Notices by Fedi.Tips 🎄 (feditips@mstdn.social), page 16

@signalkilled

Remote follows aren't logging in on the other server, but they are proving your identity to the remote server.

If you go to the websites of several different servers and try to do remote follows on each of them, you may need to do this proof several times.

@signalkilled

When there was the huge wave of new people last year, remote following was one of the most confusing things they complained about, so I'm trying to steer people away from that.

@signalkilled

Ah okay, that's really weird, sounds like something somewhere is broken then...

Sorry about that! Hopefully this doesn't happen for other addresses 🤞

The problem with remote following is you have to keep logging in again and again whenever you're on a different server. I did a page about it here:

https://fedi.tips/remote-following-on-mastodon/

It's much easier to just log in once on your own server, then paste in the addresses as you want to follow them.

@signalkilled

I've just tried it on my single user server, and it worked there too, even though my server is not federated with that server.

@signalkilled

The federation doesn't make any difference.

When you paste a full account address, that is enough for your server to locate the other server, even if it has had no contact with the other server before.

@signalkilled

If you're copy pasting the entire address (@ something @ server) it should show up even if you're the first person to enter it.

Searches won't work, but the full address should work.

@signalkilled

Which part of the fedi.tips guide were you looking at?

If it's broken I need to correct it! 😅

p.s. If you want to see nice PeerTube videos boosted in your Mastodon feed, follow my other account @FediVideo

@futurebird

Good luck, hope it goes well!

Let me know if you put stuff up, I could give it a shoutout on @FediVideo

@drnoble

Do you mean on your profile page? Or do you mean if other people boost it as well?

@3dcandy @jarocats

That sounds fair enough, yup.

Sorry for all the misunderstandings, I was getting wrong end of stick about what you were saying.

@3dcandy @jarocats

Yeah, I get you.

I guess it's difficult to know how useful it is in the real world until there are mass audiences. At the moment PeerTube has fewer viewers so there isn't as much opportunity for it to come into play?

@3dcandy @jarocats

Ahh okay, I get what you mean 👍

Yeah, if there isn't much overlap between audience activity it won't make much difference. True!

@3dcandy @jarocats

If two people are watching the same video at the same time in the same resolution hosted by the same server, does that not trigger p2p?

@3dcandy @jarocats

I'm not talking about federation, but about the process by which simultaneous viewers exchange data with each other instead of via the server.

@3dcandy @jarocats

"but as most instances don't do it - yours included "

I'm not sure what you mean by this? The peer numbers are there on my videos too. If several watched at once, the peer numbers would go up.

@3dcandy @jarocats

I'm using a managed hosting plan which allows quite a lot more storage, was thinking of possibly hosting for others in future. I'd mainly just set it up as a search platform though, true.

It depends what you mean by substantial investment I guess!

On managed hosting at least, costs on PeerTube seem about 2-3 times higher compared to Mastodon? It's much higher, but the donations I receive cover the costs of the instances so it's (at the moment) sustainable.

@3dcandy @jarocats

"You rarely get any help from others watching as the traffic simply isn't there"

If the traffic isn't there, your bandwidth costs will be low anyway? The idea of the p2p is to help if traffic appears, isn't it?

About the costs, I run a PeerTube instance and a Masto instance and monthly fees are broadly similar, at least in my case.

" it is being deprecated."

Is there somewhere with info about this?

@3dcandy @jarocats

"regarding servers/instances then the issue with peertube is it needs a high level of hardware and decent bandwidth "

Part of the beauty of PeerTube is that the more people who watch a video, the more bandwidth gets donated to the hosting server.

When several people watch the same video at once, they exchange bits of the video between each other as well as the server. This reduces costs of hosting popular videos.

(That's why it's called PeerTube: it can work peer-to-peer)

@jarocats

I've listed some good instances on the publishing guide, most of them have been around for years.

Ultimately any site on the internet can go away or turn to crap, but you can mitigate this by looking at the site's track record.

There are also now specific sections on PeerTube "about" pages where the instance owner is asked to state how they are funded and how long they intend to keep going.