To be honest, I had the feeling it is lopsided the other way around at the moment: There are quite a few good and passionate content creators, lacking in an audience and interaction. I mean - sure - it does not have the amount of content of a big tech platform like YT, and not enough to binge watch stuff all day long, but I think lack of an active audience is at the moment more pressing - as is discoverability. If not using outside channels - like promoting on their Mastodon accounts primarily - or using places like !peertube@lemmy.world or !peertube@lemmy.wtf to discover things, a lot of worthwhile content right now flies under the radar. And that is excluding unofficial mirrors of YT content, which I tend to avoid.

On the other hand - I know lack of a mobile app has come up at several times in comments on there, and I have myself by now anecdotally heard from a few people wanting to try PeerTube and then being weirded out by the unfinished mobile app in ways that were unrecoverable. In addition, adding more know-how and codebase for mobile applications into the greater FLOSS ecosphere and Fediverse is good in its own right, there is a severe lack of it.

So this is a bit of self-promotion, but I can’t think of a better way to link all of them in a neat way: Almost all the channels I recommend (excluding some that are on instances that did not allow mine to follow them, which makes the channel cards not load properly, sadly) are on the landing/home page of my instance, in no particular order:

Follow this link for the overview! - of course you can interact and follow from other instances (including other services like Mastodon). Lemmy does not work properly for following PeerTube channels in my experience, though - don’t know about Piefed and mbin.

You can find a similar collection of channels on the landing page of peertube.wtf as well as a collection in a sticke post on !peertube@lemmy.wtf. too.

Hmm, I think at the moment with how Lemmy/the threadiverse is set up, linking to the piefed.social post instead of the link of the post is really clunky - makes interaction pretty hard. Don’t know if that was intentional to promote the other community, but a cross-post would probably be a better idea?

EDIT: Lemmyverse link, for people interested to interact over there more easily from a different instance - although I think Lemmyverse.link doesn’t work with every client

100℅ with you there, I had to struggle with some people trying the weirdest shit on my PeerTube instance, including repeated attempts at ban evasion. Things got better ever since I made registration manually approved only again, though. Even just fencing it off behind “willing and able to write a few coherent words” helps a lot.

Don’t know about what’s on Odyssey - but content on PeerTube is pretty neat, in my opinion - if you like Linux, FLOSS, tinkering and in general, people making videos out of being passionate about something. Also occasional weirdness, and also an increasing amount of “normal” content, at least I had that feeling in the past weeks.

Check !peertube@lemmy.world and !peertube@lemmy.wtf for a rough overview of what to expect and recommendations.

But it is of course also a miniscule amount of content when compared to the giants. And if you go on the wrong instances, there definitely are spammers and grifters to be found. But usually, they get excluded from trustworthy instances.

They used to utilise an implementation of WebTorrent, and compatibility for it is still in the system, but discouraged. Enabling it essentially doubles the storage space needed, due to different requirements of how videos have to be encoded/stored. They switched to HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) with a P2P protocol implemented via WebRTC since then:

https://docs.joinpeertube.org/admin/configuration#web-video-transcoding-or-hls-transcoding

Not Framasoft or affiliated with them. Depending on how long ago your attempt was, their Sepia Search tool may be what you are looking for. That search index has also become the main search option for many instances and it’s definitely a lot better than the options a few years ago.

That being said, discoverability is still a problem. Search algorithms are actually deceptively hard to create and optimise - and with no personalised algorithm, creating a good experience needs more invested time and work at the moment (finding and adding subscriptions).

Speaking of algorithms, there’s a promising project with a lot of potential: PeerTube Picks, which currently is in the form of a Firefox add-on that implements a very basic personalised algorithm, which, anecdotally, has helped me discover a few channels/videos I would have otherwise missed. There’s also !peertube@lemmy.world and !peertube@lemmy.wtf to find and share videos, channels and playlists, although that is of course kind of word of mouth, still.

I get it, and I have been ambivalent throughout my life about it - but I think every time I sit down and think about it, I am still more appreciative of the benefits of a global “Lingua Franca”, compared to the problems. I do appreciate that I can enter the majority of communities online, and immediately, there’s one language everyone can participate in the discussions with, without the need of machine translations and other hoops.

But I do agree that it would be wrong to extrapolate from English being such a language that everyone speaks “well enough” (often with local quirks, like my German bleeding through when I provide run on sentences en masse), to saying content should be made exclusively/primarily in English only.

