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Hey people who run their own PeerTube servers 👋
There is a little-publicised feature in PeerTube which lets servers subscribe to a shared "allowlist" of good servers to federate with. (You can also manually federate with additional servers that aren't on the list.)
Would there be any interest in setting up such a shared list so that PeerTube admins can easily find other nice/safe servers to federate with?
@homegrown I'm a bit confused by this. I'd like to federate in the sense that my bandwith and storage help those servers, but I only want my own channels to show up when people visit my server specifically.
The federation on this particular list would be about which videos show up when people visit or browse or search your site.
If you only want to have your own videos browseable or searchable then you probably shouldn't add any servers to your federation list.
Another option is to federate with other servers but set your website to only show your videos on the front page by default. A lot of servers do this, it lets people switch to a federated view if they want.
@homegrown as a user, PT discovery is terrible. I search for a common term and get nothing. I might be doing something wrong, but that's my experience. If more federation helps, it would be great.
@homegrown hey @atomicpoet this might be an awesome thing for your new coop to host
@homegrown won’t that break comments and boosting from the rest of Fedi?
p.s. For people wondering about the technical details, someone hosts a JSON file somewhere (on their website etc) and PeerTube admins can post the URL of the file into the box where they normally write the servers or accounts they federate with.
A server which follows the JSON file then regularly checks that file for new servers to federate with. This requires trusting the maintainer of the file, and is basically outsourcing research about safe servers to whoever runs the list.
p.p.s. Just to clarify, the federation this feature affects is only the shared video catalogue of a PeerTube server, i.e. which PeerTube videos and PeerTube accounts are visible from that server.
When one PeerTube server federates with another, that other PeerTube server's videos and accounts all become browsable and searchable.
This list feature doesn't affect which servers or accounts can follow or comment or boost or like.
p.p.p.s. Unlike Mastodon, PeerTube has full backfilling of all the videos by all the accounts of servers it federates with. If they federate, all the content of that server becomes visible on their own server.
This is useful for discovering things, but it also carries risks if the server has nasty content.
For this reason PeerTube servers are locked down by default and PeerTube admins have to manually choose which servers they will federate with.
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