PeerTube
Platform · this deep dive is built from the official pages of the platform itself and of the tools that support it.
Overview
PeerTube is not a service but a program. The project explains this outright: PeerTube is installed on a web server and lets you create your own video host — a "home YouTube"; the goal is not to gather the world's video on one server farm but to end up with a network of many small connected hosts. The program is developed by the French non-profit Framasoft, and two full-time developers there work on PeerTube.
Hence the main consequence: you do not register "with PeerTube", you register on a specific platform with its own owner, rules and limits. Framasoft stresses that it does not control who downloads and installs the program, and runs only two platforms of its own — framatube.org and peer.tube.
The platforms are linked by the ActivityPub protocol: you can subscribe to a channel from Mastodon, and video from one server is shown on another. The second technical difference is distribution over WebRTC, where viewers help serve the video to each other and reduce the load on the server.
Who's here
You have to be careful with the numbers here: the project has three sets of them, and they do not agree.
The public platform directory the project maintains itself returned, on the date of our check, 1816 platforms, 486,274 registered users, 23,994 active over a month, 973,867 videos, 897,353,434 views and 339 platforms with open registration. That is the freshest and most verifiable measurement — but it counts only the platforms that added themselves to the directory.
At the same moment the project's home page states «1,000,000 videos and 1600 platforms in the network», while the search engine description of that same page says more than 600,000 videos, more than 70 million views and 150,000 users. Three sources belonging to one owner disagree with each other; for any calculations the directory is the more reliable footing.
The network has no breakdown by country or language: the data sits on the servers of individual owners. The interface hints indirectly at the geography — the project's home page is translated into more than two dozen languages, including Russian.
Getting started
The first step is choosing a platform. The project has a selection form: you state whether you are a viewer or an author, whether you need live streaming, which topics interest you, how to display sensitive content, in what language and how much space you need for video — at least 1, 5, 20 or 50 GB. The per-account quota is set by the administrator, and it differs on every platform.
Registration also depends on the owner: the program lets them turn registration on or off, approve new users manually and set upload limits. It is far from open everywhere — 339 platforms out of 1816.
Inside an account you create one or several channels: the project calls this a way to group video by topic and dress the channel up with a name, a banner and an avatar. Separately there is an export of all your data — video, settings, channels — into an archive and an upload of it to another PeerTube platform.
What you can publish
A video can be published in three ways: upload a file, import by a link (through youtube-dl or a direct MP4) or import a torrent; the last two are enabled by the administrator. There is also auto-synchronization: the program can pull in a channel from YouTube, Vimeo and other platforms.
Privacy is configured with five modes: public, unlisted, password-protected, internal and private. A video takes a category, a licence, a language, tags, a thumbnail, subtitles and chapters; comments and downloading are turned off with a checkbox. From an audio file and a picture the platform will assemble a video itself.
Live streams run over RTMP from OBS or another program. A normal stream is one-off and the recording replaces the broadcast; a permanent one lets you go live many times at the same address, and the recordings are saved as separate videos. The right to go live, to publish recordings and the limit on simultaneous streams are also enabled by the administrator.
What is forbidden is set not by the program but by the platform: being free does not mean being above the law — each host defines its terms of use within local legislation, and users can report a video. By default sensitive content is hidden.
How to grow
There is no algorithmic feed in the usual sense — there is federation and search: channels are found from compatible programs, and video from other platforms shows up on yours if the owners have subscribed to each other.
A view is counted after 10 seconds of playback, or after 50 % of the duration if the video is shorter than 10 seconds; the counter updates with a delay. The statistics combine views on your own platform, on remote ones over ActivityPub and in embedded players, and show views and likes, the average and total watch duration, the viewer peak with its date, unique viewers, the number of countries and regions and retention by timecode. The charts break viewers down by date, country, region, client, device and operating system.
There is no advertising system: the project writes outright that it does not depend on advertising and does not track the viewer.
Path to monetization
There is no built-in monetization, and that is a deliberate refusal. The project's wording: a monetization policy does not exist at the moment, PeerTube is designed to be neutral on the question; an author can display a support button under a video, in which they freely place text, images and links — to Patreon, Tipeee, PayPal, Liberapay. The reason is named in the same place: the developers do not want to tie the code to a single funding method and suggest building your own schemes through the plugin programming interface.
The practical conclusion: there will be no money from the platform. Everything you earn on PeerTube will come from viewers directly, and if you are the administrator yourself, the bill for traffic and storage is yours too.
Tools and automation
PeerTube has an open REST API with OAuth 2.0 authorization: first you request the platform's client_id and client_secret, then the user token; in the example from the documentation the token's lifetime is 14,399 seconds. The same page describes how to tell that a site runs on PeerTube: the NodeInfo response, the x-powered-by: PeerTube header and the og:platform tag in the HTML. Client libraries are meant to be generated from the OpenAPI schema.
Of third-party tools the documentation lists Prismedia — uploading to PeerTube and YouTube at once, YouTube2PeerTube — a bot that mirrors YouTube channels, Peertube Mass Uploader — bulk uploading from MP4 with thumbnails and subtitles, peertube-cli and peertubetomasto for auto-posting to Mastodon. The list is maintained by the project itself. Built in, there is editing (trimming, a watermark, an intro), remote transcoding runners, plugins and themes.
Limits and rules
- The limits are set by the platform's owner. The upload quota, the availability of imports and live streams, the number of simultaneous broadcasts, the moderation rules — these are the settings of a specific server; PeerTube has no single file size limit.
- Server requirements for an administrator. The minimum is 1 core, 1.5 GB of memory and a 20 Mbit/s upload channel; for 1000 simultaneous viewers — 4 cores, 4 GB and 1 Gbit/s; with transcoding on the same machine — 8 cores and 8 GB.
