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?
You must log in or register to comment.
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.
That seems… like a poor choice.
It’s really just missing a great instance. Most of them look really shady or are not accepting new users.
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.
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.
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.
Is there a non ml community? I try to avoid the “genocide is ok when China does it” instances
Yes someone suggested !peertube@lemmy.wtf and world seems to have one as well.
You should go here https://ideas.joinpeertube.org/ or here https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube to raise concerns.
Thank you very much! I love the cooperation in the fedi.
Its growing like crazy. Try the app they just released. It uses some search that works better than instance search
It uses sepia search to search all instances that have opted into being searched.
deleted by creator
In that case issue is some instances do not allow global search and that’s why search will limit to only channels you follow and your instance.
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.)
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.
I completely agree.
Normally, you wouldn’t have to do this. The problem is that Peertube devs made the HORRIBLE decision to make federating “opt-in” only. This means most content isn’t available on most instances. It’s a snowball effect where most owners make the decision without thinking to have some mystical barrier to enter their esteemed federation.
They don’t understand that most users don’t give a shit about “proving” themselves to enter some random person’s instance. (and rightfully so)
Peertube made a lot of good choices, but a lot of bad ones too by the censorship/walled garden crowd.
Hopefully someone with more resources than me can run an instance that fills this void: just let people upload and interact like youtube back in the early 2000s.
just let people upload and interact like youtube back in the early 2000s.
Quick! Somebody get a baby named charlie to bite me! He could bite my finger!
That kids in college now. Yeah. Feel old now, don’t ya?
Implying I didn’t feel old then, lmao
Yeah, I agree.
When it comes to building a fediverse service there’s a really delicate balance to find with making it unambiguous you’re engaging with multiple services, vs creating a singular and cohesive enough user experience, and it seems like the peertube devs just learn reaaally far towards the former at the expense of the latter.
Its a bit frustrating.
Edit: I learned from another user on this thread that sepia search can be enabled by an instance as their search functionality. That definitely helps
You say that yet Google search / Internet search is very much a big thing. For the record, I agree with you.
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.
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.
-
I’m not entirely sure what you’re saying. Google owns youtube. If you’re saying people search google, and then click the youtube link results, I mean, yeah, people do that. But it’s not a necessity. I can go to youtube, and search straight from youtube. I CAN search from google, but it’s not a requirement like it is with peertube.
PeerTube doesn’t have search at all? Yea that is kind of nuts. I’ve had bad search experience across Lemmy and Mastodon as well. I wonder how much is due to decentralized nature of the servers, the federation aspect, or just poor search functionality.
Peertube has a search, but by default it only searches it’s own instance. Instance owners can choose to federate with other instances, but thats a choice they need to enable.
You can use outside searches to search all of peertube, but it’s not a given that you can on peertube directly.
Instance owners can enable Sepia Search (Global Search Index) on their instances.
To instance owners (like myself) looking to be added:
This has helped with my channels discoverability. Im still not seeing my videos on the search, even directly searching for the title of the videos, but im hoping that changes when the index gets updated.
I didn’t know that, that definitely helps
I’m not opposed to a microservice that indexes the fediverse for creating a robust search index. Without it, you’d have to nearly search each server on each service.
Sepia Search is something that’s also build into PeerTube, if the admin have enabled Global Search. Sepia Search uses this list of instances: https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances
The same can be enabled in PeerTube. You can see here, that I have it enabled on my instance:
I’m so glad you pointed this out. I did not have this enabled on mine and I forgot about this option completely. I just enabled it.
i found sepia search to be very good! i noticed the ios peertube app seems to have integrated it so a lot more videos are discoverable. @ellyxir@humanwords.cc
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 🤷
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.
If I go to the TILvids channels, the last 6 months of videos are missing.
Do you have an example?
If I go to The Linux Experiment via peertube.wtf, I can see many years of videos.
From what instance is that?
Mine
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?
