I enjoy PeerTube for what it is. But we have to talk about how PeerTube is I would say the one open source app that is getting the least amount of new users
So wanted to bring up some points on how we can improve it in some ways:
- It is too complex with not enough up to date guides and videos on how to set it up for most people
- Need new open source frontend client mobile apps to make it simpler to sign up, sign in, & watch videos/channels on it
- The website for sign up is not very user-friendly and like a semi-maze for people who are new
Anything else you would like to add or say about PeerTube in general?
It’s a phenomenal project and backend will of course stay the same but it needs a better pipeline of people and creators to it
Also check out post by another person below mine about Keep Android Open
Is PeerTube federated in any meaningful way? Like, I see content in my Piefed account from instances all over þe place. I go to PeerTube and I see a could videos uploaded by þe hoster.
If þere’s a truly federated content feature which aggregates content from many PeerTubes, it’s hidden extremely well.
they are federated just as piefed is, but the difference is that in lemmy/piefed, you do not want to follow particular users, you follow communities. on peertube, you follow users. so when you watch a video on one instance, you can watch a video from different instance too, its just that peertube does not have a great recommendation algorithm. in lemmy/piefed, when you go to home page, and just search something, content from all comunities is shown. in earlier versions of peertube, you could not search across instances. now you can. if you want a better search, try - https://sepiasearch.org/
Awesome; I’m glad it’s improving. My experience wiþ it has not been good so far, but I’d love to see it succeed.
Why are you using the thorn? Gotta admit though, it looks pretty dope and convenient
Once they press the letter T, the letter H stops working.
Cheers! I use it to try to mess wiþ LLM training data.
Thats a thing about how peertube federates. They prefer to be relatively conservative with sending out their federation feelers, so by default they aren’t looking for content on other servers. Idk the details of how federation works so I am probably at least a little wrong, so don’t take my word as law
Just a few thoughts as to why it hasn’t taken off:
Video is multiple orders of magnitude more difficult and expensive to serve than text or even audio.
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Your server needs a great upload speed which is not achievable for on-site home servers for most people in the world
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Your server has to have at least one dedicated encoding GPU (no raspberry pis or Intel nucs if you want any meaningful traffic)
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Your server has to have a ton of storage, especially if you allow 4k content to be uploaded, which while much cheaper than before, is still expensive. Here in the EU, reliable storage is around 300€/12TB for drives, which fills up very fast with 4k videos or if you try to store different resolutions to reduce transcoded loads.
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Letting random people upload video onto your instance is significantly harder to moderate than text or photos. Like think of the CSAM spam that was on Lemmy when it started in taking many new users…
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The power usage (and bill) of the server will also be much higher than without peertube because of constant transcoding
The cost, both financial and server taxation-wise is simply too great for me, and many others to setup a peertube instance.
Regardless of how easy it is for people to create on peertube, someone has to bear the cost of hosting it. That is cheap-ish for Lemmy or mastodon, but there is a reason YouTube was a loss leader for a long time for google, and many streaming services restrict 4k video.
That isn’t even getting into compensation for the content makers.
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The main issue is that there are not enough users and not enough creators. Also, instance space is often limited.
I sometimes take part in a German ttrpg streaming group and I thought about convincing them to also upload to peertube but most instances that are focused on that topic simply don’t interested in hosting 300+ new videos that are each 3h+.
Apart from that platforms like twitch “guarantee” a small revenue stream and YouTube a large audience. PeerTube is harder to sell both in regards of outreach and revenue. However, I think if you are producing for the English market PeerTube can be very interesting revenue wise as some PeerTube creators report that they get more donations per viewer than on other platforms.
For creators, wich want to monitize their content, PeerTube isn’t an option. The alternatives for music is Bandcamp and for all other Odysee, there they can create incomings with their content. PeerTube is nice for upload and host videos and same images in Pixelfed, both federated but only this.
I am interested in those people who are not trying to monitize everything. So that is a good filter for me.
On the other hand, there is no reason why they can’t curate their own sponsorship, or even run their own ads. Seems like there is more money in that than trying to break big on you tube.
Yes, there are also creators which public their work without any financial interests, but the most which create contents with effort and quality, like cientific documentals, music and other artistic content have costs producing and publishing it. In Odysee they have an fair system to gain money, like also in Bandcamp, without nagging and annoying the user for it, like in YT. In PeerTube to do it the creators can only use third party services for it (Patreon or others), otherwise they can do only the same as YT, blocking the access to their instance as paid service.
costs producing and publishing it.
