Thread

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My goal with #Plebs was to make it the PeerTube of #Nostr. I think I’ve accomplished that. But with major improvements, imho, by making it a static site that can easily be loaded locally and leveraging Blossom hosts to offload the content in a way that’s better than ActivityPub. Time will tell, but if video views on PeerTube are any indicator, I suspect Plebs will remain very niche. Though, I wish more people on Nostr would use it to post videos. I pumped a lot of “blood, sweat, and tears” in building it and I’d hate to see it go to waste and become abandonware. A truly censorship-resistant, decentralized video platform with Bitcoin tips via zaps to content creators without any middleman is gonna be huge when people finally wake up to it.
Watch Videos on Nostr with Plebs
Plebs is a censorship-resistant, decentralized video platform powered by the Nostr social protocol

Replies (43)

Yeah I like this, and I agree that it will be a boon to content creators... once they learn what Nostr is! You mentioned peertube, just keep in mind Mastodon as ~ 1 million DAU's... So PeerTube is going to be some smaller fraction of that. Nostr has what... 6k DAU's, for the main "kind 1" functionality? We don't even know, lol... So do the math on what any sort of percentage of that will look like for any of the "other stuff" that's not just strictly "kind 1" microblogging. So that's all to say: don't be frustrated, this is all just so early that you can't take any real lessons about whether something is "working" or not until we start to see DAU's closer to 5 figures, at least...
↩ replying to Globe99
So that being said, some concrete ideas / suggestions: 1. When I just logged on, I saw some "prawn" right on the front page... Would it be better perhaps to default to just videos from the user's social graph on Nostr, rather than just "global"? 2. Would a "quick and dirty" way of bootstrapping content be to just suck in a bunch of stuff from Internet Archive? You know, like what @Movie Archive does? 3. any chances of Smart TV integration (yeah I know, probably too early... but I doubt any of the Youtube competitors have even gotten that far yet...)
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↩ replying to Globe99
If they haven’t posted the video through Plebs, the videos they have published won’t show in the feed. This design choice was done for multiple reasons. The first being to ensure censorship-resistance through the uploading to Blossom hosts. The second for anti-spam mitigation. And third for how it tracks impressions and engagement in order to load the trending section and queued videos in “Up Next”. Think of Plebs as an outbox model. Otherwise, if we ingest all videos across Nostr, the app can’t guarantee if a video can be found online and might also pull in absolute slop.
↩ replying to Luxas
Yeah... don't think I agree with the design decision. I think this should just be a "YouTube"-like client for videos that get posted to Nostr. That's what I would personally find valuable. Nostr users should understand how to filter based on their follows, WoT, by relays, etc. Censorability, the use of blossom, etc the onus should be on the user posting the video to worry about that. Of course Plebs can make it easy for users to use blossom, but that shouldn't be a requirement to be on the site...
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↩ replying to Globe99
That’s ok. I didn’t build it to please everyone, I built it to be the most censorship-resistant and with higher quality, intentionally uploaded videos. Most people are absolutely unaware of how to manage things on their own. Most of us are outliers. Without the way Plebs was architected, there wouldn’t be any stop to someone flooding the feeds with junk. And even then, those protective measures are thin. If there’s any chance of a decentralized YouTube being used by normies, this was the best possible way for it to be built, imho.
what you did does have a lot of potential, it's just that for me I feel that the problem I have in even trying to recommend it to content creators who do want more control of their content, is the barrier itself that even there to run a relay and server, I I like your app but the truth is that trying to run a relay or storage server without tutorials for people who are not very experienced is a huge barrier that they have to overcome.
Isn't it self-hostable? Peertube is a community project. If your goal is to send tips to a video, the road is long, because you have to find a video you like, so you need to have a lot of content or have your contacts post it, which is difficult. You changed videos kind three times, if I'm not mistaken, which didn't help.
↩ replying to Luxas
Sure, but like a YouTube playlist where you can see thumbnails of all the videos. Don't know if there is a nip for playlists, but it would be cool to have a playlist all the people in our meetup could add video to by uploading them to blossom and adding them by signing an event.
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I'm a plebs.app maxi, this is going to be huge. Actually nostr is very well positioned for this use-case with being inherently social + blossom servers becoming very common these days. A way to monetize could be a service that provides extra bandwidth for popular podcasts around the release time when the load exceeds the blossom servers' capacity. Alternatively this task could be done in a crowdsourced way: allow anyone with bandwidth earn sats by providing the extra bandwidth, and you can take a cut for managing the connections. So many ideas and possibilities to explore. I'm planning to release one episode of a podcast for my local community in January to shill nostr, and see how ready people are for this kind of goodness.