One of the PeerTube test instances.

PeerTube, the decentralized YouTube alternative, has just made a new milestone release. The project has come a long way, and already sports a vastly improved UI and federated comments.

Each of these comments was posted from a Mastodon instance.

Speaking of that, it’s also now possible to directly follow PeerTube channels from Mastodon or Pleroma instances.

The flow isn’t super intuitive yet, but this is still a pretty exciting development. It means that you can follow your favorite video providers directly from your microblogging app, and the videos will pop up in your stream.

Other great improvements include:

Admins can now customize instances using CSS and JS, a win for content providers who want to add their own branding

Videos can be mirrored directly from YouTube / Vimeo / Dailymotion, or practically any site supported by the youtube-dl library.

library. File transcoding can now be turned on or off for a particular instance

Support for video in portrait mode

Support for iOS devices

There are also numerous bugfixes and API improvements in each of the releases leading up to this.

Overall, PeerTube is taking tremendous shape, and is looking more and more like a viable alternative to centralized video hosting providers.