[tiborsaas]

There could be multiple search servers. I don't understand how that goes against the centralized nature, links to the video hosting instances would still be essential. Distributed services still benefit the traffic from Google, DDG, etc. Why this project is special?

I fail to see how an search index would be bad user experience. Compare that to the current situation of 61 isolated, unsearchable PeerTube instances.

[jasode]

Ok, I think we're talking past each other. Let me attempt to unravel.

You/SamBam/danShumway are at the abstraction level of technical protocols, parsing JSON files, index servers, etc.

I'm at the abstraction level of psychology and emergent group behavior that overrides those ideal technical structures.

>Distributed services still benefit the traffic from Google,

This sentence is a perfect example of how we're focusing on different things.

Your interpretation: Google is an index, and it links out to distributed servers. Ergo, an analagous Peertube-Index metadata server that lists PeerTube p2p nodes can be technically accomplished to do the same thing. What's the problem?!?

My interpretation of mikece: Google's index/algorithm/ranking/censorship has "too much power" over the web ecosystem and this a common complaint of its centralized authority of urls. Who gave Google all that power? Us websurfers did! How did it get that power even though it just has links to distributed http nodes instead of serving up the data (NYTimes article, etc) itself? [Excluding Google Amp in this example.]

To me, mikece is asking how to avoid another Google/Youtube type of defacto centralization of power which means we avoid central servers from existing to accumulate that power in the first place. To me this means p2p clients all querying each other and mikece is wondering if this is tehnically possible. That's what my speed-of-light answer is about.

Therefore, discussing what's "technically feasible" with indexing p2p video nodes seems to be missing the point if the abstraction level is emergent group behavior.

[tiborsaas]

What does this emergent behavior mean in practice? It's not inherently good or bad. If my index becomes more popular than individual nodes, so what? PeerTube is doomed? As you mentioned, I don't see a problem with this. User experience matters a lot and Google realized this 20 years ago. 1 input, 10 instant results, the rest is history.

I see you don't like this, but slicing up a service to isolated islands won't help much. It's a good step forward, but search is essential and in this case takes very little effort.

Furthermore PeerTube instances are centralized services too, if one gets very popular, then it will thrive / suffer the same way YouTube did.

[jasode]

>What does this emergent behavior mean in practice? It's not inherently good or bad. If my index becomes more popular than individual nodes, so what?

Apathy or indifference is also a valid position. However, I was addressing the many who do think there's "bad" in that emergent behavior.

What does it mean in practice? Some believe Google's search index, Youtube's video service, Facebook, etc have too much power over the internet. Therefore, lecturing them that "the http protocol itself is already decentralized so what does it matter that one http node spelled "youtube" is more popular?" -- is not a satisfactory explanation. They want to change that power imbalance.

Therefore, I believe the social ideals for p2p video would be to take away power from Youtube and have it more widely dispersed. Ideally, nobody would be big enough to "dominate" in the web video ecosystem. There wouldn't be a Power Law of popular cache index servers with one eventually dominating.

I'm saying that p2p video really can't prevent that from happening if a bunch of users voluntarily gravitate towards index servers which are centralized -- which negates the power-dissipating intentions of p2p. Also consider that many video content creators would voluntarily upload their videos to those index cache servers which further solidifies the centralization of power. Humans keep being humans and will subvert the (global) goals of decentralization and (local individual actions) aggregated together inadvertently recreate centralized platforms!

If you don't care about that, that's valid but a lot of others do based on common complaints of Youtube wielding too much influence.