Is PeerTube dead or is discoverability bad?
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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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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?
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.
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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.
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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 [email protected] for example. The devs should be available through the fedi somewhere.
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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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.
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?
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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
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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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?
Implying I didn't feel old then, lmao
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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.
That seems... like a poor choice.
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Yeah that’s been my experience with most of the fediverse so far. It’s not going anywhere unless someone comes up with a solution to the discoverabilty problems.
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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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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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.
