Is PeerTube dead or is discoverability bad?

[mesamunefire@lemmy.world]

Some Lemmy instances work. Others don't. Piefed and kbin/kbin work well though.

[mesamunefire@lemmy.world]

It would be nice if we can just click subscribe. I know mastodon lets you do something similar within other mastodon instances. What I wouldn't give for a better user experience...

[die4ever@programming.dev]

they seem to only give accounts to creators

Yea this is a bit silly. It seems like they manually approve user accounts because they need to be careful with the uploads using up their storage. But a way better solution would be to approve users more liberally, and user accounts would be created without a channel so they cannot upload anything, and creating channels needs to be approved. That way people can freely make user accounts for browsing/following, and the admins can still restrict spam channels from being created and uploading videos.

[roofuskit@lemmy.world]

Exactly. The way it is structured seems to forget people who watch the videos are an important part of the community.

[roofuskit@lemmy.world]

Yeah it's compounded by federation being opt in on PeerTube. It makes the server your account is on matter a lot more.

[die4ever@programming.dev]

yes Youtube has maybe a billion user accounts with 0 videos, it's the main way to use the platform

[rocky1138@sh.itjust.works]

It's really just missing a great instance. Most of them look really shady or are not accepting new users.

[ulrich@feddit.org]

It uses sepia search to search all instances that have opted into being searched.

[ulrich@feddit.org]

It uses sepia search to search all instances that have opted into being searched.

[ulrich@feddit.org]

Simply copy the link from tilvids.com

...what link?

[yessikg@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

She is on her own instance now

[notfromhere@lemmy.ml]

But it’s not PeerTube, it’s ABC’s PeerTube and BCD’s PeerTube and CDE’s PeerTube, etc.

[captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works]

The question that basically everyone is going to ask is "so?"

[notfromhere@lemmy.ml]

Username checks out

[ulrich@feddit.org]

[captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works]

1. yes the throat fuck it does, and

2. 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:

• 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.

• 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.

[andrew_s@piefed.social]

That view of The Linux Experiment is quite similar to the view from lemmy.ml, with the latest post also being from 9 months ago. I wonder if your PeerTube instance and Lemmy 0.19.x have the same problem, where "something changed" at PeerTube, and new videos stopped appearing at federated sites that didn't change to accommodate the update. Are you running an old PeerTube version?

[commander@lemmings.world]

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.

[commander@lemmings.world]

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.

[commander@lemmings.world]

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.