PeerTube is fantastic with its decentralized model that prioritizes user privacy and control. However, it still struggles to gain widespread popularity.
What do you think could be done to enhance PeerTube’s appeal and functionality, possibly even becoming a serious alternative to YouTube?
Content. I’m there for the content, not the platform.
Who is on PeerTube that we should be watching?
How often are watch-worthy videos on PeerTube posted on Lemmy?
I’ve seen one or two interesting videos posted to Lemmy from PeerTube in the ~6 months I’ve been here. I think both were from someone called Linux Mom or something like that and I’m not sure but it looked like they weren’t posted by her but by someone else uploading her videos from YouTube to the service. One video was her showing how to use a device to backup old game cartridges and the other was a video for Linux beginners.
That’s about all I’ve seen that grabbed my attention, and the second was only because I liked the creator from the first. But again, I don’t know if it was an official upload that she supported, and if it wasn’t that’s not a good way to attract creators.
that might be me. Ive been pushing as much as possible on /c/video peertube stuff. Whenever I find it.
One of the best and worst things about peertube is that the suggested videos side of things that youtube has isnt a thing. You can search based on hashtags but getting the same fix like youtube is very hard. Its also good in that most creators that are on their are really interesting/dedicated to their craft. And copyright isnt really a thing on peertube, so music/videos/etc…are a LOT better. At least for a time.
This is probably the video? https://lemmy.world/post/15969866?scrollToComments=true
[email protected] now has her own peertube instance: https://tinkerbetter.tube/videos/local
Copyright absolutely is still a thing, the network is just under the radar at the moment and the people who could be suing over it don’t have visibility on usage of their stuff. But, make no mistake, if it ever gets big enough to get noticed, those people and corporations will absolutely sue.
You are correct, I guess what I mean is that its not being enforced all that much.
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I mean a large problem with services like Lemmy Mastodon and peer tube is that they’re complicated. There’s a learning curve require that I don’t have to have if I go to a place like YouTube or any other video site. Peertube requires me to learn about servers and other things in order to fully utilize their service and that’s a massive barrier to the public. Currently it’s preventing me because I just frankly don’t have time to go learn about more technological Concepts to best use a service.
Don’t get me wrong it’s not a dig at the services. They are excellent and I’m glad they’re here and one day I will figure out peertube but until these sites are as easy to use as going to a link and just doing whatever the person wants to do if they’re just not going to take off. Places like limmy and Mastodon and even peertube need a centralized portal so that is just super easy to start.
I’ve yet to get peertube working and I … just don’t care to take the time to figure it out. If it doesn’t work on mobile easily it won’t take off. And this is coming from a nerd.
Same, I’ve resorted to blocking the peertube link bot because I was tired of trying and it not working. It had its chance to make a good impression, it failed 🤷
Along with the other things posted here, it would be nice if peertube had a landing page or even if there was a “watch peertube now” button that led to a page showcasing current popular videos or something.
I clicked your link to peertube.org, then had to “Ask Sepia, our iconic cuttlefish” for a search term to get a list of videos, which after scrolling for a bit moved into lists and channels. A click of the “show more videos” button opened a new tab, and upon clicking a video to watch yet another tab opened to what seems like a fediverse instance for peertube?
For it to be a viable alternative, it needs to capture the way people watch and engage with youtube. If I am watching a video on youtube, there are suggestions for similar content below. If I go to the home page and scroll, either the most popular content will show if I am not signed in, or if I am, content related to videos I watch will be shown.
If I click to watch a video, it will open in the same window.
This is the sort of usability that will entice those new users to make the leap.
Yeah YouTube shorts is like smoking crack (I don’t do Tik-Tok), when compared to your experience of Peertube, yours, metaphorically, seems more like teenagers trying to roll a joint of nutmeg,
They definitely are like crack for a lot of people, I use a youtube front end when I can, and when it’s down a browser addon to remove them.
My daughter is 18 and just a couple months ago started doing the same, after realising shorts were almost an addiction.
Another friend has admitted she cannot stop watching them but so far hasn’t done anything about it.
Oh yeah, I’m over thirty and have had and seen a few addictions.
I stayed away from the shorts and tiktoks for a long time, now I’ve been watching the shorts. It’ll just suck hours.
Kinda like this
Money for creators
i think all the issues can be surmounted if they find a way to pay creators like youtube does.
A lot of niche YouTubers say that they get most of their revenue from patreon and other sites like that so it seems like there’s already existing avenues to post videos and get paid via a different site
Yeah, it’s not about monetization. I think for content creators the biggest limiting factor is the user base. If you make a video but nobody sees it then what’s the point of making a video? You want people watching your creations and the more users a site has the more likely you’re going to have people watching your video. So a real suggestion would be something like video visibility which is kind of a hit or miss on Youtube since the magical Youtube algorithm pretty much throws only clickbait.
maybe we can somehow encourage creators to post to both in a why not kind of way, until peertube has critical mass?
What I’m about to say is probably dumb but… I think it wouldn’t be really possible for PeerTube to become a serious alternative to YouTube, because of decentralization.
Like, sure, that may be a good thing in certain cases - we’re literally on Lemmy - but I want to be able to access content from most PeerTube instances using one singular instance, which isn’t really possible with PeerTube. As a result, the majority of instances feel dead.
I think what we need is an open-source and centralized alternative to YouTube (if that doesn’t already exist), but I might be missing something.
Data streaming costs have to be better addressed. How does the bill get paid? It’s really that simply.
We need to make it more profitable to post on peertube than to post on yt.
More peers.
Which can only really be addressed by making it easier / less of a hassle to become a peer.
I for one would love to host a peertube instance, but I keep running into a wall when I try.
I think something that gets overlooked is the ease of use of setting up a Peertube server yourself.
If I want to host my own Mastodon or Lemmy instance it is pretty straightforward, and I can just do so on my unRAID server with a simple ready-made docker container. But when I want to do that for PeerTube, as a novice I somewhat run into a brick wall.
Search up front.
What kinda of users do you want? Creators or eyeballs? The joinpeertube website doesn’t seem to cator to users wanting to just watch videos.
people see “alternative” and think “competition,” when they should consider it as “coexistance.” so either some youtubers would have to also upload to peertube as an additional option in case of site maintenance and other such trouble, or people on peertube could upload to youtube a week or so later and as part of their end credits/description/whatever, say that viewers can see this content one week early on peertube. It wouldn’t be THE fix for peertube, but more like the first step in a series of ever-increasing tweaks that could lead to this theoretical fix.
Of course, this is based on old practices such as “In theaters Friday, but you can see Thursday at Midnight” and other such strange ad campaigns, so the idea may not be entirely transferable. But that shouldn’t mean someone shouldn’t at least try that and see what happens.
If Peertube has the Breadtube (Breadtube is dead, long live Breadtube) and Magic: the Gathering content I want to watch I’ll use it.
Have more content, and make it easier to join and post content.
