7
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by farcaster@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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?

top 36 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old

It's both horrible discovery and a limited number of creators.

But, for discoverability, https://sepiasearch.org/ might help you find things to watch, since it's the only good multi-server search I've seen. (And run by the peertube devs.)

[-] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

I say this everytime someone talks about peertube. You should not need to leave the website to use the website. If I search "crazy guy uses rake to play football", and it's not in the results page, I'm not going to go to ANOTHER website, to search THIS website, for a guy who doesn't understand how to play sports.

[-] notfromhere@lemmy.ml 0 points 4 months ago

You say that yet Google search / Internet search is very much a big thing. For the record, I agree with you.

[-] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 0 points 4 months ago

Google search started out when the internet was a collection of unrelated websites and you needed a search engine to discover any of them. If Youtube's search was so useless that you had to leave Youtube, open up Google, search for the content you wanted to see there, and then ended back up on Youtube, you'd be pretty pissed.

[-] notfromhere@lemmy.ml 0 points 4 months ago

But it’s not PeerTube, it’s ABC’s PeerTube and BCD’s PeerTube and CDE’s PeerTube, etc.

[-] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 0 points 4 months ago

The question that basically everyone is going to ask is "so?"

[-] notfromhere@lemmy.ml 0 points 4 months ago
[-] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 months ago
  1. yes the throat fuck it does, and

  2. 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.

[-] Ulrich@feddit.org -1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

It's both horrible discovery and a limited number of creators.

100%. I created my own instance and set it to auto-follow other instances. There's like 975 or something and still not really much interesting. Can confirm TILVids also denied my federation request.

I'm doing my part by uploading my own videos 🙂

If I set it the discovery to "trending" the top video is 2 years old 🤷

[-] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 0 points 4 months ago

Sort by "hot". And also, check this list out for content: https://lemmy.wtf/post/15810205

Also also, you can still follow channels on tilvids.com, from your own instance, by following the channel's handle.

[-] Ulrich@feddit.org 0 points 4 months ago

If I go to the TILvids channels, the last 6 months of videos are missing.

[-] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 0 points 4 months ago

Do you have an example?

If I go to The Linux Experiment via peertube.wtf, I can see many years of videos.

[-] Ulrich@feddit.org 0 points 4 months ago
[-] andrew_s@piefed.social 0 points 4 months ago

That view of The Linux Experiment is quite similar to the view from lemmy.ml, with the latest post also being from 9 months ago. I wonder if your PeerTube instance and Lemmy 0.19.x have the same problem, where "something changed" at PeerTube, and new videos stopped appearing at federated sites that didn't change to accommodate the update. Are you running an old PeerTube version?

[-] Ulrich@feddit.org -1 points 4 months ago
[-] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 0 points 4 months ago

From what instance is that?

[-] Ulrich@feddit.org -1 points 4 months ago
[-] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 0 points 4 months ago
[-] Ulrich@feddit.org -1 points 4 months ago

Not sharing, thanks Guy on a Buffalo.

[-] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 0 points 4 months ago

No problem. Something is off with the federation on your server though.

[-] commander@lemmings.world 2 points 4 months ago

Both.

Peertube made this asinine decision to make federating opt-in, so most instances are just places where the owner can jerk themselves off for excluding everything.

[-] TeddE@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

Seems difficult to build it as a social media if it's inherently unsocial.

[-] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

Who said YOU could say words???

revokes your right to comment

We'll be having none of that interaction, and social stuff here!!!!

.......why isn't peertube taking off???

(/joke)

[-] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 2 points 4 months ago

The discoverability is incredibly bad. Peertube has a ton of videos and more servers than lemmy by a long shot iirc. The problem is that the „frontend“ has seen no love like ever. There recently came an app which is nice but otherwise, its very underloved.

Feel free to voice your concerns in !peertube@lemmy.ml for example. The devs should be available through the fedi somewhere.

[-] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 1 points 4 months ago
[-] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 1 points 4 months ago

Thank you very much! I love the cooperation in the fedi.

[-] rocky1138@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 months ago

It's really just missing a great instance. Most of them look really shady or are not accepting new users.

[-] roofuskit@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago

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.

[-] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 0 points 4 months ago

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.

[-] roofuskit@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago

The that's a shit solution.

[-] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 0 points 4 months ago
[-] roofuskit@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

How about basic usability considerations? Nobody is going to switch if this is the user experience. And if no users are subscribing and interacting why would content creators spend time posting to it?

If people want it to be a thriving community then it needs functionality that makes it a community. I shouldn't have to creat an account on a server I don't want content from in hopes that I'll be able to subscribe and interact with a server I do want content from.

I'm an established fediverse user, I have been rolling my own Linux servers for decades. I'm perfectly capable of dealing with imperfect systems. This is a shit user experience and if nobody says so it will never be fixed and peertube will wither and die.

[-] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com -1 points 4 months ago

Although I do understand the idea. but you really need to check your ego, mate.

Just offer help or suggest different ways than it is currently done. If you have the faintest idea of hosting and/or programming, this is not how to get your way.

So stop bitching and start working or shut the fuck up.

[-] roofuskit@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago

😆

That'll show the big corporations how it's done. I'm sure they're shaking in their boots at a platform that demands their users are programers or live with how crappy it is.

[-] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com -1 points 4 months ago

You‘re avoiding my point because you know I‘m right. We dont want corpo apologists here. Foss software is dependent on cooperation. Cooperate or leave.

In any case, you’re leaving my feed now.

[-] roofuskit@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

I'm an apologist because I'm capable of criticism. You're no different than Trump and Musk.

this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
7 points (100.0% liked)

Fediverse

34115 readers
72 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS