The free, open-source, ActivityPub-federated video platform — a self-owned YouTube alternative you host yourself.
Last verified · 2026-07-02 · by Moe Ameen
PeerTube is a free, open-source, decentralized video platform. It is not an AI generator — it is where your videos live. Instead of one company owning every creator's channel, PeerTube lets anyone run their own video server (an "instance"), and those instances federate with each other using the ActivityPub protocol, the same standard behind Mastodon and the wider Fediverse. The result is a network of independently operated video hosts that can follow and mirror each other, so a viewer on one instance can watch and comment on videos hosted anywhere across the network.
It was started in 2017 by a developer known as Chocobozzz and is developed and maintained by Framasoft, a French non-profit focused on digital freedom. The first beta arrived in March 2018 and version 1.0 landed on October 11, 2018. The software is written in TypeScript and licensed under AGPL-3.0. The current release is the v8 line (v8.2.2, a maintenance/security update, shipped July 2, 2026); v8 added team collaboration — channel owners can grant other members editor access to publish, update, and manage videos, playlists, and channel syncs.
The defining technical trait is peer-to-peer delivery. When a video gets popular, viewers' browsers share pieces of it with each other over WebRTC, spreading the bandwidth load instead of hammering one server. (Early versions used WebTorrent; PeerTube v6 moved fully to HLS with WebRTC P2P.) Live streaming has been supported since v3.0 in January 2021. There are official Android and iOS apps, and Framasoft runs Sepia Search, a meta-search engine that indexes videos across public instances.
What PeerTube deliberately does not have is as important as what it does: no advertising, no tracking, and no algorithmic recommendation feed. Discovery happens through subscriptions, RSS, federation, and Fediverse follows rather than a black-box algorithm. There is also no built-in monetization — creators typically link out to Patreon, Liberapay, or direct donations. Because instances are self-hosted, there is no single price; you either run your own server, join a community instance, or pay a managed host.
PeerTube solves ownership; it does not solve reach. By design it has no recommendation algorithm and no built-in discovery engine, so a great video on your instance is only found by people who already subscribe or stumble across it through federation. That is the exact gap Kompozy fills — not by replacing PeerTube, but by feeding it. Kompozy does not publish directly to PeerTube (it is not one of Kompozy's nine connected networks), so the workflow runs the other way: your PeerTube upload is the long-form source, and Kompozy turns it into the short-form funnel that sends new viewers back to your federated channel.
Concretely: take a long-form video from your PeerTube instance and drop it into Kompozy. Clipped Shorts detects the strongest moments and cuts them to vertical with branded captions; the same video becomes a carousel of key points, quote graphics, native text posts in your voice via the Persona Brief, a recap blog, and a newsletter. Kompozy then schedules and fans that set across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, X, Facebook, Pinterest, and Threads from one queue — each post a doorway back to the full video on your owned PeerTube home. You keep the sovereignty PeerTube gives you and add the mainstream-platform distribution it intentionally leaves out.
PeerTube is a free, open-source, decentralized video platform developed by Framasoft, a French non-profit. Anyone can run their own video server (an "instance"), and instances federate with each other and the wider Fediverse using the ActivityPub protocol. It has no ads, no tracking, and no algorithmic recommendation feed.
The software is free and open-source under the AGPL-3.0 license. There is no single subscription price because it is self-hosted — you can run your own instance, join a community-run one, or pay a managed host to run it for you. Bandwidth and server costs are the operator's.
PeerTube is decentralized and self-owned rather than run by one company. There are no ads, no tracking, and no recommendation algorithm — discovery happens through subscriptions, federation, and Fediverse follows. Videos are delivered peer-to-peer to share bandwidth, and there is no built-in monetization, so creators link out to Patreon, Liberapay, or donations.
Yes. Peer-to-peer live streaming has been supported since PeerTube v3.0, released in January 2021, and includes live chat. Later releases added scheduling and stability improvements for handling more simultaneous viewers.
Because PeerTube has no discovery algorithm, reach comes from promotion off the platform. A common workflow is to host the full video on PeerTube, then use a tool like Kompozy to clip it into short-form vertical videos, carousels, and posts and publish them across TikTok, Reels, YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn, and X — each pointing viewers back to your PeerTube channel.