't have time this week. Can we take this up again next week?

No problem, I also have many other things to do.

Hi,

I'm one of the administrators of the NSA's instance.
If you want to register on our instance, we can negociate the upload limit so you have enough space for your needs :)

Our values are similar to those of KDE, we do not yet have any page that refers to it.

@skid Thanks for the offer, we will think about it!

However, how did you find out about this task?

The (only) problem I see with your instance is the domain name (https://nsa.ovh). I do not think it is a very good idea to put KDE's official channel to an instance which has the same (domain) name (nsa) as the shortcut of one of the biggest governmental spying and data collection organizations, the National Security Agency (short: NSA), because it is fundamental for KDE to respect the user's privacy and not to collect data from the users.

To support this statement I want to quote the vision of KDE:

"A world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy."

For the moment, I wait for @paulb 's answer, because he is (as far as I know) the main administrator and the person in power of the numerous social media presences of KDE, including YouTube, and hopefully soon PeerTube.

However, how did you find out about this task?

As an instance administrator, i'm suscribed to the peertube-admin mailing list and from there :

To conclude, note that KDE is looking for a PeerTube instance to host their videos, so if you are interested don't hesitate to contact them.

So we reached out to our favorite search engine with "KDE Peertube" as keywords and it was the first result.

The (only) problem I see with your instance is the domain name (https://nsa.ovh). [...]

It's understandable ^^'
The domain "nsa.ovh" is intentionally ironic :)

In T8747#148743, @cahfofpai wrote:

@skid Thanks for the offer, we will think about it!

However, how did you find out about this task?

The (only) problem I see with your instance is the domain name (https://nsa.ovh). I do not think it is a very good idea to put KDE's official channel to an instance which has the same (domain) name (nsa) as the shortcut of one of the biggest governmental spying and data collection organizations, the National Security Agency (short: NSA), because it is fundamental for KDE to respect the user's privacy and not to collect data from the users.

To support this statement I want to quote the vision of KDE:

"A world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy."

For the moment, I wait for @paulb 's answer, because he is (as far as I know) the main administrator and the person in power of the numerous social media presences of KDE, including YouTube, and hopefully soon PeerTube.

Well, I am not the only one.

First of all, let me say how much we appreciate you reaching out, @skid. The domain name is definitely problematic, even though I appreciate the humour of your choice (it made me chuckle). And it seems like you have a solid and professional set up, which makes it a double pity. I would definitely recommend nsa.ovh for personal use.

It is true that you can host your videos on one instance of PeerTube and then share the links from another. This even works for linking to the channel itself -- marvels of a federated network. However it does seem a bit convoluted to me.

By the way, I have been using PeerTube quite a lot, and the more I use it, the more I like it. It is pretty incredible.

Hey all, you've probably seen it, but just in case someone missed it - Framasoft/Peertube did an AMA a couple of days ago:

https://old.reddit.com/r/freesoftware/comments/8vt9tq/ama_with_framasoft_and_peertube_send_your/

Maybe there's something interesting or useful to us in that thread, so you might wanna take a look :)

This task is a bit stuck in the pipeline. I think we can generally all agree that it'd be a good idea to host our videos on a public Peertube instance, as Peertube better reflects our values and priorities. Now, https://nsa.ovh has recently encountered a total data loss according to their Twitter account, so I don't think they'll be a viable option in the near future. Currently https://peertube.mastodon.host sounds like the best option to me (high data cap that we can surely ask to be upgraded if needed, 1080p video and the admin(s) seems to have quite a lot of experience). A good start would be if we could upload the Akademy videos there, as they are mainly thought for a specific audience and not for the general public to randomly stumble into. When will the videos be ready & who manages them?

https://peertube.mastodon.host sounds like the best option to me (high data cap that we can surely ask to be upgraded if needed, 1080p video and the admin(s) seems to have quite a lot of experience).

I've been trying their service for some months now. Admittedly, I have very few videos, but I haven't noticed any outages or had any problems. So +1 from me.

In T8747#158827, @xyquadrat wrote:

A good start would be if we could upload the Akademy videos there, as they are mainly thought for a specific audience and not for the general public to randomly stumble into. When will the videos be ready & who manages them?

The Akademy videos are managed by the Akademy Team. They have required audio post processing which is why they aren't available yet. This should be done in the next couple of weeks. The canonical locations for Akademy Videos is https://files.kde.org/akademy/ where you can find the previous years videos as well.

I think uploading them to peertube sounds like a good idea. How would the Akademy Team do this when they are ready? I assume having them already there for the announcement would be good.

The Akademy team would not do the uploading, since managing social media accounts and their contents are Promo's responsibility.

In T8747#158919, @duffus wrote:

I think uploading them to peertube sounds like a good idea. How would the Akademy Team do this when they are ready? I assume having them already there for the announcement would be good.

