I saw a few videos shared on PeerTube recently, and created an account on an instance. However, unlike Mastodon and Lemmy I’m struggling to discover channels to subscribe to. When I use the search functions on my instance, most results are either interesting channels which haven’t been updated in years, or random foreign language TV shows and episodes.
Just for example, if I’m trying to find videos on “Gaming” on one of the largest instances, the most recent video is over 1 year ago: https://tilvids.com/search?categoryOneOf=7
Is discoverability on PeerTube bad, or are there barely any active channels?
Edit: BTW one very active creator on PeerTube is https://tilvids.com/c/thelinuxexperiment_channel/videos and his videos are excellent. But can there really only be a handful of active creators to follow on the whole platform?
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The discoverability is incredibly bad. Peertube has a ton of videos and more servers than lemmy by a long shot iirc. The problem is that the „frontend“ has seen no love like ever. There recently came an app which is nice but otherwise, its very underloved.
Feel free to voice your concerns in !peertube@lemmy.ml for example. The devs should be available through the fedi somewhere.
You should go here https://ideas.joinpeertube.org/ or here https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube to raise concerns.
Thank you very much! I love the cooperation in the fedi.
The frontend is nice, I actually enjoy it. Lots of functionality and fairly easy to navigate.
The problem is the culture around peertube instance: most owners are copying each other by not federating or allowing users to easily upload videos.
Essentially, most of the admins are afraid to actually host a video platform so they do anything in their power to prevent others from using it.
It’s both horrible discovery and a limited number of creators.
But, for discoverability, https://sepiasearch.org/ might help you find things to watch, since it’s the only good multi-server search I’ve seen. (And run by the peertube devs.)
I say this everytime someone talks about peertube. You should not need to leave the website to use the website. If I search “crazy guy uses rake to play football”, and it’s not in the results page, I’m not going to go to ANOTHER website, to search THIS website, for a guy who doesn’t understand how to play sports.
You say that yet Google search / Internet search is very much a big thing. For the record, I agree with you.
Google search started out when the internet was a collection of unrelated websites and you needed a search engine to discover any of them. If Youtube’s search was so useless that you had to leave Youtube, open up Google, search for the content you wanted to see there, and then ended back up on Youtube, you’d be pretty pissed.
But it’s not PeerTube, it’s ABC’s PeerTube and BCD’s PeerTube and CDE’s PeerTube, etc.
The question that basically everyone is going to ask is “so?”
Username checks out
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yes the throat fuck it does, and
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On Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed etc. you join one instance and you get access to the others. See this very comment section, I’m on sh.itjust.works, you’re on lemmy.ml, we’re both commenting on a post on lemmy.world. “Everything’s political so defederate because their ideology isn’t pure enough” notwithstanding, you open an account on one instance and the content on all instances is discoverable.
On PeerTube, for some weird reason, that functionality is something the instance owner has to enable. It’s off by default. So, in practice, PeerTube is capable of, but isn’t, federated. Which means you have 90 different little YouTubes, each of which is hosting a total of 90 videos, and you can’t watch all 8100 videos from one place, be it one website if you’re old and lame enough to have a PC or from one account on one app.
In fact, I think the behavior of TILvids has already killed PeerTube as a platform. I think it’s already dead, because some jackass with delusions of grandeur wants to build a walled garden out of an open ecosystem. You want to run an edutainment instance? Great! I’ve been saying since I joined Lemmy that general purpose instances are largely a mistake. On PeerTube I’ve seen more instances attempt to segregate by content type (there’s an arts, crafts and makers instance, for example. I could see making a gaming instance, etc.) TILvids raises a valid concern; alternative video hosting sites inevitably become hives of the scum and villainy that got themselves kicked off of YouTube. Here on Lemmy we have those instances that everybody defederates, effectively isolating that shit. TILvids’ approach to this is quarantine everything that isn’t them, which I see as strangling both themselves and PeerTube by two mechanisms:
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It’s going to stifle general adoption of the platform by viewers. People go to Youtube to look at one kind of video, say, archery competitions, then they notice in the side panel a thumbnail of a leatherworking tutorial, and they go “Ooh I always wanted to see that.” Pretty soon you’ll open up Youtube to watch 4 minutes of cats yawning, a Desert Bus speedrun, a stand-up comedy routine and then three different recipe tutorials for making bagels. No one says “I want to find a website that hosts edutainment video content.” They turn up looking for celebrity nipple slips or people falling off skateboards, they’ll stay for the edutainment.
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It’s going to kill any mechanism for new creators. A big benefit to Youtube is any idiot can make a video and upload it to the internet. That’s where we got Hank Green and CGP Grey. There needs to be a space that permits that on or adjacent to your platform. Currently their recruitment strategy for creators seems to be “Get established on Youtube, then maybe we’ll let you upload your content here too for some reason.” It’s not going to take off as a self-sustaining platform that way; there needs to be a place for people to upload their early bad crap and build experience.
Everyone on PeerTube is trying very hard to make their chosen platform unadoptable.
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That’s fine. That’s how federation works.
The problem is that the different peertube instances are defederated BY DEFAULT so it’s exceptionally rare to find ones that can share with each other.
The censorship crowd needs to stay far, far away from peertube if there is ever any chance of it being successful.
I completely agree.
