The first year in review.

A few months ago we passed the one year anniversary of when rankett.net was created and registrations were opened. Overall I am extremely happy with the direction this peertube instance has taken. This blog post will be a retrospective of how it has gone so far and my plans for the future.

Over the summer 2022, I decided to take the plunge and finally create this peertube instance. The first domain name I wanted (“organum.net”, based on the series by Max Seiffert published around roughly 1920-1950) was taken so I decided on “rankett.net”, named after an organ stop by that name (see http://www.organstops.org/r/Rankett.html ).

Originally, there was a problem with how I encoded the videos. I used a plugin which encoded uploaded videos with the HEVC (libx265) video coder and OPUS audio coder to be more efficient. However, a user emailed me that these videos could not be viewed on Google Chrome. This was not acceptable, so I reverted to the default peertube “profile”, encoding videos with libx264 and AAC video and audio.

Shortly after creating the website I decided to store videos at only one size (720p, or smaller if the uploaded video’s size is smaller than 720p) to save space, especially due to the audio track being saved multiple times identically. In the future, I will be interested to see if there is a plugin which allows me to use different encoders to render videos at different sizes.

Initially, one problem which arose was people creating accounts only to advertise their online services. These accounts would include links to other pages on which they had created identical accounts. Clearly this was an attempt to optimize SEO rankings. It got to the point that every day after I woke up I would have around 5 accounts to delete. However, a peertube update was released which allows me to manually approve account creation. Once this was implemented, the spammers immediately stopped.

The initial reason that I created this peertube page was that I was looking for an instance like this one, specifically created for artists and musicians to share their works. Before this, the first instance I joined was video.ploud.jp, a large general-purpose instance. After this, I went over to Sean Tilley’s (@deadsuperhero@firefish.tech) instance spectra.video. I greatly enjoyed my time there, and it was a good fit for my channel. However, I was still interested in creating my own instance because I knew that I could take some of the “hit” (operator work and paying for cloud computing) because of my Computer Science degree and financial situation, and I wanted to make a larger contribution to the fediverse and I was hoping that the existence of this instance would encourage other musicians to come over to the fediverse and try this alternative to youtube.

On https://rankett.net/about/instance I wrote that I would run this page for “about a year or so, depending on usage and financials”. Now, about a year later, I am happy to continue operating this instance. It has proven to not take an exhaustive amount of work to run, and I have had plenty of time to do other things, such as college work and starting another website, pipe-organ.wiki. Also, it has remained very cheap to operate, costing me less than $20 per month, even when things like the domain name are included in the costs. I’m very happy with how things have gone on rankett.net, the about page says we have reached 199 members, and we have many active members who regularly upload their videos (I’m very thankful to all of you for being here).

Also, I am very thankful for those of you who have donated to me, either over PayPal or on liberapay, to help offset cloud computing costs.

For now, I will continue operating rankett.net for the forseeable future. I have no plans to stop, and I can’t imagine any reason that I would not be able to run this instance anymore.

For the future, I have many plans for the “rankett.net” network. I have considered operating other software under the rankett.net name, like akkoma or pixelfed, or even a bulletin board software. However, I will not do this yet, because I don’t want it to cost too much, and operating a microblogging service would require more moderation. This is something that I am planning for in the years down the road. One other long-term goal that I have is to create a “public index” of similar instances to this one. One dream of mine is that this peertube instance is the inspiration for more peertube instances for artists with similar goals and rules (perhaps we could even use the name “rankett” with different TLD’s, such as rankett.com, rankett.social, etc.). It remains to be seen if this will end up happening, but if it does I will create a public index that will be followed by this instance and hopefully the others.

One short-term goal that I have is to review all the text in the “about instance” page and review all the rules. I wrote this information over a few days when I initially opened registrations on this website, so I will consider wether any rules or other pieces of text should be changed. Also, I will continue looking for other instances to follow (I have not added new instances to the “follow” list in a few months).