The PeerTube project has made some huge strides since its initial inception in 2018, ramping up from a 0.0.1 Alpha release last January to a 1.0 stable release in December, the project has been great at managing its roadmap, and has updated it to reflect their 2019 plans. Here’s our takeaway of some of the more impressive features coming in.

Live Streaming

As it stands today, there is still no federated, P2P-powered alternative to Twitch available in the fediverse. However, the prospect of offering live streaming has been in discussion for a while now within the PeerTube project. The developers discussed offering a segmented video architecture through an experimental implementation of HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), which would allow for streaming on the PeerTube platform.

We now use a fragmented mp4 instead multiple ts segments. But we still have 2 different files per resolution: 1 for HLS and 1 for WebTorrent. One day, if we are able to stream in the browser fragmented mp4 files (coming from webtorrent) we’ll use only 1 file.

Chocobozz, PeerTube developer

Playlist Support

Playlists are one of the more-requested user features, the lack of which is sorely missed from the platform. PeerTube’s upcoming release includes built-in playlists now, which will be very handy for creators and viewers to sort and organize their videos.

Playlist entries can be sorted and re-organized at any time, making it very easy to define a specific sequential order for a series of videos. Additionally, any playlist can either be set to Public or Private.

In addition to all of this, users will be able to easily add any video they find on PeerTube to one of their own playlists, making the feature handily accessible and easy to use.

Watch Later list

Watch Later is a popular and convenient feature found on YouTube, allowing users to put videos in a special playlist for later viewing. PeerTube’s upcoming release not only ships with playlist support, but features a default playlist for this very purpose.

Plugin System

One realization made by the PeerTube dev team is that not every feature request will make it into PeerTube’s core platform. It has been suggested that PeerTube investigate setting up a plugin infrastructure, to open up the possibility of extending the platform by third-parties.

Theme System

PeerTube currently offers a rudimentary theme system to admins running their own instances – right now, you basically have to copy in snippets of CSS and JavaScript into some blank fields that are tucked away in an admin panel. This request asks that PeerTube instead implement theme capabilities to make the customization process easier. Details are still scarce at this time, but this particular entry is marked as High Priority.

Configurable Overview Page

Some recent user feedback offered the opinion that the Overview tab ought to be more configurable, to promote channels and categories of media that a user or admin would want to feature. This feedback has been picked up, and is now a milestone for 2019.

What About Moderation?

Right now, there is a dedicated list of feature requests specifically geared towards moderation, and none of these entries seem to appear on the current version of the 2019 roadmap.

While this might mean that they’re still up for consideration for 2019 development, it’s likely that a good portion of the fediverse’s userbase would like to see at least a few of these entries get picked up on the roadmap, as strong moderation and anti-harassment features are important prerequisites in developing federated communication systems.

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