A free, general-purpose video sharing platform for the leftist community

TankieTube is out of "beta" and everyone's invited! feast-1feast-2

Definitions:

  • TT = TankieTube
  • PT = PeerTube
  • YT = YouTube

OpSec

  • Email - Make sure to register using an email detached from your legal identity (remember Stonetoss?).

    The software requires an email address, however, I've disabled the verification requirement. This means you can register using something like cum@fart.com and it will totally work—unless the address is already taken (in which case you should get better material!).

    You would need a real address, of course, to have the option of resetting your password. The only other thing I use email for is explaining and notifying users of any moderator actions I take against them, as a courtesy.

  • P2P - The peer-to-peer feature allows the software to scale tremendously well when serving the same viral video to many people at the same time (supposedly at least 1000 concurrent viewers, easily, with a wimpier server than ours).

    A downside of the feature is that it can reveal your IP to a subset of people watching the same video at the same time as you. [Read more]. Therefore, it is recommended to either:

    1. Use a VPN. Or,
    2. Deselect the P2P participation feature in the user settings menu.

Federation

TT users can search and view any videos from instances on the subscriptions list, and the instances following TT can view our vids. I occasionally browse the public index and look for new instances to follow (sometimes they're a bust). LMK if you find any cool ones.

Mirroring vids, as in multiple copies on multiple servers, is done when instances implement something called redundancy, but I haven't looked into that much yet.

Fifty Channels!

The major difference from YT is that TT users can create up to fifty (50) channels (the default is 20 but I bumped it up). Channels are analogous to Lemmy communities, except that PT doesn't yet support shared channels with more than one author/user (I believe it's a planned feature). Create a channel for every weird niche topic that you want!

I'll eventually create a style guide. If you want to sync or archive a YT channel, then I'd prefer that you create a unique TT channel that corresponds to it for better organization.

PT has an automatic channel syncing feature, but I have it turned off right now because it was overloading the transcoding queue.

The TankieTube Homepage

The YT homepage is built by a sinister algorithm customized to distract and exploit you. The TT homepage contains whatever-the-fuck HTML I choose to type with my paws. Determining what to put on it will be a big and ongoing decision. If you've made a channel relevant to the site's theme, send me a message and I'll probably pin it!

About the Outro

The music is La Danse Des Bombes, a great song about the ecstasy of armed combat in defense of the Paris Commune of 1871, which I discovered thanks to comrade exotiquematter@tankie.tube. PT is French software, so I think that's neat.

The sound effects are sampled from a video of the Al-Qassam Brigade resistance fighters in live armed combat against Israeli occupation forces. The sound effects correspond to a :hamas-red-triangle: hamas-red-triangle scene in the video.

Underneath it all is a 140bpm beat by "K1 The Producer".

History & Goals

I started out with a $15/mo VPS (run by Nazis, as it turned out) and have migrated/upgraded the server twice since then. It's now using the most powerful dedicated server available from Freakhosting at ~$230/mo💰🥴, because I wanted it to not suck. It has a Ryzen 9 7950x3D, which is ~32 times as fast as the first server. It still doesn't have the transcoding throughput to keep up with YT syncing without creating a double-digit hour backlog.

The transcoding power can be boosted by renting additional servers for use as remote runners. It all depends on the amount of support the project can get...

Donation Link 🥺👉👈

I'm afraid to add it up, but I'm sure I've sunk at least $600 into various TT expenses since I registered the domain on 2023-10-27 and started playing around. I didn't want to ask for donations until I was sure I knew what I was doing.

Another goal: making the PT vids embed properly in Lemmy!

      • makotech222 [he/him]
        ·
        2 days ago

        uhh yeah thats what gpus are built for essentially. its probably like 1000x faster than an equivalent cpu.

          • mbt2402 [none/use name]
            ·
            2 days ago

            https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/HWAccelIntro would seem to indicate that the AMF encoder provides amd gpu support. https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/938 https://docs.joinpeertube.org/contribute/plugins#add-new-transcoding-profiles

            • TankieTanuki [he/him]
              ·
              2 days ago

              Jorropo commented Aug 31, 2020

              @karibuTW it's also that ffmpeg is CPU focused, don't except any huge improvement by GPU acceleration.

              Is that true?

              Hardware encoders typically generate output of significantly lower quality than good software encoders like x264, but are generally faster and do not use much CPU resource. (That is, they require a higher bitrate to make output with the same perceptual quality, or they make output with a lower perceptual quality at the same bitrate.)

              capitaldcolon

              • mbt2402 [none/use name]
                ·
                2 days ago

                i get ~5-10x speedup with nvenc for h264, can't speak to the quality of the amd or av1 stuff. the quality of motion etc is worse at low bit rates but i think above a few mbps at 1080p its not that much of a difference.

          • loathesome dongeater@lemmygrad.ml
            ·
            2 days ago

            I'm not sure. I peered through peertube docs and they surprisingly do not tell specifically what kind of hardware you need for transcoding. All they talk about is offloading intensive tasks like transcoding to runners but again don't talk about the the hardware requirement.