>I don't understand what PeerTube is for, concretely. (I've read parts of your docs before, and understand what federation is.)
I get the impression that it's for personal video sharing. Technically competent users will host their own personal instances and host instances for their communities. These instances are federated into larger social networks where users can interact across instances.
>I would like to be able to host videos inexpensively, perhaps in an s3 bucket or on a raspberry pi. The free / cheap version needs to scale to at most 2-10 concurrent viewers (a more expensive version that scales indefinitely would be nice for commercial use).
I do not think something proprietary like an s3 bucket would be compatible with Peertube, but I have not maintained an instance. The system works with webtorrent (a version of BitTorrent that runs over WebRTC), so it depends whether the concurrent viewers are all watching the same video or not (because then they will seed the videos to each other using webtorrent).
>It would be optionally password protected in a way that is client side encrypted (probably in a way that is transparent to the end user; such as via a key in a url, that loads a bit of javascript that fetches and decrypts the video). That way, amazon or whoever won't accidentally decide my video is a pirated win95 iso or whatever.
The fact that your VPS host is untrustworthy and temperamental is not peertube's fault. Consider a better VPS provider perhaps.
>I should have final say in whether the content is taken down (and own the domain name, in case I want to move to a new cloud provider).
>It should be trivial to set up.
These two things are in conflict. Merely getting ahold of a domain name is non-trivial, although I suppose you could operate it as a Tor onion service or something on the other end of zooko's triangle.
I get the impression that it's for personal video sharing. Technically competent users will host their own personal instances and host instances for their communities. These instances are federated into larger social networks where users can interact across instances.
>I would like to be able to host videos inexpensively, perhaps in an s3 bucket or on a raspberry pi. The free / cheap version needs to scale to at most 2-10 concurrent viewers (a more expensive version that scales indefinitely would be nice for commercial use).
I do not think something proprietary like an s3 bucket would be compatible with Peertube, but I have not maintained an instance. The system works with webtorrent (a version of BitTorrent that runs over WebRTC), so it depends whether the concurrent viewers are all watching the same video or not (because then they will seed the videos to each other using webtorrent).
>It would be optionally password protected in a way that is client side encrypted (probably in a way that is transparent to the end user; such as via a key in a url, that loads a bit of javascript that fetches and decrypts the video). That way, amazon or whoever won't accidentally decide my video is a pirated win95 iso or whatever.
The fact that your VPS host is untrustworthy and temperamental is not peertube's fault. Consider a better VPS provider perhaps.
>I should have final say in whether the content is taken down (and own the domain name, in case I want to move to a new cloud provider). >It should be trivial to set up.
These two things are in conflict. Merely getting ahold of a domain name is non-trivial, although I suppose you could operate it as a Tor onion service or something on the other end of zooko's triangle.