That is pretty much zero no days though. The only real cost is time.
I mean yes, they will need a computer. They might need lighting if they are on camera, but from then on, zilch. You could do it with a cell phone for video.
I have a kid that published their music with videos, and there is no cost at all, using all the free tools available.
They can’t monetize directly, but they can still do Patreon and sponsored ad reads. Maybe this already exists, but we could make it common to have donation wallets linked on videos, so you can still get tips too.
It’s just the ad revenue we can’t do
It took a while for me to figure out how to sign up for a peertube instance and I’ve still barely been able to log into it.
I’m not a fan of how YouTube videos are mirrored on peertube. It feels like freebooting.
You get linked to a video on the fediverse and you like the video and want to know more. When you look at the description you see abundant evidence the description was copied from YouTube, but that’s fine. You decide let’s go to YouTube to give them views so they can continue making videos but there are no links to the source material.
Here’s the contributing section of their git.
Thanks for the link. I’ll see how I can add on
I tryed to use peertube, but I wanted to follow an account and I wasn’t able to do it in my instance, so I moved to another and in that one I wasnt able to upload videos and then 1 month after my account was deleted because I did nothing and problems like this over and over, ignoring how to just search a video or specific chanel that is not of your own instance is really difficult. Is not a comfy experience really.
I set up my own instance but…I don’t use it. I followed a bunch of other instances and channels and I’m not sure if I didn’t configure it correctly but i’m getting no live streams, no real good content, just nothing I want to watch.
I don’t know. I want to like it but there’s just not much decent on it that I can find.
I’m trying to like the service, and I still use it on occasion but the issue for me is using the app. I’m confused on how things work. I downloaded the app and I was following a creator. Then I went to another peertube instance to finally make an account, and afterwards try to follow that creator. His videos don’t show up. I opened the browser to sign in to follow him there hopping he would show up on my peertube app, but that also wasn’t the case. Idk, it’s a little confusing.
Also in the app I don’t know how to search for videos across perrtube, I feel like I can only arch search for videos in my instance.
I love Peertube, but I remember that finding an instance wasn’t so easy.
Still I wanted to try it, so I was ready to go through some difficulties, but most people would just give up.
Yeah, it was definitely more effort than any other Fediverse service. Lemmy, Pixelfed, Mastodon, and Misskey? Have an easy, immediately noticeable join or severs tab where you can search for pretty much any instance and by categories.
PeerTube? Doesn’t have a Servers/Instances tab, only shows a quick 6 platforms on the main page, have to go to the “Browse Content” (Blank sepiasearch page) to then click the “Go Here” link to search instances. Other issues:
- Only language filter is English. Which is weird considering Framasoft is French
- Many of these promoted instances don’t even allow sign-ups
- If you’re trying to upload videos now you have to look for instances that allow a lot of video uploads
- In addition to that there’s video quality, live streaming, transcription, etc to worry about
I signed up for an account, but I’ve barely used it due to lack of content I want to see on there, plus search isn’t that great. Just far more hurdles than the other services.
IMO asking the general public used to point & click simplicity is definitely a problem. Also I assume the lack of advertising is why creators don’t use it much either. They like getting free sponsored goodies to advertise to their audience.
Public broadcasters should use it.
They wouldn’t need the development costs they now have, they could reduce server costs for anyone who’s willing to share bandwidth, they could still limit it to “local/paying users” (with an account / ip addr)
They would immediately push all their content into one place and make it so much easier to use. This would drive adoption of peertube to the next level.
I know and watch one guy and that’s nick. I just don’t know about anyone else publishing videos. I don’t see new stuff, I don’t know about it. Searching for documentaries leads into the blue. He’s dead jim.
That’s all nice and good but I think it needs mainstream creators to get on board and start publishing there. Though, since there is no financial incentive on PeerTube it won’t work.
I’m wondering would integrating with donation platforms help. Can be normal domains or some system which helps instance hosts too. I have sorta “top up and donate to content author” system in mind.
The big problem with Peertube is that most content creators cannot monetise their videos and for that reason they do not use or report on Peertube. The most contradictory thing of all is that most “Linuxtubers” do not do so either, for the same reason.
Their website directed me to a gore instance.
[Homer Simpson disappearing back into the bushes]
