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 (WebSeed protocol) the video
Following: the action of a PeerTube instance which will follow another instance (subscribe to its videos)

All the communications between the instances are signed with Linked Data Signatures with the private key of the account that made 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

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 instance 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, he asks 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) so another user who is watching the same video can get the data from the origin server and the user 1 (etc)