Also tracking the viewing history of an IP is not that easy. People trying to do this can be easily spotted by the trackers.

The uploader will be banned and their content removed, and hopefully will have to deal with the police. If a PeerTube instance is too laxist about its moderation policy, other instances will stop federating (federation is opt-in and decided by the admins).

So how can they call it "censorship resistant" if you can just ban users and delete their content?

The platform is censorship resistant. Individual instances are not. If you upload something to a specific instance, you are at the mercy of the instance owner. But you can upload to other more "open-minded" instances or host your own.

Moderation is necessary, otherwise you'll attract "undesirables" that will most likely scare away regular users.

Check out the "Who is responsible for content published on PeerTube? " bit in the faq at https://joinpeertube.org/en/faq/

Banning and choosing not to point at something are two different things.

Sure, or Tor. Anything that hides your IP.

Although IIRC there are gotchas specifically around webrtc sometimes bypassing VPNs if not configured exactly right.

We could discuss the possible workarounds for this, but let's not forget that in terms of privacy, Youtube has its own by-design flaws as well. The company gathers much precise data about viewers than Peertube does.

Exposing your IP address to the public is much more risky than exposing it to Google.

I don’t think that’s a verbatim claim you can just make and expect everyone to agree with without any form of argument.

Counter-argument one: things known by Google represents another dose of data into a single place which accumulates way too much of it already.

If I watch something on a peertube, many may know that my IP streamed that, but they don’t know who I am because they’re not an all knowing internet-scale privacy-violator. Best of all, google won’t know I watched it at all, so it won’t be another annoying data-point in the super-aggressive youtube bubble.

> Best of all, google won’t know I watched it at all

Why do you think that? It would be very easy for Google to observe who is viewing PeerTube videos and to link that back to those people's YouTube profiles. You may trust them not to, but if you do, it seems you're half way to thinking it's OK for them to know.

> It would be very easy for Google to observe who is viewing PeerTube videos

I'm not saying it can't be done, but I wouldn't assume they would go out of their way to monitor this, just like I wouldn't assume they're monitoring public IPs of torrents in the process of downloading.

Yes. It would be easy. But why would they?

Speaking in BT-terms... Peertube's might find this peeking annoying and start publishing "peerguardian" like lists to prevent Google-spying.

Only if you want to be in control of your videos and don't want to use your audience's personal data as a payment to Youtube.

You can also host them on a PeerTube instance run by someone you trust (several non-profits already maintain one).

Where can I find a list of them?

Peertube has other advantages, among which interoperability. A relevant quote from the main developer:

“Where it gets really, really exciting, is that when you respond to a video status on Mastodon, the message will be sent to the instance of PeerTube. Your response will thus be visible beneath the video, in the comment space. And yes, if another person at the other end of the world responds to your comment via their instance of PeerTube or Mastodon, you’ll see it as a response to your status in Mastodon. If tomorrow Diaspora (the Facebook alternative behind Framasphere) implements ActivityPub, it will work in the same way. We’ll have plenty of platforms that are capable of federating comments.

Free alternatives are criticized, often rightly, for not having added value compared to centralized platforms. With ActivityPub, we now have our first big advantage. Because on the centralized platforms, you’ll have a hard time viewing, under your YouTube video, the reactions of people who commented on Facebook, Twitter, etc. ”

source: https://medium.com/@chocobozzz/peertube-a-federated-video-st...

> Because on the centralized platforms, you’ll have a hard time viewing, under your YouTube video, the reactions of people who commented on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

I consider it an advantage to not have those comments. Context matters. Signal to noise ratio on Facebook is close to 0 for most things that are open to everyone. Specialized subreddits have a good SNR. HN can too. Probably closed Facebook groups do as well.

And context matters. The discussion about a Blender tutorial will be different if posted to a group of beginners than if a group of professionals were to comment on it. If I want to help people learn Blender I can seek out beginners and help them in their groups, but when I am not looking to spend time helping beginners I’d rather not have every comment by every person wondering about every little detail show up.

It's not really a problem. Pleroma for example already offers ways you can filter out certain platforms from communicating with you (or do transforms on messages like adding Subject lines or hiding the message body behind a button).

PeerTube could do the same; hide content you don't want to see below your videos or maybe whitelist certain places to allow commenting from them.

That sounds like a job for filters, which could be provided by browser extensions, userscripts, or forks of the platform hosted on other sites.

Question: how does moderation work in ActivityPub?

