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?
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.
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.