Nope
deleted by creator
I would not recommend using tilvids.com. They do not federate with anyone and do not have global search enabled, which means search only shows videos from tilvids.com. It is however, possible to follow channels from tilvids.com from other platforms (instances).
Simply copy the link from tilvids.com and paste it into the search bar of an instance that has global search enabled.
Platforms can also follow channels directly from tilvids and the videos will show up on said platform.
Discoverability can be a bit finicky on PeerTube. Especially if you don’t know how to fine tune the filters.
If you take a look at this list: https://peertube.wtf/home and this one https://lemmy.wtf/post/15810205, you’ll see that there’s plenty of content creators to follow. I discover new ones almost every day.
There really isn’t any other big content creators on PeerTube, other than The Linux Experiment, but if you wanna see your favorite creator on PeerTube, ask them.
If you are looking for a platform (instance) to register on, I recommend looking at this list: https://lemmy.wtf/post/15816115
Simply copy the link from tilvids.com
…what link?
The link of the channel or the channel handle.
Veronica explains is one channel I always enjoys (if you like Linux).
She is on her own instance now
I just rejoined PeerTube after I had a quick look years ago, and it’s gotten way better since then, actually. I found out Space Quest Historian is on it, too!
But yeah, discoverability isn’t good. Lack of an algorithm also makes bingewatching impossible - for better and worse, I guess.
As you linked them, I’d also recommend peertube.wtf - they even reacted very quickly when I reported a transphobic german conspiracy channel/server.
That’s my instance! :D
Excellent instance!
Oh :D
Well, you are doing a great job, and I like what I have seen so far! Keep up the good work!
that’s the chicken and egg problem of any social network: people don’t want to go to a social network with only a few number of content creators and content creators don’t want to spend their time managing another platform for only a few number of viewer… social networks needs people to be alive and so if you are interested in Peertube, it will be hard at first but use it so, just like voting system where every vote count, the platform will have one more user and if other people do the same, the platform will grow and if it grow enough it will start to attract bigger content creator, etc…
It’s in people hand to break the cycle and makes that Youtube alternative a viable alternative.
I’m a peertube instance admin for years now and closed my google/youtube account 10 years ago, so I’m doing my part to break it.
Just horrible discovery leading creators to abandon the platform.
Yeah, that must be it. It’s a real shame because the core technology seems to be solid. Streaming 1080p videos from other instances just works. But finding channels to follow seems impossible.
Yeah that’s been my experience with most of the fediverse so far. It’s not going anywhere unless someone comes up with a solution to the discoverabilty problems.
Honestly if they could make the mastodon sign up not give people options initially I think it is effectively a better twitter.
I had the exact same experience including the videos you linked to. There was nothing to be found.
Which is silly because most instances will auto mirror your YouTube channel. Literally takes no effort to post to both.
I have a Peertube server, and I’ve requested to follow tilvids, and they denied my request, and they also do not follow my Peertube server. I think one issue with tilvids may be that they essentially choose not to federate, and therefore you won’t find much because of this.
I just searched for “Gaming” on my Peertube server and I seem to get a non-ending list of servers. Unfortunately, one column wide, but a lot. When I search for King’s Quest, I am also getting a seemingly unending stream of videos.
I follow every Peertube server I can that is clearly not fascist, primarily NSFW, NSFL, etc.
Maybe you just need to find a server that is more federated with other Peertube servers.
This is the issue with federated youtube. It should ALL be federated, and all searchable, mandatory.
Now if I the user decide I don’t want to see an instance/video/creator, I should have two options.
Block - Used for when content offends you. It has zero place being in your feed.
Not Interested - Used when content isn’t offensive per se, but you really don’t care about it either. It’s not completely blocked from your feed, but it’s certainly not getting first dibs to show up from now on.
This leaves one thing that some may feel is an issue. Lets say there were a small dicked loser who did nazi salutes in public, and wanted to upload hateful content. Lets give him a random name for the sake of simplicity. Let’s call him…Elon. Hypothetical name.
