Why don't we just use BitTorrent for videos? Popcorn time works reasonably well and we don't need a social layer, there are already plenty of them. I d like to see everything that i like being seeded with care by its owners
Because people don't care about the actual videos, it's the social aspect drives these sites. You could upload a video of paint drying and get an active comment thread going on some sites.
Maybe. But you can have that even if YouTube was just a frontend for torrents. I care about some of the videos, eg lectures interesting conferences etc,
Not exactly, no. It uses Webtorrent, which is a WebRTC-layer port of the Bittorrent protocol. The Webtorrent and Bittorrent protocols are incompatible, despite hashes being the same.
With libtorrent starting to support Webtorrent, we should "soon" see a new generation of torrent clients who can bridge the gap between those two protocols.
The main reason is because Bittorrent doesn't have a "social networking" layer like ActivityPub fediverse has, for user/channel following, comments, etc... We could (should?) build a Popcorn Time "social" UI using RSS feeds and some semantic metadata to discover content, but that just isn't there yet. You suggest we don't need it, but what do you use for that purpose?
Peertube reuses an established social networking protocol, adding Bittorrent-like P2P video seeding on top (using Webtorrent protocol, not Bittorrent), taking the best of both worlds in a "low(er)-effort" manner.
In absolute, they are orthogonal problems. But as soon as your video platform has user accounts, playlists and comments, they become the very same thing: a PubSub platform with users exchanging different types of contents.
Many of the popular centralized platforms we have today became popular due to integration with standard 3rd-party tooling such as email, RSS... Now that youtube has shut down RSS feeds, i need an account an API key to simply download videos from my favorite artists... or i can parse the website like youtube-dl but then i need to upgrade my code (or dependencies) every few weeks because Google intentionally broke it to prevent 3rd party clients from existing at all.
With a service like Peertube, i can hit the public API directly, and the API is the protocol. So there is technically very little difference between making a Mastodon or Peertube client, and that's why they can talk to one another. But that Mastodon can interact with Peertube is not only useful to users, it's an overall very good indicator that Peertube can be interfaced reasonably-well with other tools/systems because it's a website and websites are intended to be parsed, if only by a web browser.
So i don't really understand your point. Are you against social networking as part of a video platform, at all, and just want a raw content-addressed storage pool of videos (Bittorrent)? Do you personally not wish to use 3rd party integrations (like Mastodon comments)? If so, why is it a bad thing for others?
Not that it seems to do much. Every time I have used it I have only been connected to the server peer. I doubt there are many people with an active tab open for a particular video.
It may be because noone else was watching that video, or because your browser doesn't support WebRTC, or because your browser blocked the 3rd party request to the STUN server for peer discovery. In any case, the server could and should have other peer instances seed its content ; if that's not the case, you could contact the instance admin and suggest they get that kind of replication going to ease distribution.
