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Is PeerTube dead or is discoverability bad?

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?

150 comments

  • In that case issue is some instances do not allow global search and that's why search will limit to only channels you follow and your instance.

  • I have a Peertube server, and I've requested to follow tilvids, and they denied my request, and they also do not follow my Peertube server. I think one issue with tilvids may be that they essentially choose not to federate, and therefore you won't find much because of this.

    I just searched for "Gaming" on my Peertube server and I seem to get a non-ending list of servers. Unfortunately, one column wide, but a lot. When I search for King's Quest, I am also getting a seemingly unending stream of videos.

    I follow every Peertube server I can that is clearly not fascist, primarily NSFW, NSFL, etc.

    Maybe you just need to find a server that is more federated with other Peertube servers.

    • This is the issue with federated youtube. It should ALL be federated, and all searchable, mandatory.

      Now if I the user decide I don't want to see an instance/video/creator, I should have two options.

      Block - Used for when content offends you. It has zero place being in your feed.

      Not Interested - Used when content isn't offensive per se, but you really don't care about it either. It's not completely blocked from your feed, but it's certainly not getting first dibs to show up from now on.

      This leaves one thing that some may feel is an issue. Lets say there were a small dicked loser who did nazi salutes in public, and wanted to upload hateful content. Lets give him a random name for the sake of simplicity. Let's call him.....Elon. Hypothetical name.

      So lets say small dicked Elon, starts uploading hateful content. On youtube you would report him. On peertube, since he owns the hosted server, you'd be reporting him to himself. Which is as you can imagine, useless.

      So from here, you block them, and then you never have to see their hateful content ever again.

      Because their rise, only comes from people giving these people attention.

      • I see two possible ways for it to succeed:

        • Federate by default, defederate if you have to. This is how Lemmy mostly seems to work; I proposed a policy for defederation for sh.itjust.works that has been used, we will federate with you unless you start spamming or hosting illegal porn or spewing hate speech or that kind of shit, then we'll defederate. That has to happen at the instance level; if example.lol is generally fine but there's one account there that's a nuisance that's what the block button is for, but lolita.rape gets defederated (and reported to the FBI).
        • Apply and join model. Have a coalition of instances that agree to mutually uphold certain moderation practices (no hate speech, no kid fucking, goat or human, no human trafficking, etc) and then they federate with each other, eventually forming a large and wholesome community.

        Nobody federates and it's a bunch of independent nothings won't work. Youtubers will use it as a backup service, a couple of the real paranoid Linux types will host their videos there that someone might even watch, and half the instances will be places you go when you've been kicked off of Youtube.

      • Yes!

    • what's the best peertube instance to upload gaming videos to? I might upload some and see how it goes

      edit: I think I'm gonna go with spectra, but omg this is annoying:

      Channel identifier cannot be the same as your account name. You can click on the first step to update your account name.

      I get it, they're separate actors, but still annoying. Can people find my channel by either name? Edit2: yes they can, all the user's channels are listed on the user profile, which maybe makes it worth the signup annoyance

      • Would that mean you need an account name to be Die4Ever and your channel identifier might be Die4Ever_Games?

        That would actually solve a problem I had on Youtube, where, I'll use Linus Media Group as an example, Tech Linked and Mac Address were different unrelated Youtube channels. Youtube has no concept of "Shows"

      • Take a look here for an instance: https://lemmy.wtf/post/15816115 And take a look here, under gaming, which instances they use: https://lemmy.wtf/post/15810205

      • Isn’t it the exact same thing on YouTube?

        You have a user account, which can have x numbers of channels.

      • As someone who watches gaming footage on PeerTube, I've mostly interacted with single creator instances -- i.e. either the creator themselves is self-hosting it or it's run by a fan as a non-YT backup of their Twitch/Owncast/whatever VODs. Those instances generally do not allow anyone else to upload.

        Discoverability sucks but the way I've found them is by using SepiaSearch and looking for specific words from game titles. I imagine the way most other people find them is that they already know the content creator from Twitch and want to find an old VOD that isn't archived on YT (e.g. because of YT's bullshit copyright system) -- but that's just a guess.

      • Haha, good luck.

    • Tilvids.com don't want to allow following or follow anyone themselves. That's a policy they have had for a long time. However... Since Tilvids is on this list: https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances?search=tilvids, they are part of the Global Search Index. So you can get videos from tilvids in your search results, if you instance has enabled Global Search.

      Also, you, as an instance owner, can follow channels on tilvids, by using their channel handles.

    • Fell free to send federation request :) https://peer.madiator.cloud/

  • that's the chicken and egg problem of any social network: people don't want to go to a social network with only a few number of content creators and content creators don't want to spend their time managing another platform for only a few number of viewer... social networks needs people to be alive and so if you are interested in Peertube, it will be hard at first but use it so, just like voting system where every vote count, the platform will have one more user and if other people do the same, the platform will grow and if it grow enough it will start to attract bigger content creator, etc...

    It's in people hand to break the cycle and makes that Youtube alternative a viable alternative.

    I'm a peertube instance admin for years now and closed my google/youtube account 10 years ago, so I'm doing my part to break it.

  • 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.

      • 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.

    • Important: you do not need to have an account on a peertube instance. You can follow from nearly (iirc) any fedi instance. I have successfully done so from mastodon and I have heard lemmy should work, not sure though. You just copy the address of the channel you want to follow from the browser and paste it in your search bar on mastodon.

    • Which instance was that? Have a look at this list: https://lemmy.wtf/post/15816115

      Even if the instance does not federate with the instance you wanted, you can still type in the link of the channel in the other instance's search bar.

  • 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.

150 comments