So lets say small dicked Elon, starts uploading hateful content. On youtube you would report him. On peertube, since he owns the hosted server, you’d be reporting him to himself. Which is as you can imagine, useless.
So from here, you block them, and then you never have to see their hateful content ever again.
Because their rise, only comes from people giving these people attention.
Yes!
Fell free to send federation request :) https://peer.madiator.cloud/
what’s the best peertube instance to upload gaming videos to? I might upload some and see how it goes
edit: I think I’m gonna go with spectra, but omg this is annoying:
Channel identifier cannot be the same as your account name. You can click on the first step to update your account name.
I get it, they’re separate actors, but still annoying. Can people find my channel by either name? Edit2: yes they can, all the user’s channels are listed on the user profile, which maybe makes it worth the signup annoyance
Isn’t it the exact same thing on YouTube?
You have a user account, which can have x numbers of channels.
YouTube is a bit different because you can use your username as your channel name, and then you can have multiple “brands” that aren’t linked to your username. People can’t find those from your main account.
Ah okay, so you can also upload videos to your username channel?
yea Youtube lets you use the same name, but the extra organization that Peertube gives seems pretty cool too
Take a look here for an instance: https://lemmy.wtf/post/15816115 And take a look here, under gaming, which instances they use: https://lemmy.wtf/post/15810205
As someone who watches gaming footage on PeerTube, I’ve mostly interacted with single creator instances – i.e. either the creator themselves is self-hosting it or it’s run by a fan as a non-YT backup of their Twitch/Owncast/whatever VODs. Those instances generally do not allow anyone else to upload.
Discoverability sucks but the way I’ve found them is by using SepiaSearch and looking for specific words from game titles. I imagine the way most other people find them is that they already know the content creator from Twitch and want to find an old VOD that isn’t archived on YT (e.g. because of YT’s bullshit copyright system) – but that’s just a guess.
Haha, good luck.
Tilvids.com don’t want to allow following or follow anyone themselves. That’s a policy they have had for a long time. However… Since Tilvids is on this list: https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances?search=tilvids, they are part of the Global Search Index. So you can get videos from tilvids in your search results, if you instance has enabled Global Search.
Also, you, as an instance owner, can follow channels on tilvids, by using their channel handles.
I created !peertube@lemmy.world in case anyone finds channels, videos, ect that they like.
We can help with the discovery!
Check out the pinned posts here: !peertube@lemmy.wtf
Thanks, I tried to add as much as I could from that community. Also added it in the sidebar!
Check out the two pinned posts here: !peertube@lemmy.wtf
I just checked that out and am Fry ng to make a decision but am confused about storage space for users. What do people use peertube storage space for and/or why might I want it?
Storage is for videos you upload. If you don’t intend to upload video, you should just go for a PeerTube platform (instance/server) that federates with as many other as possible.
Thanks! That actually changes which server I was going to use lol
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.
they seem to only give accounts to creators
Yea this is a bit silly. It seems like they manually approve user accounts because they need to be careful with the uploads using up their storage. But a way better solution would be to approve users more liberally, and user accounts would be created without a channel so they cannot upload anything, and creating channels needs to be approved. That way people can freely make user accounts for browsing/following, and the admins can still restrict spam channels from being created and uploading videos.
they seem to only give accounts to creators
That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. I’ll get in trouble for saying it, but I think that PeerTube is for video channels what Lemmy should be for communities. It should be that if you want to start or moderate a community, then you sign up to Lemmy, but if you just want to interact with one, you use a user account provided by software that’s fully geared up around users (e.g. Mastodon).
Ignoring for the moment that Lemmy’s federation model hasn’t been widely adopted, and that comments from Mastodon that appear in Lemmy often have annoying Hashtag / Mention spam, my fantasy version of a post in a Lemmy community would look something like https://tilvids.com/w/wjTD7fp9qy4KmTkBdSoWyc, which was created by a PeerTube user, but has been commented on and voted for by users from Mastodon, Sharkey, PieFed, other PeerTube instances, and MBIN.
