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?
But it’s not PeerTube, it’s ABC’s PeerTube and BCD’s PeerTube and CDE’s PeerTube, etc.
That’s fine. That’s how federation works.
The problem is that the different peertube instances are defederated BY DEFAULT so it’s exceptionally rare to find ones that can share with each other.
The censorship crowd needs to stay far, far away from peertube if there is ever any chance of it being successful.
The question that basically everyone is going to ask is “so?”
Username checks out
yes the throat fuck it does, and
On Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed etc. you join one instance and you get access to the others. See this very comment section, I’m on sh.itjust.works, you’re on lemmy.ml, we’re both commenting on a post on lemmy.world. “Everything’s political so defederate because their ideology isn’t pure enough” notwithstanding, you open an account on one instance and the content on all instances is discoverable.
On PeerTube, for some weird reason, that functionality is something the instance owner has to enable. It’s off by default. So, in practice, PeerTube is capable of, but isn’t, federated. Which means you have 90 different little YouTubes, each of which is hosting a total of 90 videos, and you can’t watch all 8100 videos from one place, be it one website if you’re old and lame enough to have a PC or from one account on one app.
In fact, I think the behavior of TILvids has already killed PeerTube as a platform. I think it’s already dead, because some jackass with delusions of grandeur wants to build a walled garden out of an open ecosystem. You want to run an edutainment instance? Great! I’ve been saying since I joined Lemmy that general purpose instances are largely a mistake. On PeerTube I’ve seen more instances attempt to segregate by content type (there’s an arts, crafts and makers instance, for example. I could see making a gaming instance, etc.) TILvids raises a valid concern; alternative video hosting sites inevitably become hives of the scum and villainy that got themselves kicked off of YouTube. Here on Lemmy we have those instances that everybody defederates, effectively isolating that shit. TILvids’ approach to this is quarantine everything that isn’t them, which I see as strangling both themselves and PeerTube by two mechanisms:
It’s going to stifle general adoption of the platform by viewers. People go to Youtube to look at one kind of video, say, archery competitions, then they notice in the side panel a thumbnail of a leatherworking tutorial, and they go “Ooh I always wanted to see that.” Pretty soon you’ll open up Youtube to watch 4 minutes of cats yawning, a Desert Bus speedrun, a stand-up comedy routine and then three different recipe tutorials for making bagels. No one says “I want to find a website that hosts edutainment video content.” They turn up looking for celebrity nipple slips or people falling off skateboards, they’ll stay for the edutainment.
It’s going to kill any mechanism for new creators. A big benefit to Youtube is any idiot can make a video and upload it to the internet. That’s where we got Hank Green and CGP Grey. There needs to be a space that permits that on or adjacent to your platform. Currently their recruitment strategy for creators seems to be “Get established on Youtube, then maybe we’ll let you upload your content here too for some reason.” It’s not going to take off as a self-sustaining platform that way; there needs to be a place for people to upload their early bad crap and build experience.
Everyone on PeerTube is trying very hard to make their chosen platform unadoptable.
Is it because video hosting is substantially more expensive than mostly text and some images (Lemmy and Mastodon) that it brings out that kind of behavior? As in they have more skin in the game so they try to protect it more? Any thoughts on the new Loops platform? Is it suffering from the same issues?
Video hosting being expensive is why it’s difficult for an individual to make an account on most if any instances, which is also a problem.
There are two “that kind of behaviors” here; the button to make content searchable across peertube is off by default for some reason and some admins aren’t clicking it. That could be for myriad reasons. TILvids trying to build a walled garden in an open platform is just outright wrongheadedness.
I like the idea of themed instances that revolve around certain broad topics, kind of the way television channels used to do. Some of us are old enough to remember when there was science fiction on the Sci-Fi channel, music videos on MTV, documentaries on the Discovery Channel and so on. TILvids is trying to be the Discovery channel, except anyone who signs up for cable TV primarily for the Discovery channel doesn’t get to see other channels, and anyone who signed up mostly for something else doesn’t get to see the Discovery channel. The owner has talked about a “hub and spoke” model they want to build with TILvids as the hub, which is an incompatible vision with the success of PeerTube as a whole.
I’ll also mention that I’ve never seen the “upload” gauge on Peertube do anything. The idea is it works like bittorrent, those who are watching a video will seed it to others to help share the load. I’ve yet to see that actually happen, and I wonder if it’s because no one else in the world was watching that video at that moment.
I don’t know much about Loops; it may be too early to ask. I haven’t really looked at it yet, in no small part because you have to sign up for it, you can’t really window shop. I think Loops is going to face the same problem that Minetest (or whatever they changed its name to) does; it’s a good piece of software that does the things you like, and it’s not attached to the corporate fuckheads who burned your future down. Want to try it out? “Absolutely, 100% no I don’t because it’s not the program my friends have.” The fact that the Tiktok ban in America turned out to be fake is probably what’s going to fail to launch Loops.
P2P on videos does work and if you watch out for a live stream, you’ll probably see it yourself.
Yesterday I was watching a live stream, where I had 10 peers.
Again I’ve yet to see it happen on a normal video, which leads me to believe there’s extremely little traffic.
You can usually experience it if you watch some of newly added videos from the big channels.