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?
You must log in or register to comment.
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.
Seems difficult to build it as a social media if it’s inherently unsocial.
Who said YOU could say words???
revokes your right to comment
We’ll be having none of that interaction, and social stuff here!!!
…why isn’t peertube taking off???
(/joke)
It’s not unsocial. It’s just not mirroring multi-gigabyte files by default. It’s perfectly social if you use the website.
Everyone has to stop conflating the technology with the network. Lemmy is a website engine. PeerTube is a website engine. The ability to mirror content is not inherent to running a Lemmy- or PeerTube-based website. The network is not the primary object here.
It is a construct that arrises from content-mirroring.
Remember, federation is copying, not creating some kind of remote view. If you’re federating videos, you’re letting other websites consume terabytes of your storage space amd bandwidth.
Remember, federation is copying, not creating some kind of remote view.
Is this true? It’s my understanding that, lemmy for example, has the protocol in place for servers to communicate their content with each other, but each server’s content is hosted separately.
Are you saying all federated services copy each other’s data instead of only linking to it?
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.
So it’s more useful as a video player than a YouTube replacement?
Well, it is used mainly to share videos so we don’t have to send them or save them directly to file server. I’d say it has many of the features YT has, so I would say it is possible to replace YT with it, but the problem with videos - as opposed to images or text - is that they take fuckton of space.
Just horrible discovery leading creators to abandon the platform.
Yeah, that must be it. It’s a real shame because the core technology seems to be solid. Streaming 1080p videos from other instances just works. But finding channels to follow seems impossible.
deleted by creator
Honestly if they could make the mastodon sign up not give people options initially I think it is effectively a better twitter.
I had the exact same experience including the videos you linked to. There was nothing to be found.
Which is silly because most instances will auto mirror your YouTube channel. Literally takes no effort to post to both.
Its growing like crazy. Try the app they just released. It uses some search that works better than instance search
It uses sepia search to search all instances that have opted into being searched.
deleted by creator
I created !peertube@lemmy.world in case anyone finds channels, videos, ect that they like.
We can help with the discovery!
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.
That said, check out https://dalek.zone/. It’s one of the few peertube instances I’ve come across that legitimately seems interested in making it a viable platform. Registrations and uploading new videos don’t require approval, and it federates with way more instances than average.
Do we need to start over? Like fork PeerTube and fix all the “We choose to do this wrong because our parents didn’t hug us as children” problems?
No, I don’t think it’s anywhere near that bad.
I just think that going forward, Peertube developers and instance owners should make the platform more accessible and interconnected.
It’s a bigger responsibility to actually host content instead of just links to content, which I don’t think most peertube instance owners can handle.
But federating with other instances IS links to content, not hosting content.
I’m actually referring to both. Instance owners are afraid to allow users to host content and they’re afraid to link to servers that host content.
So why run an instance in the first place then?
Good question. My honest answer is 🧩.
I’ve seen it enough in the tech sphere to recognize it for what it is.
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.
I think peer tube federation is opt in not opt out like most other services.
Yeah the search is the worst part. As others have said the technology is there, we just need a better search.
The other issue is Lemmy (and perhaps other platforms) has issues with Peertube channels. I can’t direct link Peertube for activityhub posts. Lemmy is a no go. !teddy_the_dog@piped.chrisco.me Piefed for example works: https://piefed.social/c/teddy_the_dog@piped.chrisco.me
I host one and don’t plan on taking it down anytime soon! If anyone likes dog videos: @teddy_the_dog@piped.chrisco.me
He’s a good boy.
Nice channel, I’ve just added it to https://piefed.social/topic/wholesome to help people find it.
Excellent. I hope we will all enjoy it. Teddy is a good boy :)
Thanks!!
I couldn’t even get an account on the instance I most wanted because they seem to only give accounts to creators. So now I cannot follow anyone on that instance, or like their videos, or comment. So I have to figure out what other instance I can get an account on and follow from there, hoping they federated with each other.
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.
Exactly. The way it is structured seems to forget people who watch the videos are an important part of the community.
yes Youtube has maybe a billion user accounts with 0 videos, it’s the main way to use the platform
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 !videos@lemmy.world, 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.
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 seem like that was their goal.
They support everything, they just don’t encourage it? A logged in user doesn’t use much more server resources than an anonymous user. It’s still fetching all the video stats and comments, and of course the video itself which is the biggest thing. Kinda seems like it’s just for moderation concerns.
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.
Try the app, it’s a little better
Not if you want to subscribe to a channel, or interact with videos in any way.
Yeah it is a major work in progress but discoverability is better and you can use Sepia search from within it.
i can’t easily upload from my ipad which is my main video creation device.
i just post to my personal goto social instance without issue.