Amongst those subscribers, commenters, and voters should be Lemmy users, of course. In this thread, it feels like PeerTube is being criticised by people who want to use it in a way that it’s not designed for, because they can’t interact with it from their Lemmy account. If inter-op was better, there’d be no need to create a new account anywhere, and it would have a network effect - the channels that people are trying to discover would already have been brought in by other users, and findable through a conventional Lemmy search. Also, the votes and comments from Lemmy users that are currently going to whoever takes a PeerTube video and posts it in the likes of !videos@lemmy.world, would instead be going to original creator. This would also aid discovery (since people would be more likely to see the channel in ‘all’), and might have also some incentivising influence on the creator.
Basically, I blame Lemmy.
Basically, I blame Lemmy.
Peertube is older than Lemmy though.
What you suggest isn’t actually a bad idea, but if that was the goal then they shouldn’t even pretend to support user accounts only channel accounts, channel accounts wouldn’t need to be able to like/comment/subscribe either. They wouldn’t have to bother with their UI rendering likes/dislikes/comments, they wouldn’t need buttons to subscribe, and they wouldn’t need a mobile app either. It’s a good idea, just be a video backend and only support the embedded video player (as it appears on Mastodon), but it doesn’t seem like that was their goal.
They support everything, they just don’t encourage it? A logged in user doesn’t use much more server resources than an anonymous user. It’s still fetching all the video stats and comments, and of course the video itself which is the biggest thing. Kinda seems like it’s just for moderation concerns.
I think they still need a separate user account. For one thing, a PeerTube channel is ‘attributedTo’ the user account, in the same way that Lemmy communities are ‘attributedTo’ the moderators. A Group belongs to at least one Person, it can’t belong to itself. Another is that it allows for creators to comment on videos, and either be recognised as the ‘OP’, or as a fellow content creator.
In terms of rendering things like Likes and Dislikes, it has the info in the backend, so it may as well. They don’t Announce votes like Lemmy does, you have to activitely fetch them, so the channel as it exists on PeerTube provides a definitive source. Likewise, there’s all sorts of reasons why comments get out of sync, so the channel provides an authoritative place where you should be able to see them all.
There is a friction though. I like the idea of a place that only open to people willing to create content, and isn’t interested in signups from ‘lurkers’, but providing a mobile app doesn’t seem compatible with that.
Exactly. The way it is structured seems to forget people who watch the videos are an important part of the community.
yes Youtube has maybe a billion user accounts with 0 videos, it’s the main way to use the platform
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.
Some Lemmy instances work. Others don’t. Piefed and kbin/kbin work well though.
The that’s a shit solution.
Uhm… entitlement much?
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.
It would be nice if we can just click subscribe. I know mastodon lets you do something similar within other mastodon instances. What I wouldn’t give for a better user experience…
Yeah it’s compounded by federation being opt in on PeerTube. It makes the server your account is on matter a lot more.
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.
😆
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.
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.
Which instance was that? Have a look at this list: https://lemmy.wtf/post/15816115
Even if the instance does not federate with the instance you wanted, you can still type in the link of the channel in the other instance’s search bar.
That’s a shit solution
Then find another instance…
I think peer tube federation is opt in not opt out like most other services.
The PeerTube admin chooses which other platforms they follow. They can also control who can follow them.
Yeah the search is the worst part. As others have said the technology is there, we just need a better search.
The other issue is Lemmy (and perhaps other platforms) has issues with Peertube channels. I can’t direct link Peertube for activityhub posts. Lemmy is a no go. !teddy_the_dog@piped.chrisco.me Piefed for example works: https://piefed.social/c/teddy_the_dog@piped.chrisco.me
I host one and don’t plan on taking it down anytime soon! If anyone likes dog videos: @teddy_the_dog@piped.chrisco.me
He’s a good boy.
Nice channel, I’ve just added it to https://piefed.social/topic/wholesome to help people find it.
Excellent. I hope we will all enjoy it. Teddy is a good boy :)
Thanks!!