Normally, you wouldn’t have to do this. The problem is that Peertube devs made the HORRIBLE decision to make federating “opt-in” only. This means most content isn’t available on most instances. It’s a snowball effect where most owners make the decision without thinking to have some mystical barrier to enter their esteemed federation.
They don’t understand that most users don’t give a shit about “proving” themselves to enter some random person’s instance. (and rightfully so)
Peertube made a lot of good choices, but a lot of bad ones too by the censorship/walled garden crowd.
Hopefully someone with more resources than me can run an instance that fills this void: just let people upload and interact like youtube back in the early 2000s.
Both.
Peertube made this asinine decision to make federating opt-in, so most instances are just places where the owner can jerk themselves off for excluding everything.
Seems difficult to build it as a social media if it’s inherently unsocial.
Who said YOU could say words???
revokes your right to comment
We’ll be having none of that interaction, and social stuff here!!!
…why isn’t peertube taking off???
(/joke)
It’s not unsocial. It’s just not mirroring multi-gigabyte files by default. It’s perfectly social if you use the website.
Everyone has to stop conflating the technology with the network. Lemmy is a website engine. PeerTube is a website engine. The ability to mirror content is not inherent to running a Lemmy- or PeerTube-based website. The network is not the primary object here.
It is a construct that arrises from content-mirroring.
Remember, federation is copying, not creating some kind of remote view. If you’re federating videos, you’re letting other websites consume terabytes of your storage space amd bandwidth.
Remember, federation is copying, not creating some kind of remote view.
Is this true? It’s my understanding that, lemmy for example, has the protocol in place for servers to communicate their content with each other, but each server’s content is hosted separately.
Are you saying all federated services copy each other’s data instead of only linking to it?
I have a Peertube server, and I’ve requested to follow tilvids, and they denied my request, and they also do not follow my Peertube server. I think one issue with tilvids may be that they essentially choose not to federate, and therefore you won’t find much because of this.
I just searched for “Gaming” on my Peertube server and I seem to get a non-ending list of servers. Unfortunately, one column wide, but a lot. When I search for King’s Quest, I am also getting a seemingly unending stream of videos.
I follow every Peertube server I can that is clearly not fascist, primarily NSFW, NSFL, etc.
Maybe you just need to find a server that is more federated with other Peertube servers.
It’s really just missing a great instance. Most of them look really shady or are not accepting new users.
There are no great instances because all federation is opt-in.
There’s also no general, standard “Peertube affiliated” instance that tries to federate with as many others as possible.
I think there were just some very poor design decisions made for the platform by people who don’t know what they’re doing.
Ex: Blurring sensitive videos blurs the title as well, without the option to change it.
The community doesn’t help because most instances have “request an account” nonsense or literally don’t allow users to upload videos.
I re-iterate my previous comment: “most instances are just places where the owner can jerk themselves off for excluding everything.”
There will be great peertube instances, but the culture needs to change first.
That said, check out https://dalek.zone/. It’s one of the few peertube instances I’ve come across that legitimately seems interested in making it a viable platform. Registrations and uploading new videos don’t require approval, and it federates with way more instances than average.
Do we need to start over? Like fork PeerTube and fix all the “We choose to do this wrong because our parents didn’t hug us as children” problems?
No, I don’t think it’s anywhere near that bad.
I just think that going forward, Peertube developers and instance owners should make the platform more accessible and interconnected.
It’s a bigger responsibility to actually host content instead of just links to content, which I don’t think most peertube instance owners can handle.
But federating with other instances IS links to content, not hosting content.
I’m actually referring to both. Instance owners are afraid to allow users to host content and they’re afraid to link to servers that host content.
So why run an instance in the first place then?
Good question. My honest answer is 🧩.
I’ve seen it enough in the tech sphere to recognize it for what it is.
I couldn’t even get an account on the instance I most wanted because they seem to only give accounts to creators. So now I cannot follow anyone on that instance, or like their videos, or comment. So I have to figure out what other instance I can get an account on and follow from there, hoping they federated with each other.
Important: you do not need to have an account on a peertube instance. You can follow from nearly (iirc) any fedi instance. I have successfully done so from mastodon and I have heard lemmy should work, not sure though. You just copy the address of the channel you want to follow from the browser and paste it in your search bar on mastodon.
The that’s a shit solution.
Uhm… entitlement much?
How about basic usability considerations? Nobody is going to switch if this is the user experience. And if no users are subscribing and interacting why would content creators spend time posting to it?
If people want it to be a thriving community then it needs functionality that makes it a community. I shouldn’t have to creat an account on a server I don’t want content from in hopes that I’ll be able to subscribe and interact with a server I do want content from.
I’m an established fediverse user, I have been rolling my own Linux servers for decades. I’m perfectly capable of dealing with imperfect systems. This is a shit user experience and if nobody says so it will never be fixed and peertube will wither and die.
Although I do understand the idea. but you really need to check your ego, mate.
Just offer help or suggest different ways than it is currently done. If you have the faintest idea of hosting and/or programming, this is not how to get your way.
So stop bitching and start working or shut the fuck up.
😆
That’ll show the big corporations how it’s done. I’m sure they’re shaking in their boots at a platform that demands their users are programers or live with how crappy it is.
You‘re avoiding my point because you know I‘m right. We dont want corpo apologists here. Foss software is dependent on cooperation. Cooperate or leave.
In any case, you’re leaving my feed now.
