- Fediverse: several servers following one another, several users following each other. Designates federated communities in general.
- Vidiverse: same as Fediverse, but federating videos specifically.
- Instance: a server which runs PeerTube in the fediverse.
- Origin instance: the instance on which the video was uploaded and which is seeding (through the WebSeed protocol) the video.
- Cache instance: an instance that decided to make available a WebSeed
of its own for a video originating from another instance. It sends a
ptCacheactivity to notify the origin instance, which will then update its list of WebSeeds for the video. - Following: the action of a PeerTube instance which will follow another instance (subscribe to its videos).
- All the communication between the instances are signed with Linked Data Signatures with the private key of the account that authored the action.
- We use the ActivityPub protocol (only server-server for now). Object models could be found in shared/models/activitypub directory.
- All the requests are retried several times if they fail.
- An instance has a websocket tracker which is responsible for all videos uploaded by its users.
- An instance has an administrator that can follow other instances.
- An instance can be configured to follow back automatically.
- An instance can blacklist other instances (only used in "follow back" mode).
- An instance cannot choose which other instances follow it, but it can decide to reject all followers.
- After having uploaded a video, the instance seeds it (WebSeed protocol).
- If a user wants to watch a video, they ask its instance the magnet URI and the frontend adds the torrent (with WebTorrent), creates the HTML5 video player and streams the file into it.
- A user watching a video seeds it too (BitTorrent). Thus another user who is watching the same video can get the data from the origin server and other users watching it.