Anyone with a modicum of technical skills can host a PeerTube server, aka an instance. Each instance hosts its users and their videos. In this way, <strong>every instance is created, moderated and maintained independently by various administrators.</strong>
You can still watch from your account videos hosted by other instances though if the administrator of your instance had previously connected it with other instances.
And there's more! PeerTube uses <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://activitypub.rocks">ActivityPub</a>, a federating protocol that <strong>allows you to interact with other software</strong>, provided they also use this protocol. For example, PeerTube and Mastodon -a Twitter alternative- are connected: <strong>you can follow a PeerTube user from Mastodon</strong> (the latest videos from the PeerTube account you follow will appear in your feed), <strong>and even comment on a PeerTube-hosted video directly from your Mastodon's account.</strong>
Mainstream online video broadcasting services make money off of your data by analyzing your interactions so that they can then bombard your with targeted advertising.
Most importantly, <strong>you are a person to PeerTube, not a product in need of profiling so as to be stuck in video loops.</strong> For example, PeerTube doesn't use any biased recommendation algorithms to keep you online for hours on end.
All of this is made possible by Peertube's free/libre license (GNU-AGPL). Its code is a digital "common", that belongs to everybody, instead of a secret formula that belongs to Google (in the case of Youtube) or to Vivendi/Bolloré (Dailymotion). This free/libre license <strong>guarantees our fundamental freedoms as users and allows many contributors to offer evolutions and new features.</strong>
YouTube has clearly gone astray: its hoster, Google-Alphabet, can enforce its ContentID system (the infamous "Robocopyright") or its videos recommendation system, all of which appear to be as obscure as unfair.
The feature is called <a href="https://docs.joinpeertube.org/admin/following-instances#instances-redundancy" target="_blank">"server redundancy"</a> and caches your most popular videos to help serve additional viewers.
Direct contact with a human-scale hoster allows for two things: you no longer are the client of a huge tech company, and <strong>you can nurture a special relationship with your hoster, who distributes your data.</strong>
