Whether to Stick It or Get Stuck To

This post is an elaboration on what I was talking about on Gamepad yesterday, re: setting up a PeerTube instance in order to get away from posting to YouTube.

All of the hardcore Fediverse wonks will exhort anyone who will listen (whether they like it or not) to self-host their social platform, and on it’s face that’s a really great idea because it would give me the ability to be in control of everything on this side of the wire. I could expand my capacity as needed, update when needed, and, more importantly, set the rules. But telling someone what they should do and a person’s ability to actually do that aren’t even in the same realm of existence. For one, I’d need to have the physical hardware to run whatever software I am looking to run. For two, I’d need the time and patience to deal with the setup and configuration of new software which usually runs on Linux, a platform with which I am not intimately familiar. When it works, great! I’m happy! I have a few in-house servers for various personal, low-level things running on a few RPi devices right now. But even having gotten those working was a chore for me.

I do like the idea of calling the shots for my own video hosting platform. Video posting happens even more infrequently than my blogging these days. Right now I’m in my “video making” phase which includes mainly gameplay videos, but also some animation things that I’m working on (I hope). Like many others, I post to YouTube, but in soon-to-be-2026-and-beyond, putting eggs in corporate baskets grows increasingly hostile to users both on the provider and consumer side of the equation. It’s come to my attention that YouTube has been applying AI “enhancements” to the videos that some folks have posted, without their knowledge or tacit agreement. “That’s horrible!” you say, as I did, and as others have, but I am willing to bet that YouTube slipped permission into their EULA that gives them free reign to do so. Corporations can do all kinds of shady shit like this by controlling the legal side, while consumers have two options: suck it up, or stop using the service.

Since I didn’t have hardware powerful enough or expansive enough to run a local PeerTube instance, I went to Fedihost, a French company dedicated to offering hosting plans for Mastodon, PeerTube, and GoToSocial. It’s not really “sticking it to the man” to ditch one man for another man wearing a different hat, but benefit of the doubt and all that since Fedihost is supposedly dedicated to the ideals of the Fediverse.

I opted for the most basic hosting package which is $7USD per month. This says I get one transcoder and 10GB of storage space for my videos. If I were gung-ho about making video content, I could choose their$40/month package which includes 4 transcoders, a web-based video editor, and live-streaming abilities, but I’m not that deep into this lifestyle at this time.

After provisioning my service, it turns out I have 20GB of storage, which I assume is some kind of seasonal promotion deal, although I didn’t find that info listed anywhere. The good news is that the PeerTube plan allows for add-on storage, and right now it seems that I could expand this 20GB by 10, 35, 100, or even 1000GB for as low as an additional $6 for the 35GB package.

So I posted a video. It transcoded down to a svelte 4.2MB…but it’s only 16 seconds long. For a real test, I downloaded one of my almost 40 minute Star Citizen replay videos — I no longer have the source files, so I had to get a copy from YouTube. How ironic — and re-uploaded it to PeerTube. Somehow, the original video of 467MB ballooned to 683MB after transcoding! And, of course being a copy of a copy, doesn’t look as good. More importantly and confusingly , the Fedihost account dashboard tells me I am using 2.3 GB of my 20 GB allotment. Holy Heck!

So I took the 4K/60FPS master recording I did keep, and ran it through Resolve to spit out a 1920x1080 version, and even that is clocking in at 11GB…too large for this PeerTube instance to handle in one go. I deleted my previous 683MB video from the service, but my Fedihost dashboard says I was still using 2.3GB of my 20GB allotment. How?

Thinking there might be something I could do on the transcoding side, I went to muck about in the PeerTube settings, but was getting errors almost every time I tried to update the settings. Vague, vague errors that weren’t actually telling me what was wrong.

The bottom line is that by the time you will read this, I will have already nuked the service. I lack patience for a lot of things, and the weird errors that didn’t provide insight into how to fix the problem were enough to put me off, but I can also see the writing on the wall that 20GB — or even adding another 35GB on top of that — of space is simply not going to cut it. I have the ability to make nice, visually clear videos, and I don’t want to upload grainy projects; I don’t want to be known for that, and I don’t want people to have to suffer through it, and I can’t do that on the budget that Fedihost offers, nor can I afford the budget that would allow me to use the service to my satisfaction.

I am aware that there are other, public, non-me-controlled instances out there, but I don’t know about that. Open source can be good from an egalitarian standpoint, but it’s also extremely prone to implosion as participants can squabble and throw tantrums and put the project in jeopardy. I know the folks behind Gamepad and have complete faith in them; I don’t know these rando PeerTube hosts so for all I know they could simply decide tomorrow that they don’t want to spend the time maintaining the instance and shut it down without warning.

So I guess I’m still beholden to the corporate overlords at YouTube for the time being. “Security through obscurity” should work in my favor, I hope, and by keeping my viewership small I might avoid having any AI slop applied to my projects but at the rate these C-Suite trust-funders are drinking the AI Kool Aide, I’m not convinced that will be a certainty forever.