Talking about choosing PeerTube

This is the start of what will likely be a series discussing the reasons behind structuring the livestream events the way they are along with how this all came to be.

Big Media

Name the major livestreaming platforms. Twitch. YouTube. Kick. TikTok. There are some regional ones as well like Bilibili in mainland China or TwitCast in Japan. What do all of them have in common? There are a few that come to mind:

• Built-in monetization
• Success generally being defined as how many concurrent viewers or followers/subscribers a given channel has
• Algorithmic promotion to increase platform revenue
• Little built-in incentives to promote anyone other than oneself
• The corporate business model uses very high levels of surveillance capitalistic data collection to increase corporate profits
• Promote a mindset that "Success is tied to how much money you can make as a streamer on this particular platform"

There are more, but for now this list will suffice to help build the context for using alternative platforms like PeerTube for the livestreaming.

Creatives Showcase Goals

To help provide a background for the discussion specifically about PeerTube, we need to discuss the goals of the Showcase livestream parade. There are just a few key goals:

• Promote people connecting with creatives' works as directly as possible, to engage with the artwork, writing, or craft that the creatives' produce in a way that supports the creatives directly through buying works, spreading the word about the different creatives, increasing awareness of various types of creativity, and generally building up the community in a mutually beneficial and wholesome way.
• Push back against the proliferation of AI-generated works by building connections with the humans whose labor has almost universally been stolen to fuel corporate interests in the pursuit of ever insatiable greed in the development of generative AI systems.
• Provide organic and human-relationship-driven discovery for creatives and their typical or existing audiences by relying on non-manipulative promotion to discover otherwise "manipulative algorithm-disfavored" creatives in a wide variety of genres within a single event.

That's a lot of words that can be more-or-less summarized into "Connecting with people, not platforms." Becoming a more "successful" streamer is a perfectly valid and reasonable goal for creatives to strive for.

For these events and effort, the focus is elsewhere: deliberate and thoughtful engagement with creatives' art, produced works, crafts, or other creative endeavors with the goal of building deeper connections and lasting support that doesn't feed the surveillance capitalism platforms.

What are you trying to avoid by using PeerTube instead of the large, existing platforms?

I've decided to talk about the situations and behavior that are not in line with the goals of this effort because for most, those situations are more familiar and easier to relate to. While it's important to show what you want to happen, if that vision is relatively unknown or people have little experience with, painting the picture through removal of negative things can help with the imagination.

Situation 1 - Focusing on increasing one's revenue via the streaming platform.

As stated before, it is perfectly valid and logical for streamers to want to increase their revenue or other measures of success via the large platforms. There are events and even entire websites dedicated to organizing and executing "Raid Trains" or similar with various related goals to increasing one's success on said platform.

This effort is not about that. It's not about trying to see how many bits (Twitch), super-cheers (YouTube), etc. one got during the Raid Train so that one can make posts about it on social media. Those are all things that focus on "how can I succeed on this platform more, how can I become a bigger 'streamer?'" and not "how can I get my artwork, my skills, my creative products into the hands of people who will appreciate it, engage with it, and ultimately support me directly as a Creative?"

Situation 2 - Highly enthusiastic viewers with resources

Twitch has in-platform currency in the way of bits. Viewers can purchase bits using various payment methods which then allows viewers to gift any number of them to a streamer. Gift subscriptions are also another way enthusiastic viewers can support Twitch streamers beyond subscribing themselves to the channel. In addition, many Twitch viewers have access to something called a Prime subscription if they have a linked Amazon Prime account to their Twitch account. This Prime subscription does not cost anything more for the viewer and can be used once every 30 days to financially support the streamer in a small way.

Imagine now that there is a Twitch-based streamer parade. At some point during the Raid Train - the "parade" in Twitch parlance - the train arrives at the channel with the enthusiastic viewers who are excited to support their favorite streamer. They are invested in seeing the financial success of their favorite streamer increase and readily gift bits, gift subs, and other support with the goal of triggering even more Twitch-specific goals like Hype Trains, or even possibly pushing their favorite stream to the top of the Twitch recommended page.

