// the find
Chocobozzz/PeerTube
ActivityPub-federated video streaming platform using P2P directly in your web browser
PeerTube is a self-hosted video platform that federates over ActivityPub and offloads bandwidth to viewers via WebRTC P2P. It's for developers or organizations who want to run their own YouTube-like instance without depending on centralized platforms. Actively maintained by Framasoft since 2015.
The P2P delivery via WebRTC is genuinely clever — popular videos get cheaper to serve as more people watch them simultaneously, which solves the cost problem that kills small self-hosted video platforms. Federation over ActivityPub means your instance's content is discoverable from Mastodon and other fediverse apps without any extra integration work. The runner architecture (peertube-runner as a separate process) lets you offload transcoding to separate machines, which is the right call for a video platform. REST API is OpenAPI-documented and the plugin system is real — not bolted on.
P2P only helps when multiple people watch the same video at the same time; a small instance with low concurrent viewers gets zero benefit from WebRTC and still has full bandwidth costs. The Angular frontend is heavy and the build toolchain is complex — local dev setup requires getting Node, Angular CLI, and the server stack all running together, which is non-trivial. Federation discovery is fragile in practice: your instance only knows about content from instances you explicitly follow, so new instances start nearly invisible to the fediverse. Storage management is entirely on the admin — no built-in tiering to object storage by default, so disk fills up fast once you have real users uploading.