I think Framasoft are good enough at providing their technology offerings with English documentation, which is I think the important part. They also accept English feedback, and can communicate with people in English like here. And their more local, French focus has, I think, helped them with a stable foundation at home and a supportive community.

I think you must have gotten unlucky there, which does highlight a real problem of discoverability/onboarding. There definitely are instances, which provide (easy) access to more of the overall PeerTube ecosystem. To self-promote, mine for example is connected to 782 other platforms at the time of this writing, and utilises a global search index (like a lot of instances do). As another example, peertube.wtf is connected to a whopping 1086 other platforms, due to being in the game longer and following an overall more permissive moderation policy.

It’s regrettable that turned out to be your experience with PeerTube, and it does highlight an issue with onboarding/discoverability - but it is not necessarily the most common experience people have with PT. Although, I must admit, there is no representative surveying or anything, so I can’t be sure what the most common experience is.

Not Framasoft, or affiliated with them - but I managed to set it up from basically having 0 practical experience and only very basic, non-professional knowledge. I’d say it’s not especially hard, and compared with setting up Lemmy and Mastodon, I’d even call it easy, personally.

I’d say the definitive source is the online docs, with a good installation guide included:

https://docs.joinpeertube.org/

https://docs.joinpeertube.org/install/any-os

Not Framasoft or affiliated with them, but I am running an instance myself. If you have a FQDN and can set up a PeerTube server with federation enabled utilising the bandwith behind it, there are settings to automatically mirror and seed videos from other instances. For example, my server currently has ~300GB which it utilises to automatically pull trending, new and most-watched videos from trusted instances to mirror and seed as a redundancy.

Setting this up is relatively easy, basically just uncommenting and specifying stuff in a config text file. Besides that you could disable user registrations and anything else, maybe the web interface altogether, and just let it do the mirroring. At least AFAIK, there doesn’t seem to be a way to do this, without setting up PeerTube with Fedaration enabled first, though. But maybe they will provide additional info I haven’t learned yet!

Thank you for the answer, that makes a lot of sense. I think the very unique structure and goals you have developed have served you well, since PeerTube might be one of the best fleshed-out projects in the Fediverse space, at least in my opinion.

Great dino choice from great devs!

I’m not from Framasoft, but those speeds should work well enough for personal projects, depending on what resolutions you want to provide the videos at - but in general, the video compression + P2P sharing of people watching the video + other Servers potentially providing redundancy if your content goes “viral” at some point should make this easily possible with those upload speeds.

Also check the question + answers here, which is relevant to your situation: https://lemmy.spv.sh/post/8543/15298

Ah, I might have been misinformed then, I genuinely thought they were still using WebTorrent for P2P as a standard. As long as they still have a P2P system in place, I am relieved.

It’s barebones and very much a WIP - and not official - but for PeerTube, there is PeerTube Picks, a Firefox add-on, that tries to provide a very simple “algorithm” experience, which may grow to become what you are looking for.

Sure:

https://lemmy.world/post/30376256 should work for you.

!opensource@lemmy.ml - should work for anyone that isn’t defederated, it should be the top post at the moment there.

IIRC WebTorrent support is removed. Is torrenting completely off the table?

It is? Like, in general, or just for the app? Just want to make sure I am not missing some huge news here, because if it is removed entirely going forward (it definitely still works on the web interface on Firefox as of me writing this) - that would be rather bad. It’s a huge part of why PeerTube works so well.

Not part of Framasoft, but I am administrating a PeerTube platform/instance myself, and can anecdotally say, that it works rather well. Another factor is, that as an admin, you can set up to automatically mirror videos on other instances, when they meet certain criteria.

For example, I have ~300GB set aside to mirror trending, new and most-watched videos of some instances, that I consider to have quality (EDIT: and reliably non-illegal) content regularily (e.g. spectra.video, makertube.net, peertube.wtf, etc.) That way, in addition to just users watching videos acting as a seeding peer via webtorrent, my own dedicated server in Finland among other professional servers with large bandwith also add to the resilience of the network, even for smaller instances.

Anecdotally, I have also heard of some people running a PeerTube instance successfully from just a SBC, like a RaspPi or similar, from home, utilising the WebTorrent integratio you mentioned EDIT: As I have learned, while they are using P2P connections, it is no longer the WebTorrent protocol to their advantage. Here’s a video I remember talking about this as an example.