Admittedly a risky crosspost, but cannot find conflicting community rules. I believe the possible discussion justifies it.
cross-posted from: https://piefed.blahaj.zone/c/peertube@piefed.blahaj.zone/p/999813/what-s-stopping-you-from-using-peertube
Or ‘What is PeerTube lacking that you simply cannot do without?’
I believe it’s a safe assumption that fediverse users want to move away from the monopolies and closed gardens so often associated with video streaming, and yet it’s not a task that’s ever been made easy. Maybe an ounce of inspiration is the cue we need, and so my question to you is; What’s Stopping you from using PeerTube?
Nothing, I use it all the time. I follow peertube channels from this account and I also follow channels through rss feeds
lack of videos
videos ain’t that the truth
I also find the federation makes it even more fragmented and difficult to find content from the few creators I’d follow (mostly reposts from Youtube).
And it’s not even like the different instances follow a theme consistently.
It should just be you check on a bunch of instances and you get a combined feed of them all. If thats possible on the app, it isnt obvious enough.
I think the architecture of federation is flawed. Different instances should share the same common elements while each hosting their own.
On Lemmy there shouldn’t be 5 different subs of the same thing where everyone just goes on the most popular one. Everyone should be rehosting the same sub on their own… I mean that’s how the internet works. That’s DNS is shared…
Peertube’s main usecase for me would be links based video hosting. So if I wanted to embed or link a video in a webpage, or a course moodle.
Ultimately, it’s the lack of any real reason to use it.
As a user, there’s no content on any PeerTube instances that I’m particularly interested in. Or if there is, I have no realistic way of locating it because the search/discovery features are effectively non-functional; unless you’re really into 3-hour videos titled “A Deep Dive into Every Reason why Richard Stallman was Right”, the recommendations are otherwise useless. There’s also no features that interest me that aren’t also available on any other platform I consume video from.
As a small creator (under 500 followers across 3 platforms), there’s no audience to show my content to on PeerTube, and no real way to gain an audience. There’s effectively zero exposure opportunities on PeerTube, and unless you already have a large audience that you can convince to move to a new platform, then nobody’s going to see your content. Even though I’m not making videos for any monetary gain and doing it purely because it’s fun for me, a big part of that fun comes from the engagement I get to have with the community. And if that community isn’t going to be active on PeerTube, then neither will I; this was the reason I stopped posting to Loops.
If I were a larger creator, or somebody whose income relied on video creation, then I would have even less inclination to use PeerTube because the monetization capabilities are basically nonexistent. Yes, you can add a KoFi link to your channel details, but you can also draw a QR code to your KoFi link on a cardboard sign and stand by the traffic lights for all that’s worth; in fact, I think that would actually still give you MORE exposure than PeerTube would, and you don’t even have to make videos to do that.
While I generally agree with the ideology behind PeerTube and want to see it succeed, it’s just not in any practical state for me, no matter which angle I look at it from.
I feel like the only content creators that would want Peertube are either those who want to post videos and fundamentally hate the algorithm platforms and those who have been deplatformed and need a quick way to get content up for their audience.
As a user, there’s no content on any PeerTube instances that I’m particularly interested in. Or if there is, I have no realistic way of locating it because the search/discovery features are effectively non-functional
While I agree with the lack of content that I’m interested in, when it comes to searching, the Web search engines that index video can find it. Kagi Video specifically has “PeerTube” as a source, so you can search just PeerTube.
The times I tried it I did not see anything remotely interesting. Then I checked again after knowing how these federated networks work and it was the same but I wondered, do I have to make an account somewhere in order to not having to check every single instance? Does it even use instances the same way as lemmy or piefed? How do I find more instances?
In the end, there were too many questions and very little desire to look for the answers.
there’s no content, because there’s no audience, because there’s no content.
the support youtube gives just in terms of traffic and storage is something peertube can never hope to achieve without big centralised instances.
Eh. I think the bigger deal is that the large platforms, including YouTube, give large content creators a cut of the ads. YouTube has had to deal with competition and part of that competition has been to pay content creators, even if it isn’t a lot.
well yeah, if there’s no pay there’s no way to sustainably produce for the platform.
Direct people to Kofi, Liberapay, and Patreon, and have Peertube for outreach like on Youtube
you need an audience first. the conversion rate is usually about 1%.
The majority of YouTube content has never produced a dime for the creators.
The majority of creators get a minority of views.
There’s no content because there would be no reason to put your content on it even if it had the users.
Being ad-free is great for the viewers, but it’s problematic for creators. Creators who already have something working for them on YouTube need to completely change their model if they now need to rely solely on donation/patreon. That’s especially hard for smaller channels who are still building viewership.
