If you could improve PeerTube, what would you improve?
Cross-posted from "If you could improve PeerTube, what would you improve?" by @asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev in !asklemmy@lemmy.world
What keeps you away from PeerTube? What features does PeerTube lack? If you were the developer of PeerTube, how would you improve it?
I think it's mainly the content. We need some good content, creative people and interesting videos on the platform. Yeah and maybe discoverability. People also need to get those videos displayed/recommended to them. Other than that, a good app is always nice. That's already been worked on. But regarding the technology, I think Peertube works quite nicely these days. And it has a good amount of features as well.
The question is how to get the creators there. A lot of people are on YouTube because of the ad revenue, but with no ads on PeerTube there’s no revenue to share. A lot of other for-profit companies have tried to lure these creators away with little success, so I’m not sure how a non-profit service is supposed to attract people who have turned content creation into a career.
Right. OP didn't specify it has to be a technical shortcoming... or easy to solve. So I just said what I think is the biggest issue. Because I really think the platform itself, and the software are great. And still constantly improving.
I think this is really difficult to impossible to overcome. Other for-profit platforms have failed at this. Even the big players like Youtube, TikTok etc needed a huge pile of money, investors and an unethical business model to succeed. And I'm pretty sure we don't want that with PeerTube.
I think what we currectly, realistically can do is have a few big content creators do it for fun. And host their stuff on PeerTube. But that needs some other motivation than making money.
Ultimately, the majority of the worth or value of a platform like this isn't in the program code. But in the content and userbase. And I think that's where the focus needs to be when we want to grow or improve it for the potential users.
For long-form video creators a Patreon like subscription service might work, but I very much agree with you that this is the main issue. Peertube works fine from the technical side of things.
Peertube makes it really easy to promote whatever you want in the "support" button.
So really the only thing they're missing out on is adsense. Which, fuck Google. And is only a small (but not insignificant) portion of their income.
Peertube is perfect for those niche things that aren't revenue friendly. Add in the creator needs to be big enough to be self sufficient from patreon, its the plateform that isnt limited by ad sense BS or what trendy shit is happening.
Making some sort of monetization scheme in which creators are paid more per view than YouTube, would solve a lot.
Then creators might as well spend the extra couple of minutes to also upload to PeerTube, because they make more money per view there.
So many things:
You are probably already aware but YouTube's closed captions are very inaccurate. I'm sure it's better than nothing though.
Yes it very much depends the video. But on slow paced standard english they tend to be okay, which is most the content I end up watching anyways.
Improve cross instance search and for more creators to move from other platforms
Admins are able to add external search engines. Most use sepia search and it pretty much covers all the non-sketchy stuff.
Search.
If I go to youtube, and I search for content, it's either there, or it's not.
If I go to peertube, I need to then exit the site, search on AN UNRELATED 3RD PARTY SITE, and then I can get results from more than the local instance.
If I go to an instance that's nothing but stamp collecting, the trending videos are going to be about stamp collecting. That doesn't mean all of peertube is talking about stamp collecting. I'm just on the wrong instance, and the site itself is fractured and borderline useless.
Now you can include a feature to tell peertube that you DO want to see trending, local only, as a stamp collector, on a stamp collecting instance, that would be really useful! But also, if I don't give a fuck about stamps, as mkst people don't, the default should be peertube wide trending across ALL instances. I mean, if I don't care about stamps I'm on the wrong instance to begin with, but that's besides the point.
I feel like peertube should be each instance is a different type of content. Want to watch guys go fishing? There's an instance just for that. With multiple different channels, each from different people, each covering different fishing topics. But your whole life isn't just one topic. So you go to a different instance, one for automobiles, and you follow the channels that post videos about your car. Then you go to a cooking instance, and find a channel that's just a guy showing you how to bake pies and cakes while running from the police.
Your searches, will 99% of the time not find the most relevant results if we seperate the content based on instance. So the search as is, is really limited and fragmented to have to go to another site, search, find the video, come back to peertube, log in, go to the video directly, and THEN subscribe to the content.
See how jarring that is, compared to youtube? Search, click, play/subscribe. All in 10 seconds.
https://sepiasearch.org/ is already integrated into the app.
I tried it, but gave up months ago. Decentralization is what we're all about, but without a centralized index of what's available, finding videos on PeerTube is more work than watching them is worth.
There is an index maintained by Framasoft (devs of PeerTube), but it is something the servers need to enable. A lot don’t.
Correction (De)Centralized index
I really liked the livestream feature that was on reddit a few years ago. Would be cool to have a fediverse version of that, where people could casually stream from their phones with just a peertube app.
