The app (locally, on your device) checks if someone from your contact list installed (became available) on Signal, and if they did, you get notified by the app.

And it shares your phone number with everyone in your contacts who has Signal installed.

Someone can get notified only if they already have you in their contact list (so they already have your phone number), and have Signal installed.

I still wish you could choose if you want others to be notified tho…

I was just reading this issue on Github last night and I really don’t see how PeerTube is any better than a traditional server for hosting videos. The peer part of it seems to have such a miniscule impact on the whole thing that it just feels like a gimmick. I’ve read that the biggest problem for PeerTube instance hosts is storage and not the bandwidth. The only thing that peers can save you is tiny bit of bandwidth from what I understand.

So from what I’ve gathered, relying on peers only for hosting the video is completely unviable. And that makes sense, especially for old, unpopular videos, there will be no peers to begin with. Even if every video on the site is being “seeded” by viewers, the reliability of connection and bandwidth would be very bad because you can’t know if the peer is some guy on the dial up connection. Even in the perfect scenario where everyone had very reliable connection and good bandwidth, the fact that browsers don’t support p2p protocol and rely on a hack/workaround to use it, will mean that there will be delays. So starting the video and rewinding would be painfully slow.

Is there something that I’m missing, or is PeerTube really not that much better than a “normal” video hosting server?