You have to find an instance of PeerTube to share content. The biggest benefit and biggest problem with peertube is the decentralized nature of it. In this case, there is an option for KDE. Linux Rocks Online provides a peertube instance at peertube.linuxrocks.online

In T8747#159131, @michaeltunnell wrote:

In T8747#158919, @duffus wrote:

I think uploading them to peertube sounds like a good idea. How would the Akademy Team do this when they are ready? I assume having them already there for the announcement would be good.

You have to find an instance of PeerTube to share content. The biggest benefit and biggest problem with peertube is the decentralized nature of it. In this case, there is an option for KDE. Linux Rocks Online provides a peertube instance at peertube.linuxrocks.online

Yes, or as @xyquadrat suggests, https://peertube.mastodon.host/, which also seems very reliable.

Just in case it is not clear why this is desirable, I think there is a point to be made by supporting free social media platforms, albeit it is not a terribly practical one.

By opening accounts with the likes of Mastodon, PeerTube and Diaspora we are supporting en endorsing free, ethical projects.

We are also trying to lure users away from those terribly unethical other platforms, the same way we want to lure desktop users away from Windows and macOS which dominate 98% of the desktop space.

It is good for the privacy of our users (one of our core principles), as we are allowing those that are reluctant to be tracked and infected with persistent cookies to still follow what we do.

I usually stop after three reasons, but here's a bonus: Not to appear too cynical, but it is a savvy PR move.

I will admit this is not super-urgent though, so, if anyone wants to take on the responsibility of setting things up, get the channel started by stocking it with videos and then has no problem with handing the credentials over to whoever become the new people-with-access-to-social-media-to-be, then they should do it.

They should also take into account the comment above so that, when we do have time to get on this topic, we have a tool that avoids making the process of uploading videos more cumbersome than it already is.

The brand-new KDE PeerTube channel is live with it's first video, the release video of Plasma 5.13: https://peertube.mastodon.host/accounts/kde/videos https://peertube.mastodon.host/videos/watch/ae6d09f3-72ac-4afe-83fb-dbd8952587eb . I will upload the other videos during the next time.

In T8747#159363, @paulb wrote:

Just in case it is not clear why this is desirable, I think there is a point to be made by supporting free social media platforms, albeit it is not a terribly practical one.

By opening accounts with the likes of Mastodon, PeerTube and Diaspora we are supporting en endorsing free, ethical projects.

We are also trying to lure users away from those terribly unethical other platforms, the same way we want to lure desktop users away from Windows and macOS which dominate 98% of the desktop space.

It is good for the privacy of our users (one of our core principles), as we are allowing those that are reluctant to be tracked and infected with persistent cookies to still follow what we do.

I usually stop after three reasons, but here's a bonus: Not to appear to cynical, but it is a savvy PR move.

I will admit this is not super-urgent though, so, if anyone wants to take on the responsibility of setting things up, get the channel started by stocking it with videos and then has no problem with handing the credentials over to whoever become the new people-with-access-to-social-media-to-be, then they should do it.

They should also take into account the comment above so that, when we do have time to get on this topic, we have a tool that avoids making the process of uploading videos more cumbersome than it already is.

@paulb Thanks for defending our plans and efforts!

In T8747#159595, @cahfofpai wrote:

The brand-new KDE PeerTube channel is live with it's first video, the release video of Plasma 5.13: https://peertube.mastodon.host/accounts/kde/videos https://peertube.mastodon.host/videos/watch/ae6d09f3-72ac-4afe-83fb-dbd8952587eb . I will upload the other videos during the next time.

Awesome! Great job @cahfofpai, and thank you for taking the lead on this task.

A few stats on our PeerTube channel:

• abonnents: 51
• total views: 801!

Videos:

• Plasma 5.13: 108 views, 1 comment (by our account)
• KDE Applications 18.12: 693 views, 4 comments

I asked Tristan Mahe (https://www.remote-shell.net/), the hoster of our instance, either he could activate the new import feature (https://framablog.org/2018/10/15/peertube-1-0-the-free-libre-and-federated-video-platform/) at this instance so we could easily import more videos from our YouTube channel.

Has somebody advertised the KDE Applications 18.12 PeerTube video (https://peertube.mastodon.host/videos/watch/2e647c42-3f96-4d08-8a6f-ca45ff9bc136)? Otherwise I could not explain how it got so many views.

The person who uploaded the KDE Applications 18.12. video to YouTube also uploaded it to PeerTube! Thanks for it!

Why was the video or a link to it not included in the KDE Applications 18.12 article?

