Mentions United: Peertube Provider

I don't often work with videos, especially not on social media. But every now and then I record one with my smartphone, for example at a concert or a soccer match, and want to blog about the event later. I then embed the MP4 files as an asset in the corresponding Markdown. Over the years, a few MB have accumulated and at some point I had to think about where to put them in order to keep the size of the blog under 1GB. Outsourcing to YouTube? I can, but that would be the wrong direction for me. Something on Fediverse or the social web? Of course ... Peertube! On the German instance clip.place operated by adminForge, a channel for the videos was quickly created and uploaded. Basically I only had to change the URL's in the video and iframe tags to the new ones. I don't expect a lot of comments on my videos on clip.place, as I currently use it more as a repository or syndication target, but you never know ... and since I have so far added a Mentions United Provider Plugin to all of my connected platforms that have a free API, one is now also available for Peertube. As always, the data for the plugin, i.e. the video URLs, are in the frontmatter of my post. Here is an example of my concert post WIRTZ DNA-Tour 2024, Leipzig @ 2024-02-17: syndication: - host: Peertube url: https://clip.place/w/quf3PWpmKJjRwm89axBLY2 In the EJS template for my posts, it is checked whether there is at least one Peertube syndication for the current post and if so, the Peertube provider plugin is integrated and initialized after the main Mention United script in the JS code. Finally, the retrieve method contained in the plugin is called via the general Mentions United load and the comments are displayed on the page, if there are any. let synPeertube = syndications?.filter(s => s.host.toLowerCase() === "peertube"); 0) { %> ... const mentionsUnited = new MentionsUnited({ ... }); { %> mentionsUnited.register(new MentionsUnitedProvider_Peertube({ syndicationUrl: "", syndicationTitle: "" })); ... mentionsUnited.load() .then(() => { return mentionsUnited.show(); }) Actually, everything is the same as always, but the Peertube API still has a special feature: although there is an open RESTful API, there are no fixed auth tokens that could be generated in the account UI, for example. Instead, you first have to retrieve the client tokens via the API in order to generate an auth token valid for 24 hours, also via a REST endpoint. A little cumbersome, but you can also retrieve the comments of a video via a token-free Video Feed API JSON format and limit the amount of data with a parameter for the video ID: /feeds/video-comments.json?videoId={{ID}} Unfortunately, this procedure has a small catch: In contrast to the REST API, the feed does not provide the complete author data of the comment, but only the display name and the profile URL: "author": { "name": "Kristof Zerbe", "url": "https://clip.place/accounts/kiko" } Thankfully, the REST endpoint /api/v1/accounts does not require an auth token and so I collect all unique authors in the Peertube Provider plugin, cut the name from the profile URL and use it to retrieve the complete data separately. For example: { "url": "https://clip.place/accounts/kiko", "name": "kiko", "host": "clip.place", "avatars": [ { "width": 48, "path": "/lazy-static/avatars/e0891432-0f45-48c5-86c0-594a395f3d91.png", "fileUrl": "https://clip.place/lazy-static/avatars/e0891432-0f45-48c5-86c0-594a395f3d91.png", "createdAt": "2025-04-01T06:16:21.893Z", "updatedAt": "2025-04-01T06:16:21.893Z" }, { "width": 120, ... } { "width": 600, ... }, { "width": 1500, ... } ], "id": 17957, "hostRedundancyAllowed": false, "followingCount": 0, "followersCount": 0, "createdAt": "2025-03-31T07:15:05.857Z", "displayName": "Kristof Zerbe", "description": "https://kiko.io", "updatedAt": "2025-04-01T06:10:52.234Z", "userId": 213 } I mainly focused on the avatar URL, because a small picture of the commenter is a standard for Mentions United interactions and I don't want to deviate from this. Of course, the number of additional requests for many comments increases significantly with this approach, but I have already opened an Issue (#6998) for this in the GitHub project. Let's see when I can remove the account retrieval again. Here's an example I used to test the new Peertube Provider plugin: https://kiko.io/post/WIRTZ-DNA-Tour-2024-Leipzig-2024-02-17/#interactions Original post on kiko.io: https://kiko.io/post/Mentions-United-Peertube-Provider/

May 3, 2025 - 18:18

I don't often work with videos, especially not on social media. But every now and then I record one with my smartphone, for example at a concert or a soccer match, and want to blog about the event later. I then embed the MP4 files as an asset in the corresponding Markdown. Over the years, a few MB have accumulated and at some point I had to think about where to put them in order to keep the size of the blog under 1GB. Outsourcing to YouTube? I can, but that would be the wrong direction for me. Something on Fediverse or the social web? Of course ... Peertube!

