Getting started with PeerTube
Fediverse TV
PeerTube, the Fediverse's video platform, offers a decentralized, open source way to watch videos and live stream your own content. We'll show you how to get started and even set up your own instance.
The Fediverse community is building a parallel Internet based on ActivityPub, a W3C-recommended standard for social media, and PeerTube [1] is the Fediverse's video service for individuals, communities, and other organizations.
As with Mastodon, it would be understandable to think of PeerTube as a Fediverse drop-in for the popular closed, proprietary alternatives such as YouTube. And, sure, you can use PeerTube that way, but you would be ignoring its merits and how it can deliver video streaming that takes control from powerful corporations and puts it into the hands of users.
Running a service that delivers video on the scale of YouTube requires an immense amount of bandwidth and storage, unless you decentralize the whole thing. To be clear, PeerTube does not offer an amount of media on the scale of YouTube. However, PeerTube does offer an ingenious way of growing the resources it needs along with the amount of media it serves. By using peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, PeerTube shares the load over instances (servers run by PeerTube community members). Counterintuitively with instances, the more viewers a video has, the lighter the load on the server where the instance is hosted, because the load is spread over more nodes in the network. In addition, PeerTube's federated nature makes it possible for one instance to offer its visitors a much larger catalog of videos than it could if it were isolated and relied exclusively on its own storage.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
KDE Unleashes Plasma 6.5
The Plasma 6.5 desktop environment is now available with new features, improvements, and the usual bug fixes.
-
Xubuntu Site Possibly Hacked
It appears that the Xubuntu site was hacked and briefly served up a malicious ZIP file from its download page.
-
LMDE 7 Now Available
Linux Mint Debian Edition, version 7, has been officially released and is based on upstream Debian.
-
Linux Kernel 6.16 Reaches EOL
Linux kernel 6.16 has reached its end of life, which means you'll need to upgrade to the next stable release, Linux kernel 6.17.
-
Amazon Ditches Android for a Linux-Based OS
Amazon has migrated from Android to the Linux-based Vega OS for its Fire TV.
-
Cairo Dock 3.6 Now Available for More Compositors
If you're a fan of third-party desktop docks, then the latest release of Cairo Dock with Wayland support is for you.
-
System76 Unleashes Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta
System76's first beta of Pop!_OS 24.04 is an impressive feat.
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 is Available
Linus Torvalds has announced that the latest kernel has been released with plenty of core improvements and even more hardware support.
-
Kali Linux 2025.3 Released with New Hacking Tools
If you're a Kali Linux fan, you'll be glad to know that the third release of this famous pen-testing distribution is now available with updates for key components.
-
Zorin OS 18 Beta Available for Testing
The latest release from the team behind Zorin OS is ready for public testing, and it includes plenty of improvements to make it more powerful, user-friendly, and productive.