Now, the train continues to the next streamer who has a much smaller viewership, or a viewership that doesn't have the same level of resources. Just a few minutes ago, the enthusiastic viewers contributed financially, excited to participate in the further success of their preferred streamer. Now, even with positive attitudes towards the overall parade event, it's much harder to consider doing something similar for this much smaller streamer now that financial resources have been "used up" in the previous stream. The following thinking becomes common: "I just gave 500 bits to extend the Hype Train. I don't really have any more to contribute here," or "Since I can't spend any more bits or pay for any more gift subs, I can't really support any of the streamers coming up in the parade so I'll probably just drop out here."

The energy from the previous stream was high, but focused on how to make the stream a "success" in terms specific to only that platform, not about "look how many people have bookmarked or shared with others about commissions," or "I know some people who might really like this style for their social media profile pictures." The high energy was from engagement with the platform and how to succeed as "a streamer," not how to have more success as a 3D model designer.

Coming off that energy into a smaller channel, one that possibly doesn't have the ability to monetize via that platform yet, the mindset of the viewers is of "I gave my bits to my favorite, I'm not sure I want to give any bits here." This goes against the goal of building each other up. When the primary expectation for "supporting" a creative is tied specifically to a given platform, it makes it inevitable that existing supporters of a streamer will disproportionately or even exclusively support their favorite streamer. It's part of "winning" the Raid Train because now it unintentionally becomes "which channel managed to get the bigger Hype Train?" instead of "how many new people did everyone manage to discover and support by buying their art or by checking out their published writings or spreading the word about their skills?"

Scenario 3 - Heterogeneous viewing experiences

As I am not as familiar with the details of other platforms, I will be focusing this from a Twitch perspective. On Twitch, if a streamer has not qualified for the Affiliate program, viewers will not be shown ads during the stream in a way that causes them to miss out on anything being broadcast. If a streamer is an Affiliate or Partner, that means that unless a viewer is a paid subscriber to that particular streamer, or a paid subscriber to the Twitch Turbo plan, that viewer will be shown ads at some point during the stream. Viewers will have very different experiences with each streamer due to these decisions by Twitch on monetization.

While this can be worked-around by clever scheduling of ads, the end result is that it is very likely that viewers will have different viewing experiences depending on the streamer they are watching.

Another aspect of this heterogeneous experience is when a streamer's viewers have built up extremely exclusive vocabulary from shared experiences that are impenetrable to anyone else. When a streamer broadcasts on the platform that everyone also knows when exactly to redeem channel points for the maximum "inside-joke" effect, anyone else new to the stream is excluded from the experience, especially when the viewers who do know the inside jokes don't really want to change their chatting habits just because there are people who don't understand. It can inadvertently become a feeling of "this is our space, and you're not quite as welcome here" for long-time viewers who have such extensive exclusive vocabulary and memes.

How does PeerTube address these scenarios?

Just to be clear, no platform is perfect, and PeerTube is not perfect at addressing all possible aspects of the above scenarios. PeerTube, however, does dramatically reduce the risk of those happening, far beyond what any other existing big media platform can.

For scenario 1, this one is fairly straightforward. PeerTube does not have built-in monetization. While it's easy to set up links to external methods of donation, they are all 3rd party and do not integrate into PeerTube and thus don't directly contribute to any privileged status on the PeerTube server.

For scenario 2, this one is similar to that for scenario 1 in that PeerTube does not have built-in monetization. There is little bit of nuance here, though since enthusiastic viewers can still decide to support financially more heavily during their favorite streamer's segment. The nature of the support does typically involve a much higher level of friction since more clicks are needed, and for streamers who sell merchandise, supporters may be waiting to buy specifically during the livestream parade event due to the likelihood of the streamer running "promotional sales" during the event. This can be an unexpected positive, however, for other creatives in the parade if the viewers already have any desired physical goods as this would increase the opportunity for different creatives to receive support.