On the German instance clip.place operated by adminForge, a channel for the videos was quickly created and uploaded. Basically I only had to change the URL's in the video and iframe tags to the new ones.

I don't expect a lot of comments on my videos on clip.place, as I currently use it more as a repository or syndication target, but you never know ... and since I have so far added a Mentions United Provider Plugin to all of my connected platforms that have a free API, one is now also available for Peertube.

As always, the data for the plugin, i.e. the video URLs, are in the frontmatter of my post. Here is an example of my concert post WIRTZ DNA-Tour 2024, Leipzig @ 2024-02-17:

syndication:
  - host: Peertube
    url: https://clip.place/w/quf3PWpmKJjRwm89axBLY2

In the EJS template for my posts, it is checked whether there is at least one Peertube syndication for the current post and if so, the Peertube provider plugin is integrated and initialized after the main Mention United script in the JS code. Finally, the retrieve method contained in the plugin is called via the general Mentions United load and the comments are displayed on the page, if there are any.

let synPeertube = syndications?.filter(s => s.host.toLowerCase() === "peertube");

<% if (synPeertube?.length > 0) { %>
<%- js('js/mentions-united-provider_peertube.js'); %>
<% } %>

Actually, everything is the same as always, but the Peertube API still has a special feature: although there is an open RESTful API, there are no fixed auth tokens that could be generated in the account UI, for example. Instead, you first have to retrieve the client tokens via the API in order to generate an auth token valid for 24 hours, also via a REST endpoint. A little cumbersome, but you can also retrieve the comments of a video via a token-free Video Feed API JSON format and limit the amount of data with a parameter for the video ID:

/feeds/video-comments.json?videoId={{ID}}

Unfortunately, this procedure has a small catch: In contrast to the REST API, the feed does not provide the complete author data of the comment, but only the display name and the profile URL:

"author": {
  "name": "Kristof Zerbe",
  "url": "https://clip.place/accounts/kiko"
}

Thankfully, the REST endpoint /api/v1/accounts does not require an auth token and so I collect all unique authors in the Peertube Provider plugin, cut the name from the profile URL and use it to retrieve the complete data separately. For example:

{
  "url": "https://clip.place/accounts/kiko",
  "name": "kiko",
  "host": "clip.place",
  "avatars": [
    {
      "width": 48,
      "path": "/lazy-static/avatars/e0891432-0f45-48c5-86c0-594a395f3d91.png",
      "fileUrl": "https://clip.place/lazy-static/avatars/e0891432-0f45-48c5-86c0-594a395f3d91.png",
      "createdAt": "2025-04-01T06:16:21.893Z",
      "updatedAt": "2025-04-01T06:16:21.893Z"
    },
    { "width": 120, ... }
    { "width": 600, ... },
    { "width": 1500, ... }
  ],
  "id": 17957,
  "hostRedundancyAllowed": false,
  "followingCount": 0,
  "followersCount": 0,
  "createdAt": "2025-03-31T07:15:05.857Z",
  "displayName": "Kristof Zerbe",
  "description": "https://kiko.io",
  "updatedAt": "2025-04-01T06:10:52.234Z",
  "userId": 213
}

I mainly focused on the avatar URL, because a small picture of the commenter is a standard for Mentions United interactions and I don't want to deviate from this.

Of course, the number of additional requests for many comments increases significantly with this approach, but I have already opened an Issue (#6998) for this in the GitHub project. Let's see when I can remove the account retrieval again.

Here's an example I used to test the new Peertube Provider plugin: https://kiko.io/post/WIRTZ-DNA-Tour-2024-Leipzig-2024-02-17/#interactions

Original post on kiko.io: https://kiko.io/post/Mentions-United-Peertube-Provider/