this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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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?

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

It's not unsocial. It's just not mirroring multi-gigabyte files by default. It's perfectly social if you use the website.

Everyone has to stop conflating the technology with the network. Lemmy is a website engine. PeerTube is a website engine. The ability to mirror content is not inherent to running a Lemmy- or PeerTube-based website. The network is not the primary object here.

It is a construct that arrises from content-mirroring.

Remember, federation is copying, not creating some kind of remote view. If you're federating videos, you're letting other websites consume terabytes of your storage space amd bandwidth.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 56 minutes ago

Remember, federation is *copying*, not creating some kind of remote view. If you're federating videos, you're letting other websites consume terabytes of your storage space amd bandwidth.

That is not true, at all.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Remember, federation is copying, not creating some kind of remote view.

Is this true? It's my understanding that, lemmy for example, has the protocol in place for servers to communicate their content with each other, but each server's content is hosted separately.

Are you saying all federated services copy each other's data instead of only linking to it?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

Images* are linked, text is copied

See: https://szmer.info/post/5936505 https://lemmy.world/post/25244041

*thumbnails are also copied

[–] [email protected] 8 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

That seems... like a poor choice.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

We use it in our company because we don't want to upload videos only we use to Google.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 23 minutes ago

So it's more useful as a video player than a YouTube replacement?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 hours ago

Most established hosters would be fearful to run an instance of peertube. Costs could balloon out of nowhere and would only increase with time. There is no way donations would keep up with costs, and charging to watch or a subscription would never take off.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (2 children)

There are no great instances because all federation is opt-in.

There's also no general, standard "Peertube affiliated" instance that tries to federate with as many others as possible.

I think there were just some very poor design decisions made for the platform by people who don't know what they're doing.

Ex: Blurring sensitive videos blurs the title as well, without the option to change it.

The community doesn't help because most instances have "request an account" nonsense or literally don't allow users to upload videos.

I re-iterate my previous comment: "most instances are just places where the owner can jerk themselves off for excluding everything."

There will be great peertube instances, but the culture needs to change first.

That said, check out https://dalek.zone/. It's one of the few peertube instances I've come across that legitimately seems interested in making it a viable platform. Registrations and uploading new videos don't require approval, and it federates with way more instances than average.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 52 minutes ago

Check out the pinned posts here: [email protected] for info on instances that fits your needs.

You can mouse over the blurred title and see what it is.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Do we need to start over? Like fork PeerTube and fix all the "We choose to do this wrong because our parents didn't hug us as children" problems?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

No, I don't think it's anywhere near that bad.

I just think that going forward, Peertube developers and instance owners should make the platform more accessible and interconnected.

It's a bigger responsibility to actually host content instead of just links to content, which I don't think most peertube instance owners can handle.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 24 minutes ago

But federating with other instances IS links to content, not hosting content.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 1 day ago (5 children)

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 [email protected] for example. The devs should be available through the fedi somewhere.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 15 hours ago

The frontend is nice, I actually enjoy it. Lots of functionality and fairly easy to navigate.

The problem is the culture around peertube instance: most owners are copying each other by not federating or allowing users to easily upload videos.

Essentially, most of the admins are afraid to actually host a video platform so they do anything in their power to prevent others from using it.

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