How about sharing links to our PeerTube videos instead of / in parallel to links to our YouTube videos at social media?
Examples:

• https://twitter.com/kdecommunity/status/1073878564058079232
• https://mastodon.technology/@kde/101244444500679203
• https://www.facebook.com/kde/posts/10156283683493918?__xts__[0]=68.ARDyrXH9T3b88OmCgf_YXcn7v-uNKLsEEc0Ey6Y_3TU_E59Om5krwC-MoeUbfX5uSUZk-etE6Krvt_3KYioRWmogRfsRtFEk3mCx6NVbn-glR0-uF3CQFsO5m6sA1Sy7LaiZKfz75N5loR88vQ6ueRROZmfP93kyql73PXZkUB9Xa7hLUx4SA4VIi7vLQhEvj8Na0V1NfACKRke1A54w_0tivokK5Y9bx6UaGMxxehIvnmaA7PNQdrgsPYieyHOUbsJQI3u02Q10W1keKkFCRfNedsAuF2l5g30GY0iBuB82bKF9cAB5L7AyjrjEu3SxCRBzwwj4szJFTCQ&__tn__=-R

In T8747#171300, @cahfofpai wrote:

The person who uploaded the KDE Applications 18.12. video to YouTube also uploaded it to PeerTube! Thanks for it!

Yes... Uploading videos to PeerTube is the plan from now on. We are looking for a way to automatically transfer videos from our YouTube to our PeerTube, along with all the metadata (descriptions, tags, etc.). If somebody could research this, it would give our channel a real oomph.

In T8747#171298, @cahfofpai wrote:

I asked Tristan Mahe (https://www.remote-shell.net/), the hoster of our instance, either he could activate the new import feature (https://framablog.org/2018/10/15/peertube-1-0-the-free-libre-and-federated-video-platform/) at this instance so we could easily import more videos from our YouTube channel.

Since version 1.0, PeerTube supports automagically importing videos from YouTube including all metadata. Up to now, this feature is not activated at https://peertube.mastodon.host, so I asked the admin behind this instance per email.

Demonstration video: https://framatube.org/videos/watch/59d306c0-fc5b-493a-956a-43785693346b
v1.0 release announcement: https://framablog.org/2018/10/15/peertube-1-0-the-free-libre-and-federated-video-platform/

Since version 1.0, PeerTube supports automagically importing videos from YouTube including all metadata. Up to now, this feature is not activated at https://peertube.mastodon.host, so I asked the admin behind this instance per email.

So I saw. I asked him with a direct message from Mastodon, but got no reply. I hope you have more luck.

At saturday, I got an answer by Tristan Mahe, the admin of the PeerTube instance we use.

He said that the YouTube import feature was not activated and will not be activated, because it could lead to an increase of copyright infringements by users which use the import function. Using other people's contents is also prohibited in the terms of the instance, he said.

@cahfofpai do you think anything else needs to be done to consider this task completed? I think you succeeded in the main mission, which was to get the account up and running :)

Sorry for the late answer, I have been quite busy during the last time.

The basic and one of te most important steps, the creation of the PeerTube account, is done. But in my opinion, there could two goals still be accomplished:

• uploading all videos of KDE to the PeerTube channel, so the video archive could be conveniently browsed without using YouTube
  • there are command line tools available both for PeerTube and YouTube; the YouTube videos could be brought to PeerTube by automagically downloading them and reuploading them to PeerTube including all meta data, subtitles and the preview picture; this should preferably be run by using a fast internet connection, maybe on a server
  • do we need all KDE videos on PeerTube to be able to use it as our main and prefered video platform?
• make PeerTube the default video platform of KDE
  • in official announcements and blog posts YouTube is used for embedding videos; (e.g. announcements for KDE Plasma, KDE Applications, Krita)
  • this is problematic because users visiting this sites are automatically tracked by the embedded YouTube video and unfree JavaScript is loaded and executed; this is very complicated opt-out only because it happens automatically and can only be blocked by using several browser extensions => using YouTube for embedding videos does definetly not comply with our vision: "A world in which everyone has control over their digital lives and enjoys freedom and privacy."
  • PeerTube is also not 100 % perfect in regards to revealing data; in order to transmit the video peer-to-peer between the viewers the clients have to know each other's IP address; there could maybe also be run site analytics tools on the PeerTube instance like Matomo (formerly Piwik) or Google Analytics; all in all this is much less bad than the surveillance practices by YouTube
  • what has to be done to make PeerTube KDE's default video platform? Do we need all videos available on PeerTube or is the current state enough?
  • to whom would we have to talk to? Who writes the announcements mentioned above?
  • when PeerTube gets KDE's default video platform, it would make sense to write an official blog post describing the why and how and to encourage projects and blog post writers to use PeerTube instead of YouTube

I don't think it is really practical to not share your IP address when downloading a video as you have to get the data. Only VPNs and Tor can help with minimising that.

An other existing option is serving video from our files.ko mirror network, which we do as the primary source of Akademy videos

You're right. Technically it is necessary to know the IP address of the other party to be able to talk to each other and transmit data. The special thing about PeerTube is that not only the server gets your IP address, but also the peers where you get the video from.

Serving videos from KDE's cdn is much better than serving it from YouTube as a primary source in regards of freedom and privacy, but it's very unconvenient. Browsing all the videos is only possible by clicking through a file hierarchy, there's no way to interact with the videos (comments, like / dislike), you only have the UI of the systems' standard video tag and as far as I know, you can only serve one video resolution by default with the <video> tag.