The long and short of it is, it’s just harder to make content if you can’t at least get some ad revenue going.
As a result, this is not a chicken and egg thing. It is not “there’s no content, because there’s no audience, because there’s no content”.
Instead it’s “there’s no audience, because there’s no content, because there’s no ad revenue”. And now we have a real conceptual problem with the platform.
yeah it’s a “if it’s free, you’re the product” thing but with nobody actually selling.
The content I want to watch.
Peertube is Youtube 20 years ago.
Cool but lacks of content and creators
I’ve tried to use peertube a few times. I just can’t figure it out. I open to and search for things like “Ms. Rachel”, for my daughter but nothing comes up. I don’t use Youtube much and would like to stop entirely, but I just can’t find any of the stuff I’m looking for on peertube
Youtube has a deep well of art because it’s motivated by capitalism and has been around longer.
People who create on peertube are motivated by art more purely but that means there’s considerably less of them. It’s going to be a long project getting to that state of critical mass where we just explore peertube to find something novel.
no content, can’t make account. Its like the instances dont even want users. Tried 2, first didnt even send confirmation message and never heard from second. Both probably wanted me to write an essay about why i want to use peertube.
I had some content of my own that i would have liked to upload, as i would much rather have it be there than in youtube. But it seems it isnt wanted.
As someone who had issue finding instances that both fit my requirements and have an open registrtion, subscribing via RSS is a neat feature. Yes, you still won’t be able to comment, which isn’t great (we need so much more activity there), but you’ll know when new videos come out and will be able to watch them.
my interest with peertube is in adding content though, specificially due to lack of content. at least i havent seen anything that interests me when i tried searching categories. And it would be nice way to share it to friends.
Oh, that’s one of the biggest issues with Peertube imo. Finding a good server with open registrations is already frustrating enough, but if you also plan to release videos, it’s a total mess.
Well, they have only themselves to blame on why no one uses it :x
Unfortunately, media storage costs don’t scale down well, and, being a video platform, PeerTube faces this the most.
Maybe we could take some notes from how games work, like have kind of reputation system or “credit” system. If you upload stuff people like they can indicate it in some way and you get access to more resources. Or if there are some other ways people could contribute. It would have to be designed in such way it takes a lot of effort to abuse though (since anything can be abused no matter what). Though maybe it would just create cliques or something else negative, at least if the people managing it dont have pure intentions.
But either way, since fediverse isnt corporate crap we should lean in more on creating and having a community with all the benefits that come from it, especially since its actually possible here.
It’s very hard to make a universal system for this, since every instance has different hardware and storage capabilities.
So for now, it’s mostly manual. Prolific creators can often request more space for their videos from their instance admins, or, if they have the money, they can host their own instance and add as much storage as they like.
deleted by creator
There’s nothing to watch. The feed is full of TV-ish garbage on political topics, and I cannot even block it from appearing.
I also can’t seem to figure it out…
I tried registering on a couple of different instances, but none were allowing any new users. So no liking or disliking videos, for me…
I also can’t seem to search across different platforms, which kinda kills it for me tbh.
Content is lacking. I don’t like the UI. Fewer features, and non-responsive admins.
Basically it just isn’t up to snuff.
There are genuine reasons to not like PeerTube, like the lack of monetisation, lacking types of content (Like you mentioned), incompatibilities between instances due to not catching up to new PeerTube versions, hard power-hungy federation, etc…
But what missing features are there though? I can maybe think of lack automatic subtitling in many instances. Your point about non-responsive admins is weird though, I’m actually not experienced, but the 2 instances I’ve used (TILVids and ExquisiteTube) have highly responsive admins, which instances have you tried?
I’m genuinely curious to hear your other difficulties (If you can) because I myself don’t know what else is to be expected by regular users
Next to the lack of content argument, I simply don’t get how it works. It’s federated, but feels much different from lemmy or Mastodon. I would say the instance feel ‘less connected’ as there is no good way to explore instances, at least in my experience. You can’t make an account and when you can it’s only valid for that one instance. Content exploration is a nightmare and a lot of content is in french, which I’m not great at. The (iOS) app is hardst working and the website(s) are confusing. I tried peertube for a while but i was mostly stuck on one instance with only one or two channels that made content that I found remotely interesting… I am really hoping it takes off at some point, but I think a lot of development still has to be done to make it usable for the casual user
Because it functions poorly as a way to see a lot of content that I want to see.
If there is a way to see/browse all of the content available on peertube all at once, I am unaware of it.
If there’s a way to curate my feed such that it pulls from multiple decentralized instances, I am unaware of it.
Make it very easy for me to see everything, make it easy for me to curate my feed from that everything available.
