What keeps you away from PeerTube? What features does PeerTube lack? If you were the developer of PeerTube, how would you improve it?
About a year ago I started trying to check out peertube to see if it was worthwhile for uploading my videos to. My first challenge was just finding instances to sign up on. Most of them didn’t allow registration. Then for the ones I did find, streaming videos was very slow and laggy. In some cases, I couldn’t even view videos. And then, it seemed that I could only search for videos that existed on that particular instance.
Like I said, this was a year ago so maybe it’s improved. But in general, it seemed totally unusable for someone just looking for a way to share videos.
Most of them didn’t allow registration. Then for the ones I did find, streaming videos was very slow and laggy. In some cases, I couldn’t even view videos. And then, it seemed that I could only search for videos that existed on that particular instance.
As a user, I feel this pain. The defenders of how “easy” it is to join federated services, it really isn’t. There’s choice paralysis as well as waiting for registration and verification. It’s not smooth at all. Take a stop watch and set up a YouTube account, upload a video of a cat’s butt, and it’s like 2 minutes.
As a person who rolled out my own servers, I understand the barriers. I don’t have registration because my $5/month server can’t handle it, performance-wise or spammers. Even uploading things on my server is slow.
Hard problem to solve tbh and I don’t have a solution
yeah for some reason you have to type some sentence for most, better off suggesting something like kbin.earth where you only check a box. But I actually have no idea if you can login with that to lemmy apps or if it just works on their site?
I went looking the other day and had the exact same experience. They have an instance search on the main peertube website but even if you filter stuff out you still get results that don’t match e.g. filter for English only instances that allow content creation and you still get french and German instances or instances that don’t even let you register.
The filter is atrocious.
I also feel like even though, yes it goes against the idea of a DEfederated setup, in order to entice users, there should be a big catch-all “default” instance that users will gravitate to when they don’t know what they want in particular. IMO, this isn’t a bad thing. It does lead to one particular instance getting bloated, but it gives people time to acclimate, to check out how everything works, and then once they’re cozy, they can pick up and move to a smaller, more niche instance.
Mainstream websites require an email and a password. That’s it. No thinking. It’s done. A lot of the people on Lemmy are internet savvy or software engineers. Of course it’s easy for them. Johnny Offstreet wants to open the app store and have it done for them. Which is why, for better or worse, decentralized social media will never reach the moon.
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I think the biggest thing for everyone is discovery.
I also think the worst parts of youtube are baked into the videos themselves now so re-uploads are just a worse experience even without the buffering.
I cannot agree more about discovery. Easily the biggest issue for me.
Regarding the first question, for me PeerTube has a similar problem as with other fediverse stuff, which besides a lack of greater adoption is a scarcity of sites with a positive, distinct identity/community (last I checked at least) to encourage more people to use it.
Off the top of my head in terms of PeerTube, only TILvids.com comes to mind, which is cool, but remains primarily tech and specifically Linux-related educational videos. I don’t mind that, but it’d be cool to see a broader range of educational content on there.
Proper grayjay integration. Though last time I tried peertube, there wasn’t much to watch anyway.
The PeerTube Android App is a huge step forward, but it needs two important features to be a viable YouTube alternative:
- possibility to login with my account
- functionality to cast to Chromecast or similar devices
- more content (not a feature)
PeerTube overall lacks decent support for subtitles, which is my answer to all of the questions. Veronica Explains is (so far) the only channel I make an effort to watch on PeerTube because she provides subtitles.
I’d be more than happy with terrible machine-generated subtitles at the bare minimum since they are enabled by default on YouTube when uploading a video. Accessibility is quite important imo
There’s actually a plugin for PeerTube that generates subtitles for videos.
As an end user that doesn’t seem to help me? How am I to use a plugin?
It’s a plugin that the admin of the server need to install, for you to be able to use it.
So we’re back to step one lol
I’ll install it on my server, once I have it up and running. I promise 😁
- Hard to get into and discover channels
- Services like Grayjay, which can put together both recommendations from PeerTube and YouTube and other platforms for some reason only pull the oldest content from PeerTube
- A lack of community outside the biggest Linux YouTubers
A few solutions might be to…
- Somehow find a way to have the PeerTube app work with YouTube
- Include subscriptions for channels so YouTubers can use PeerTube as a better patreon or ko-fi for storing videos and sharing content
- Promote better videos which may entice others to stay longer, have users consistently promote the service personally
I definitely could see a lot more usage of PeerTube if Grayjay could work better together with it, maybe enabled by default
The inverse of this is just doing what Grayjay does but on the PeerTube app instead
Right at this moment: content and performance.
If I start looking around at Peertube, will I find anything I’m interested in watching? There’s a LOT on Youtube right now, what’s on Peertube?
There’s a tendency for alternative platforms to be wretched hives of scum and villainy. LBRY for example felt like the place racist shitheads were banished to when banned from Youtube. The difference between LBRY and Peertube seems to be “something something blockchain.”
I noticed a video from a channel called The Giddy Stitcher titled “How to start a (good) Flosstube channel” which for a second I took to mean Free Libre Open Source Software tuber, as if she was going to give tips on how to run an channel on Peertube. No, apparently “floss” = textile arts/string/whatever and that term is similar to “woodtube” for Paul Sellers et al. She apparently uses Peertube to mirror her Youtube videos, and gets thousands of views per video on Youtube and maybe a dozen views on Peertube.
Anyway, watching this video, it buffered HARD. It got better after awhile but…you remember how, back in the day, you could just pause a video and it would buffer? And how it kinda doesn’t anymore? It was also that. They don’t offer lower qualities below 720p50 which probably doesn’t help; I’ve seen Youtube jump all the way down to 144p to keep the video playing at all.
I know, Peertube is “some people” while Youtube is run by Alphabet. But, maybe we should standardize on lower resolutions and aspire to HD later on, huh?
What is peer tube? Honest questions
Peertube is to Youtube what Lemmy is to Reddit. Individual instances host the content uploaded by that instance’s members, viewers can browse the entire federation. To help with server load, Peertube has a P2P function; if 100 people are watching the same video at the same time, some of them will upload parts of the video they’ve already downloaded to others.
It’s basically YouTube, but FOSS, federated and has P2P functionality to lessen the stress on the server that will be streaming the video to the user.
Semi-official search engine: https://sepiasearch.org/
Sepia search is great but it could use some modernizing.
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Basically some sort of fediverse wide accepted OAuth implementation?
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Controversial opinion: I think PeerTube should add support for paid-access content as you could then persuade the creators on Nebula to join. Since they are promoting their YT-alternative already, this would mean extra PeerTube publicity and users for free.
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