“Since it’s inception in August 2019, Peertube UK has grown to host over 2000 users and over 19000 videos. Sadly, the time has come to close down the service. There are a number of reasons for this, some personal, some more obvious. Firstly, the ongoing global economic situation has taken its toll, and I can simply no longer afford to host a service at this scale. Donations and advertising for the entire 3 years we’ve been running have covered maybe two months of my hosting costs – the rest is all out of my pocket. I’m not an entrepreneur, I don’t have other revenue generating services with which to offset the losses of this service.

Additionally, the proposed UK Online Safety Bill, if enacted, will make it almost impossible to host a site such as Peertube in the UK. This bill makes publishers, with the exception of large media companies, liable for the content hosted on their platform, and applies entirely subjective standards to the content which the law applies to. Given that smaller indie publishers such as Peertube.co.uk are exactly the sort of host used for grass roots activism and political commentary, this law makes me responsible for finding the line between simple activism and extreme terrorism, on threat of imprisonment if the government doesn’t agree with my decisions.

Finally, my family circumstances have changed significantly over the last three years, and I no longer have the free time to moderate a service such as this. As a result, pirate content has been allowed to run rampant over the last few months – a situation which will likely bite me before too long. A service such as Peertube requires substantial moderation effort, and I can no longer deliver that.

The last three years have been a fantastic experience for me in growing a public instance, as well as learning about the challenges involved in hosting something as processor and storage intensive as video, and I would have loved to keep it going as an ongoing concern. Sadly, for all the above reasons, it’s simply not possible to carry on.

New signups are now disabled, and new uploads will be disabled on 1st September 2022. I will continue to host the service until 30th September 2022 to give everyone a chance to migrate their content to an alternative service. I will not be looking to hand over the service to another host – my belief is that the federation model allows you to choose who hosts your data, and it would be unethical for me to just hand over the reins to a third party without your consent.”

yours sincerelly

https://blog.peertube.co.uk/

so this is it?

another video hosting (besides youtube) site shutting down?

Predict the shutdown of vimeo.com.

Because their model (probably) won’t fly as far as the constant advertisement streams of Alphabet’s Google’s Youtube (they are testing up to 10x advertisement clips in front of every video… which is just sick & insane)