A live stream of a concert, a promotional video for an exhibition, an interview with a writer about a new book, a tutorial of a maker space, a video recording of an event, and historical images to supplement a history lesson: public, cultural and social organisations such as festivals, libraries, art institutions and education increasingly use video to reach and inform their audience.
At the moment, they often rely on Big Tech platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo. Unfortunately, these platforms do more than just show video content: they force your audience to watch advertisements; use opaque algorithms for recommendations that pull your audience into a ‘rabbit hole’, and collect data from your audience to generate advertising revenue. This conflicts with the social interest that these public organisations strive for.
Time to break free
But it can be done differently! In the meantime, a development is taking place that can offer a solution: the development of ActivityPub. This is a protocol for decentralized social networking sites, which means that you can easily exchange content between different platforms built on ActivityPub. This offers an interesting opportunity for public organizations: when they start sharing their content via a platform that uses ActivityPub, they no longer oblige their audience to use that same platform (and therefore to agree to the terms of use of that platform). Instead, the audience can choose which ActivityPub platform they will use to view this content. Then it works similarly to e-mail: you can easily send messages from a Gmail account to Outlook, Hotmail or Protonmail: these are interoperable.
There are already quite a few platforms built on ActivityPub, such as Mastodon, a messaging platform; PeerTube, a video platform; Friendica, a social network; Pixelfed, a photo platform; Castopod, a podcast platform; and Flohmarkt, a marketplace.
What will we do?
In PeerTube Spaces we offer public organisations the opportunity to use the open source video platform PeerTube so that they can share video content with their audience in a value-driven way. We do this by setting up shared PeerTube environments to experiment with. In doing so, we investigate how this functions as a ‘digital community asset’. The project is divided into 4 phases:
- Research
- Development
- Pilot
- Evaluation and continuity
We will…
- Set up one or more PeerTube instances as digital community assets;
- Offer channels on these to public organisations to host videos;
- Conduct two cases with public organisations from the PublicSpaces network that will use such a channel;
- Set up a simple form of structure and governance (organisational form) for arranging hosting and management;
- Link different PeerTube instances to each other so that video can easily be exchanged between the different public organisations. Link PeerTube instances to Mastodon;
- Develop guidance for use and implementation;
- Develop and implement an operating model to share tasks and costs between users;
- Conduct user research with end users.
The project will run from September 2024 and is a collaboration between SURF, Beeld & Geluid and PublicSpaces.