There is no notion of moderation in ActivityPub itself AFAIK, but I suppose you're asking what happens to e.g. comments that have been sent to federated servers/software and then deleted on the original platform.

In general, when that happens the comment is removed on the host platform, then a deletion request is sent to the federated platforms. There is no guarantee that other platforms will delete the content (although if they don't, they are generally considered malicious and should be reported), much like deleted forum posts can be viewed through WebArchive.

Given the general quality of YouTube comments, this is a bug, not a feature.

PeerTube initially aims precisely at being a Youtube alternative, which is why such questions are not tackled in the article I guess. However federation with other servers is totally controlled by admin-defined rules, so you can make a “private” instance. I'm not sure whether making videos watchable by logged-in users only is already possible but it's a very easy thing to implement.

As for the torrenting, if videos are only available to members it shouldn't be a privacy problem. That being said, disabling it will probably be a possibility in v1.0.

Thanks, yeah but it's hard to find these answers at the project site as well.

The privacy problem wasn't my concern. But rather a bloated javascript client as well as the issue of accidentally seeding on a mobile connection wasting bandwidth and battery life. I see tons of potential issues but no possible gains at all when server bandwidth is not an issue.

I think Varoufakis is profoundly misled in thinking that basic income can be a left-wing policy.

It is a well-known fact that there are two versions of basic income out there: the right-wing version, where welfare is removed and replaced with a single allocation that isn't high enough to live of it; and a left-wing version, where the distributed amount is sufficient to live a decent life and thus gives "real freedom" to people.

Here is why I think the left-wing version is a fantasy: I start from the assumption that capitalistic economies like ours mainly relies on coercion. In other words, critical parts of production depend on people who would rather do something else, if it wasn't their only way to eat. Under that assumption, any policy that gives people a real choice between being employed in a factory and doing the things they really want to do removes in fact the coercion — making the economy collapse.

The form collapsing would take could for example be the following: low-paid, exhausting and low-considered jobs are not taken anymore, and yet society depends on them. The only way to make the workers come back is to pay them much better. But this can only lead to a combination of dramatic price rises and cuts in shareholder profit (and I am not an advocate of capital income, but sadly it is currently one of the main incentives for investment).

For these reasons, I am convinced that any attempt to implement a left-wing basic income will inevitably result in the right-wing version taking over, meaning less rights for the workers and a destroyed welfare.

That's clearly a faulty assumption. If production depends on a job and supply is short, then the value and pay will rise until supply meets demand.

The assumption also ignores advances in automation. Factories of the future may not need a single human, except the capitalist to sign papers.

> That's clearly a faulty assumption. If production depends on a job and supply is short, then the value and pay will rise until supply meets demand.

I don't disagree with your statement about supply and demand. But as a matter of fact, the supply is never short, because structures of society force a large fraction of the population into jobs they cannot let go, whether they like it or not.

It is common knowledge that people of low social status are given a choice between shitty jobs and starvation. Saying "if the job is not good enough, supply will fall and wages will have to rise" does not take into account the highly competitive character of the job market, especially for those with low educational capital.

Our economy relies much more on consumption than on production. The current top-down, militaristic control structure of most companies is more a result of path dependence than any fundamental requirement. There is no reason to believe that not forcing people to do certain jobs would be fatal economically.

> The current top-down, militaristic control structure of most companies is more a result of path dependence than any fundamental requirement.

I strongly disagree. In a corporation, the relation of the employee to the employer is intrinsically one of subordination. It is defined as such in the labour laws of most countries.

Of course, this subordination is not necessary militaristic — but it can be, and naturally tends to be in a context of financial pressure on the company.

The point I want to make is that an employment relation is not symmetric (although it may be experienced as such by those of middle- or upper-class position) but happens on a background of economic depencency, and that is more and more true as the job is less paid and less considered.

Firstly, if your macro does not typecheck, it means that executing it might result in a segfault or something similar, since macros are regular OCaml functions. Secondly, if macro typechecks, then it is guaranteed to expand without errors, and I think that's a nice guarantee to have.

> Firstly, if your macro does not typecheck, it means that executing it might result in a segfault or something similar, since macros are regular OCaml functions.

I see. The only time I've extensively used (real) macros has been with racket, where they aren't regular functions at all. I suppose my ignorance of Ocaml macros is showing here.

The strymonas optimal performance is guaranteed for any combination of stream processors. That doesn't seem to be the case of this library which relies on frequent patterns.