I feel so bad whenever I see news about PeerTube, because it legitimately seems like a great platform on a technological level, and so far I've been loving Lemmy and Mastodon, but it feels like the network effect just isn't there for PeerTube yet. Most of the content feels very hyper-specific (e.g. FOSS/privacy stuff), it feels like the frequency of videos is super sparse, and on top of that, unlike Lemmy and Mastodon, there's just not enough federated content (let alone local) except maybe on PeerTube.TV. I pay for and watch videos on Nebula, so it's not like I'm unfamiliar with sparse uploads, but what I do get is pretty consistently something I want to watch, and it's all in exactly one place.

Additionally, whereas Lemmy and Mastodon make it pretty easy to find an instance to sign up with (there are a few major ones or you can go with some more minor ones and still federate just fine, and there's not too much of a difference), the process for finding and signing up for a PeerTube instance is one of the most "what the fuck even is this" experiences I've ever had with a platform like this. The obvious first choice is PeerTube.TV, but you can't register with them, so now you have to go mucking around in the hundreds of other instances (you seemingly can't sort them in the finder) and pray that the instance is decent and has content you want. And in order to know what's going on for each of those instances, you need to go to the About tab in the hamburger menu, read through a million lines to make sure that "speaking negatively about Stalinism will result in a ban" isn't in the code of conduct (this was a real thing I found before), read through the list of subscriptions in a separate tab (basically none of which you can actually recognize) and/or check the video feeds, and then settle on one that seems basically acceptable.

It's something I can justify doing as an enthusiast, but I know only a select few people in my life who would even be able to figure out how to do this at all, I know even fewer who would be willing to do it if I helped them out and pleaded with/bribed them to try it, and I'm not sure I know even a single one who would do so on their own unprompted.