Is PeerTube dead or is discoverability bad?

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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.

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

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.

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.

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

just let people upload and interact like youtube back in the early 2000s.

Quick! Somebody get a baby named charlie to bite me! He could bite my finger!

That kids in college now. Yeah. Feel old now, don't ya?

[email protected]

The link of the channel or the channel handle.

[email protected]

From what instance is that?

[email protected]

they seem to only give accounts to creators

That doesn't seem unreasonable to me. I'll get in trouble for saying it, but I think that PeerTube is for video channels what Lemmy should be for communities. It should be that if you want to start or moderate a community, then you sign up to Lemmy, but if you just want to interact with one, you use a user account provided by software that's fully geared up around users (e.g. Mastodon).

Ignoring for the moment that Lemmy's federation model hasn't been widely adopted, and that comments from Mastodon that appear in Lemmy often have annoying Hashtag / Mention spam, my fantasy version of a post in a Lemmy community would look something like https://tilvids.com/w/wjTD7fp9qy4KmTkBdSoWyc, which was created by a PeerTube user, but has been commented on and voted for by users from Mastodon, Sharkey, PieFed, other PeerTube instances, and MBIN.

Amongst those subscribers, commenters, and voters should be Lemmy users, of course. In this thread, it feels like PeerTube is being criticised by people who want to use it in a way that it's not designed for, because they can't interact with it from their Lemmy account. If inter-op was better, there'd be no need to create a new account anywhere, and it would have a network effect - the channels that people are trying to discover would already have been brought in by other users, and findable through a conventional Lemmy search. Also, the votes and comments from Lemmy users that are currently going to whoever takes a PeerTube video and posts it in the likes of [email protected], would instead be going to original creator. This would also aid discovery (since people would be more likely to see the channel in 'all'), and might have also some incentivising influence on the creator.

Basically, I blame Lemmy.

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Implying I didn't feel old then, lmao

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That seems... like a poor choice.

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Honestly if they could make the mastodon sign up not give people options initially I think it is effectively a better twitter.

[email protected]

Peertube is older than Lemmy though.

What you suggest isn't actually a bad idea, but if that was the goal then they shouldn't even pretend to support user accounts only channel accounts, channel accounts wouldn't need to be able to like/comment/subscribe either. They wouldn't have to bother with their UI rendering likes/dislikes/comments, they wouldn't need buttons to subscribe, and they wouldn't need a mobile app either. It's a good idea, just be a video backend and only support the embedded video player (as it appears on Mastodon), but it doesn't appear like that was their goal.

[email protected]

I think they still need a separate user account. For one thing, a PeerTube channel is 'attributedTo' the user account, in the same way that Lemmy communities are 'attributedTo' the moderators. A Group belongs to at least one Person, it can't belong to itself. Another is that it allows for creators to comment on videos, and either be recognised as the 'OP', or as a fellow content creator.

In terms of rendering things like Likes and Dislikes, it has the info in the backend, so it may as well. They don't Announce votes like Lemmy does, you have to activitely fetch them, so the channel as it exists on PeerTube provides a definitive source. Likewise, there's all sorts of reasons why comments get out of sync, so the channel provides an authoritative place where you should be able to see them all.

There is a friction though. I like the idea of a place that only open to people willing to create content, and isn't interested in signups from 'lurkers', but providing a mobile app doesn't seem compatible with that.

[email protected]

We use it in our company because we don't want to upload videos only we use to Google.

[email protected]

Is it because video hosting is substantially more expensive than mostly text and some images (Lemmy and Mastodon) that it brings out that kind of behavior? As in they have more skin in the game so they try to protect it more? Any thoughts on the new Loops platform? Is it suffering from the same issues?

[email protected]

Most established hosters would be fearful to run an instance of peertube. Costs could balloon out of nowhere and would only increase with time. There is no way donations would keep up with costs, and charging to watch or a subscription would never take off.

[email protected]

Video hosting being expensive is why it's difficult for an individual to make an account on most if any instances, which is also a problem.

There are two "that kind of behaviors" here; the button to make content searchable across peertube is off by default for some reason and some admins aren't clicking it. That could be for myriad reasons. TILvids trying to build a walled garden in an open platform is just outright wrongheadedness.

I like the idea of themed instances that revolve around certain broad topics, kind of the way television channels used to do. Some of us are old enough to remember when there was science fiction on the Sci-Fi channel, music videos on MTV, documentaries on the Discovery Channel and so on. TILvids is trying to be the Discovery channel, except anyone who signs up for cable TV primarily for the Discovery channel doesn't get to see other channels, and anyone who signed up mostly for something else doesn't get to see the Discovery channel. The owner has talked about a "hub and spoke" model they want to build with TILvids as the hub, which is an incompatible vision with the success of PeerTube as a whole.

I'll also mention that I've never seen the "upload" gauge on Peertube do anything. The idea is it works like bittorrent, those who are watching a video will seed it to others to help share the load. I've yet to see that actually happen, and I wonder if it's because no one else in the world was watching that video at that moment.

I don't know much about Loops; it may be too early to ask. I haven't really looked at it yet, in no small part because you have to sign up for it, you can't really window shop. I think Loops is going to face the same problem that Minetest (or whatever they changed its name to) does; it's a good piece of software that does the things you like, and it's not attached to the corporate fuckheads who burned your future down. Want to try it out? "Absolutely, 100% no I don't because it's not the program my friends have." The fact that the Tiktok ban in America turned out to be fake is probably what's going to fail to launch Loops.

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The thing is, there may be content that people will find on Sepia search that you DO NOT want on your instance.

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Seems difficult to build it as a social media if it's inherently unsocial.

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P2P on videos does work and if you watch out for a live stream, you’ll probably see it yourself.

Yesterday I was watching a live stream, where I had 10 peers.

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Is PeerTube dead or is discoverability bad?