PeerTube/ARCHITECTURE.md

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Architecture

Vocabulary

  • Fediverse: several servers following each others.
  • 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.
  • Following: the action of a PeerTube instance which will follow another instance (subscribe to its videos).

Base

Communications

  • 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.
  • The maximum of points would be defined.

Instance

  • An instance has a websocket tracker which is responsible for all the video uploaded in it.
  • 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.