Yeah. We do have PeerTube Live, but it's not official and integrated into the PeerTube app itself. It also can't stream the screen of the phone, so there's that.
Ok that's pretty close! The reddit thing was about streaming your camera, and having a chat window where you could read comments from viewers.
The other key element was having a place where viewers could see what was currently streaming. That allows people to casually go see "what's on" without needing to coordinate with livestreamers to set up a time to watch, keep track of streamer channels, etc.
The biggest thing is content and discoverability.
Any good channel recommendations?
I think there are about 5 decent ones:
@ulrich@feddit.org TechLore now seems to be at https://neat.tube/c/techlore/videos
Nice thanks. I think I subscribe to 3 of them. Now we have some more!
It's mainly finding videos for me. I've been able to find a few interesting ones, but largely it's either difficult to find, or not there at all. I myself have actually been considering making some videos to help the content drought, but then the ideas, or knowledge of what people could be receptive to doesn't quite come.
also as a newpipe user, being able to search all of my selected instances at once, or with sepiasearch could be nice, but thats not up to peertube
It would be nice if there was an easy and straightforward way for instances to create their own shared indexes. There's a feature for this in PeerTube, which I guess is supposed to act like instance following + a shared search catalogue. It would be handy to know how to easily make sort of the federation equivalent of a webring.
The devs are also working on a mobile app, which I think is something the platform is sorely missing.
A custom bubble time-line like Akkoma has would be nice for Peertube indeed.
Better algorithm and a better incentive to post content (im not sure what, maybe donations)
I would very much appreciate the ability to explore other instances and see what channels are hosted there from my own instance, instead of having to open the new instance in a new tab, then copy and paste the link to each interesting channel into my instance to be able to subscribe to it.
I wish there was a similar feature for Lemmy as well.
Maybe Librepay integration of some sort could help. Maybe that platform should be a little more ambitious and offer server operators and it's users in the fediverse better pricing.
Better federation with eachother, a way for monetisation.
What keeps you away from PeerTube?
The app not being on F-Droid. Once it's there, I'll at least try it out. Bonus if there's an Android TV app too. I'll watch stuff on PeerTube if I'm given a direct link, and I tried playing around with NewPipe but the experience feels bolted on to the rest of the app.
I found one, but search didn't work
It's surprising that there doesn't seem to be an obvious way in the UI to just see a list of creators/channels on a local instance. So, that's the first thing I'd change to improve discoverability.
The way I currently find relevant content is by going to Sepia Search, putting in exact words that I think are likely to be in the title of at least one video on a channel that would likely also have a lot of other relevant content, and then going through that channel's playlists. Those searches often lead me to single user instances with only one or two channels (e.g. a channel that has a backup of that user's YouTube content and a channel with a backup of their Twitch or OwnCast or whatever streams). When it leads me to a generalist instance or one with a relevant subject/theme though, I've had little luck finding content from anyone else unless they've posted recently (compared to other users). Often the content that is most relevant to me is not what is newest but the archives from years ago. (New content is relevant though once I want to follow someone in particular, but it's not what I want to see first.)
Another issue I've encountered is with the behavior of downloaded videos. I greatly appreciate that PeerTube provides a URL for direct download, and I prefer to watch videos in my own player downloaded in advance (so I can watch offline; pause and resume trivially after putting my computer to sleep; etc). H264 MP4 works fine for this, but the download seems to be some sort of chunked variant of it (for HLS?) which requires the player to read in the entire file to figure out the length or seek accurately. Having to wait a minute or two to be able to seek each time I open a large video file off my HDD is an irritating papercut. I suspect there's likely a way to fix it by including an index in the file (or in a sidecar file) but I don't know how to do it -- short of re-encoding the entire video again which I'd rather not do since it both takes a long time and can result in quality loss. This usually doesn't affect newly added videos (where the download link includes the pattern /download/web-videos and a warning is shown that it's still being transcoded) but does when that's done (the URL includes /download/streaming-playlists/hls/videos instead); so, this is something that happens as a result of PeerTube's reprocessing.
Downloads from the instances that I've found to be most relevant to me are also pretty unreliable (connection is slow and drops a lot), so I use wget with automatic retries (and it sometimes still needs manual retries...) rather than downloading through my browser which tends to fail and then often annoyingly start over completely if I request a retry... It would be really nice if I could check that I've downloaded the file correctly and completely with a sha256 hash or something.
Search on all these federated sites is terrible. We need several user-selectable algorithms that display feeds from all instances
Better federation. The vidiverse search is just bad, i want to watch all types of content from my account.
And more general instances; i'm on spectra.video now, but as i said the vidiverse search sucks and it's not federated to enough instances :/
There's Sepia Search, but I don't really understand why that's not just built into the Peertube UI itself.
