Fediverse: several servers following one another, several users
following each other. Designates federated communities in general.
Vidiverse: same as Fediverse, but federating videos specifically.
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.
Cache instance: an instance that decided to make available a WebSeed
of its own for a video originating from another instance. It sends a ptCache
activity to notify the origin instance, which will then update its list of
WebSeeds for 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.
All the requests are retried several times if they fail.
Instance
An instance has a websocket tracker which is responsible for all videos
uploaded by its users.
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.