Scenario 3 is different since it deals with the social aspect instead of the financial aspect. Some amount of "insider-only" conversation is unavoidable since that's what allows for people to build social groups and shared experiences. Having that is a part of being human and should be celebrated. Removing some of the tools that create "This specific Twitch Streamer's Channel's unique vocabulary/memes" moments instead allows for some "insider-only" exchanges while allowing for a new scaffold for a new set of shared experiences: a PeerTube livestream parade of diverse creative people. Viewers won't have access to platform specific tools such as channel-point redemptions, dynamically modified emojis, custom badges, etc which brings the focus towards the new, likely unfamiliar experiences with PeerTube.

Why would a creative decide to join such an event like this if they could instead be spending the time streaming on their preferred platform and bringing in financial support?

Asking creatives to take time out of their lives to dedicate effort and resources to an experimental event is quite a weighty request. This is an experiment and there are a lot of unknowns, including whether or not people even come to view and engage with the live streams, let alone produced works. What we can say, however, is that existing methods of trying to build meaningful and lasting community via large media platforms are increasingly harmful and exploitive of the users of those platforms with visible and invisible costs increasing as time goes on. Surveillance Capitalism demands ever more ways to extract value from people and users through data harvesting, stealing of works to power AI models, modifying people's behavior through manipulative algorithms, and exploiting labor in harmful and deceptive way. All this is to drive further growth and profits for the shareholders of those platforms, with the users of the platform being disposable when doing so increases revenue.

This experiment is something different. There is no goal to make a platform the dominant one. Everything is volunteer and using software and platforms that receive no financial benefit for increasing viewers or creatives using it. We want to connect people with other people, not a YouTube channel. The goal is to change the mindset of "come and follow my YouTube/Instagram account" to "come and engage with me and my works directly, honestly, and without big social profiting off our labor and data."

To answer the question more directly, the reason for a creative to join this experiment is because we want to build something different. We want to build connections without relying on big media platforms. That doesn't mean we want to replace Twitch, YouTube, or TikTok and have everyone migrate to something like PeerTube. It's about saying "no" to AI stealing content via platforms selling access to users media. It's about saying "no" to being manipulated by platform-profit-increasing algorithms instead of promoting healthy community building and mutual support. It's not about building up any specific platform, it's about building up each other and building community.

With those goals, PeerTube strikes a nice balance of being a non-monetized, anti-surveillance-capitalism platform with a relatively familiar user experience similar to that of the existing large media platforms. It's a risk in terms of losing time and effort dedicated to these events, but we want to start breaking the dependence Creatives have on big media and have to start somewhere. Hopefully, other types of events with similar goals can gain enough interest to try breaking the big media dependence in new ways that haven't been discussed yet. That would be a validation and affirmation that people are willing to push back and take back control over their content in ways that value community, not corporate profits. PeerTube is the platform chosen for this experiment and hopefully it's an incredibly positive and encouraging experience for everyone.

Why don't you just take donations for the event and then split it up between all the different creatives to give them an incentive to participate?

Gathering up money into a combined fund to distribute fairly to all involved is a very positive and beneficial way for helping groups of people. If a group of people wish to do this and support creatives in such a way, we are happy to support and spread the word of such an effort! That sounds like a great opportunity for mutual aid-style group support.

This experiment and related events are focused on building direct connections between people and people engaging with creatives' works. We are trying to build each other up and build deeper connections. Donating to a shared pool of funds deprioritizes the connection building with creatives and their works and instead prioritizes contributing in a non-specific, indirect way. We want to elevate the connection building with creatives and their art with meaningful and thoughtful support.

In Summary

Why PeerTube? Because it has the right balance of familiar user-experience without the weight of built-in monetization, anti-surveillance capitalism design, technical maturity, very high levels of control over one's data, and facilitates the building of connections with People not Platforms - not letting big media enrich itself at the expense of harming people.

It's a risk and a big ask for creatives to consider participating. It's one hopefully people are willing to take in the fight against AI and manipulative algorithms. We are doing the best we can with what we have and will keep it up as long as possible. The stakes are too high to NOT try. Thank you for reading.

For more information directly from PeerTube about it, check out the project website at https://joinpeertube.org