Yeah :/ in some instances it is, but it's usually broken.
I especially wish i could actually interact with those videos from my account, such as liking or commenting. There are three types of instances: no sign ups, outdated or no content on them.
Better federation and search. Make it easier for content creators and instance runners to monetize. Make it easier to script your own feed/recommendations.
All of the above is true for all software on the fediverse. But monetization especially for PeerTube. Pay to watch, donations and ads should all be options in the official implementation. Because of the high cost of running a large high bandwidth instance (if that wasn't obvious).
Seems like the only ones who really benefit from PeerTube right now are right-wing extremists. The only large Swedish instances are far-right. And they are big because of content supply and demand.
What's peer tube?
Is the P2P component what makes or breaks this platform? It sounds like this is key to its success.
Are PT hosts also part of the P2P network? I could see hosting costs increase dramatically as a result of hosting popular content.
Getting Lemmy(and other fedi services) to fully support linking videos would help. Piefed and and other platforms support it pretty well.
for example: https://piefed.social/post/398574
direct link vs just the url. Lemmy will not work with the direct link like this nor the comments appearing in both instances.
It used to work fine in Lemmy, but somewhere along the line it seems to have broken.
Yeah it's been a little less than a year since it stopped working. I saw the GH issues, looks like the Lemmy devs took the position the Peertube devs need to fix....something with activityhub. I hope they fix things. Lemmy development vs the actual instances seem a bit more fragmented than the rest of the fediverse.
I tried to take a look with my local Lemmy instance but it looks like the issue resides in how different Lemmy uses activityhub than other software. I don't claim to know why they made the change but they seem to be the odd one out.
Misskey has a pretty great support for peertube.
Multiple audio tracks for different languages.
I think the only thing it needs is a mainstream instance.
What’s a mainstream instance?
Automatic subtitles. I know... Not the easiest functionality to develop but I do miss it from Youtube.
VLC is adding AI generated subtitles, I wonder if it would be possible to co-opt that?
That would be nice.
More content. We need 100% of the Creative Commons videos on YouTube to be mirrored, to start
We had vidcommons.org once, that hosted a lot of CC content. Unfortunately the owner couldn’t afford to keep it running.
If you now a source of CC videos, let me know.
Import/export subscriptions
A good app that feels native
A short video feature that let me browse like tiktok tbh. I know people think short videos are bad but blender tutorials, recipe videos, leftist information are great on tiktok because theyre forced to get straight to the point without fluff like youtube videos that purposely extend the video so you watch more ads.
@asudox I love the idea of peertube. I have a couple of accounts. It used to be easier to load new content by URL when it supporfted input from YouTube, but YT has gone out of their way to maintain their virtual monoply. In order for such a service to be more useful than just sharing videos with your immediate friends and family you need a way for creaters to make money, which i think is going to be easier on #NOSTR . I think a better question is how do we make nostr useful for more than just bitcoinbois.
How does nostr make it easier to monetize video plays?
@asudox then again having a tool that is only used for sharing videos with immediate friends and family is fine too. Not everything needs to be focused on killling off a particular non-free software for it to have value in and of it self.
I mean, if it had invidious' functionality tacked on, i might be swayed to use it. That being said, rip public invidious instances
I tried to sign up for an account, I was going to use it to create long form content, so I picked some tags (which definitely leave out too many broad categories to be particularly useful, and is thus incredibly limiting) that seemed somewhat related to what I wanted to do.
I then looked through the instance list based on those tags, and tried to find one that fit.. and I couldn’t, because all of them had some caveat or blurb or whatever that made me go “nope, probably not here..”
The problem is that I had to click through multiple pages to hit those caveats in the instance rules/description during the signup process, and I had to do it for every one I wanted to check out. They weren’t at all listed on the main page, and they probably should be, maybe under a popup tooltip sort of button. As it stands it was a huge waste of time, and I gave up, and lost interest in having a channel. Maybe I’ll browse it if it ever picks up, but frankly the process of signing up to be a content creator is far too onerous.
Maybe that’s a problem with the instance owners and how they have things set up, maybe with the way the whole platform works, I don’t really know. It was pretty consistent though, so I assume it’s a platform problem.
Unskippable one-hour long ads. 👌
I want the ability to have everything behind a login. I don't want people not signed in watching videos and wasting bandwidth.
I thought about uploading videos, but I could never figure out how.
The ability to post a video to multiple co-authors' channels.
Ads. If I could press a button and inject 30 second ads into videos that would cover the cost of the server, I'd run an instance today and start mirroring a fuckoad of content from YouTube