Is PeerTube dead or is discoverability bad?
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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 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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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The link of the channel or the channel handle.
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From what instance is that?
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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That seems... like a poor choice.
We use it in our company because we don't want to upload videos only we use to Google.
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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.
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?
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