Yeah if you aren’t down to publicly expose your IP address / port forward, the cheapest way I can think of still involves a several $/mo VPS that just reverse proxies home to a more powerful PC. That’s what I do since I’m behind CGNAT.
Not only is there the issue of getting approval from the video creators, there’s the issue that most PeerTube servers aren’t ready to handle a huge influx in uploads, as this would likely be a bulk operation.
Personally I think mirroring YouTube content would be more viable once ActivityPods lands and is integrated with PeerTube, which could potentially let you self host your PeerTube account data while still being part of a separate “home instance”, which would greatly help with the storage issue for PeerTube as we could all bring our own storage.
I think they’re making it more complicated than it needs to be. On any other social media site, you find people by their username. So just ask for your friends username (username@instance.com) and put it in the search bar and it’ll come up. Using the URL can be convenient on desktop because you can just copy and paste it from the address bar when you’re looking at someone’s profile.
And if you want to discover new people where you don’t already know their username, then I believe that is the same as any other social media as well, you can come across them in the comments of people you follow or go to the discover tab or search hashtags and you’ll find new people that you can tap on and follow.
I feel like this basically covers how you would find people. A lot of people get hung up on how you know what instance other people are on but it doesn’t usually matter. Either someone will give you their username which includes @instance.com, or if you don’t know the instance you can search for their name and all known accounts with that name will show up.
For example if I just search my username “BakedCatboy” (not my real username), the search results show both my mastodon and Pixelfed accounts.
This is great to hear, dansup has been stretched across so many projects for so long so hopefully this really supercharges pixelfed (and friends) development and helps to increase the diversity of AP servers.
Wow that’s impressive! I tend to be very value oriented, and at the sub $5 price, you’re getting so little that I feel like you’re mostly paying for a public IP and bandwidth. And of course selfhosting your compute is usually a win, especially if you already have something laying around. So I just pay the public IP tax for a reverse proxy and home host it all. I would probably go with a cheaper VPS for my reverse proxy but I need the confidence it’ll hold up to multiple friends Plex streaming.