- Browsers. Firefox 78+ and recent Edge and Chrome on a computer, Safari 14+ on macOS, Safari 14.5+ on iOS.
- Legal. Framasoft holds the PeerTube trademark in several countries and asks you not to give your own projects that name.
- Sensitive content. In September 2021, across 900 platforms in the directory, the share of video with that tag was about 1 %.
Who it's for
It suits you if control matters: your own domain and rules, no advertising and no tracking, and the ability to export everything into an archive and move at any moment. It suits communities, schools and organizations that already have an audience and do not need an algorithm to find it. It suits developers: the REST API is documented and open, the code is free, and plugins are written yourself.
It does not suit you if you count on earning on the platform itself: there is no monetization in the program, by the developers' decision. It does not suit you if you need a flow of random viewers: the directory counts about 24 thousand monthly active users across the whole network — which is not comparable with the large video services. And it does not suit you if you are prepared neither to administer a server nor to accept someone else's rules.
Verified data
The checked data this deep dive rests on.
About the platform
the platform describes itself as follows: «A free software to take back control of your videos! With more than 600,000 hosted videos, viewed more than 70 millions times and 150,000 users, PeerTube is the decentralized free software alternative to videos platforms developed by Framasoft»
Self-description: this is the platform's claim about itself, not an independent assessment
source, checked 2026-07-28
the program is developed by the French non-profit Framasoft; two full-time developers there work on PeerTube
The FAQ section «Who is working on PeerTube?»
source, checked 2026-07-28
PeerTube is not a service but free software that anyone installs on their own server; Framasoft does not control who installs it and runs only two platforms of its own — framatube.org and peer.tube
The section «Do you control what is uploaded on a PeerTube platform?»
source, checked 2026-07-28
Who's here
the public platform directory reports: 1816 platforms, 486,274 users, 23,994 active over a month, 973,867 videos, 897,353,434 views, 339 platforms with open registration
Directory data on the date of the check; the directory contains only those platforms that added themselves to it
source, checked 2026-07-28
Sources diverge: the project's home page names «1,000,000 videos and 1600 platforms in the network»
This conflicts both with the description in the markup of the same page (600,000 videos, 70 million views, 150,000 users) and with the figures in the public directory
source, checked 2026-07-28
Sources diverge: the description of the home page says: more than 600,000 videos, more than 70 million views, 150,000 users
source, checked 2026-07-28
Business terms
Firefox 78+ and the latest versions of Edge and Chrome on a computer, Safari 14+ on macOS, Safari 14.5+ on iOS, and the latest Chrome and Firefox on mobile are supported
The section on supported browsers
source, checked 2026-07-28
Content
a video can be published in three ways: by uploading a file, by importing a link (through youtube-dl or a direct MP4) and by importing a torrent; imports are enabled by the platform's administrator
The Publish a video or a live section
source, checked 2026-07-28
video privacy: public, unlisted, password-protected, internal and private
The section on features for authors
source, checked 2026-07-28
live streams run over RTMP (OBS and others); there is a normal stream, where the recording replaces the broadcast, and a permanent one, where the address does not change and the recordings are saved as separate videos
The Publish a live section
source, checked 2026-07-28
Analytics
a view is counted after 10 seconds of playback, or after 50 % of the duration if the video is shorter than 10 seconds
The section «How does PeerTube count views?»
source, checked 2026-07-28
video statistics combine views on your own platform, on remote platforms over ActivityPub and in embedded players; views, likes, the average and total watch duration, the viewer peak, unique viewers, the number of countries and regions and retention by timecode are shown
The Video statistics section
source, checked 2026-07-28
How the money works here
there is no built-in monetization: the project calls itself neutral on the question; an author can display a support button under a video with arbitrary text and links (Patreon, Tipeee, PayPal, Liberapay)
The section «What is PeerTube's policy about content monetization?»
source, checked 2026-07-28
Limits and restrictions
the minimum server requirements: 1 core, 1.5 GB of memory, a 20 Mbit/s upload channel; for 1000 simultaneous viewers 4 cores, 4 GB and 1 Gbit/s are recommended; with transcoding on the same machine — 8 cores and 8 GB
The section «Should I have a big server to run PeerTube?»
source, checked 2026-07-28
Restrictions
there are no unified content rules: each platform sets its own terms within local legislation; sensitive content is hidden by default in the program's settings
The sections on illegal content and on objectionable video
source, checked 2026-07-28
in September 2021, across 900 platforms in the public directory, the share of video tagged as sensitive content was about 1 percent
The project's measurement with the date stated; there is no fresher measurement on the page
source, checked 2026-07-28
Legal
Framasoft holds the PeerTube trademark in several countries and asks that the name not be used in other people's own projects
The section «Is PeerTube a registered trademark?»
source, checked 2026-07-28
API access
an open REST API with OAuth 2.0 authorization: first you request the client_id and client_secret, then the user token; in the example response the token's lifetime is 14,399 seconds
The REST API quick start section
source, checked 2026-07-28
a PeerTube platform can be identified by the NodeInfo response, the x-powered-by: PeerTube header and the og:platform tag in the HTML
The Detect a PeerTube instance section
source, checked 2026-07-28
the documentation lists third-party tools: Prismedia (uploading to PeerTube and YouTube at once), YouTube2PeerTube (channel mirroring), Peertube Mass Uploader (bulk uploading), peertube-cli
The list is maintained by the project itself; whether each tool works was not checked separately
source, checked 2026-07-28
Languages
the interface language of the home page: en-US
The language is taken from the markup attribute, the versions from hreflang
source, checked 2026-07-28
Catalogue section: all similar See also: catalogue index · region: Western Europe · scheduler comparison · find by situation · platform restrictions