Ask Lemmy

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?

There's a webpage for that https://ideas.joinpeertube.org/ Top 5 are:

1. Share channel administration between several users (103 votes)
2. "Audio only" video quality (91 votes)
3. Mobile phone client (91 votes)
4. Allow third parties to contribute bandwidth (89 votes)
5. Support multilingual videos (67 votes)

Feel free to vote or add more ideas.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but since a lot of creators rely on youtube's monetization, it might be necessary for peertube to impement some form of monetization too.

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.

Content, monetization, and ubiquity.

1. Content: PT skews heavily into Linux and Linux adjacent topics. And that's fine, but when I say I watch more YT than regular TV, I'm not kidding. And its because of the diversity and variety of channels. Things like History Hit or Every Frame a Painting, and silly shit like Red Letter Media. YouTube isn't just "let's plays" and game streaming. So Peertube can't be "Just Linux"

2. Monetization: Creators have to get paid. That's just reality. It would be a fine world if everyone could spend hours doing their passion for free and not have to worry about deeding themselves. If you want #1, you need a certain amount if full time creators, and for that they need to get paid.

3. Ubiquity: Watching more YouTube than regular TV, I don't want to sit in front of my computer to do it. We need to be able to access it from smart TVs, ROKU sticks, etc... And not just a port of the website that requires a mouse and keyboard, but something optimized to work with smart TV remote controls.

The issue with the Fediverse (not that I don't love the fediverse, I do) is that all of those three things require large scale framework and organisational planning; which is the antithesis to what the Fediverse is all about.

Tl;Dr -- Large scale success of PeerTube as a thing is largely impossible without abandoning the concept of federation itself.

Personally? Onboarding.

I've looked at the instructions on how to install peertube several times now, but its just not worth the hassle at this point. Until I can run it in just a single docker image, without an external database or email service required, then I'm not going to bother.

Its really frustrating, because I really like the project, but I just don't have the ability to use services like it without docker or podman.

i think all the issues can be surmounted if they find a way to pay creators like youtube does.

Money for creators

The idea of PT being able to compete and differentiate itself from Google to content creators by paying them money is ridiculous. You're attempting to attack the main strength of the competition, and they are way, way, way, WAY better at it than you are. It's fucking doomed from the start. You have to play to your strengths, and manufacturing commercial content for revenue is just not what PeerTube's design is even intended for.

Ten years ago you could have made an exciting pitch involving a block chain that pays hosters and content creators but now we can see how stupid that is. Well it doesn't get less stupid without the blockchain.

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.

Data streaming costs have to be better addressed. How does the bill get paid? It’s really that simply.

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.

I think the following has a good chance of working:

• YouTube does another fucky thing and messes with people's revenue. Again.
• Some big YouTuber decides to host their own peertube instance (funded by patreon) for their content. Either on its own or as a "backup".
• People go there, and other YouTubers follow seeing that it doesn't have YouTube fuckery. Either to the same instance or another.
• YouTube continues to make unpopular decisions, meaning more and more people go to Peertube and it becomes engrained in public knowledge.

Basically, "YouTube fucks up a bunch enough for people to try to move".

We need to make it more profitable to post on peertube than to post on yt.

More peers.

It really all just comes down to the content and the service that can be provided to the content creators.

Storage space is expensive and is the biggest hurdle. Most PeerTube instances have very small storage quotas, so a content creator would run out of storage fast.

Make it easy for creators to be paid, recruit services like nebula and means tv to use it as its backend, make the ui prettier than YouTube not just an orange copycat.

And make it possible for people to set it up as a tiktok competitor focused on short videos with stitches and video replies easy which makes discussion and and creators explaining complex topics easy and straight to the point (which is why i use TikTok theres so much useful knowledge people teach without long intros and fluff like YouTube)

Personally I have a very small yt channel that I haven't uploaded to for months. I'm making stuff again, and my plan is to start uploading things to peertube early and then to yt, and I will tell people in my videos that they can find my videos early there.

I doubt I'll make a huge difference from me personally, but I'm sure if more creators did this it would start to. There needs to be a bridge between the platforms.

The thing is, they'd have to do it for the sake of creating an alternative space, and not for like patreon benefits or something. I guess the peertube videos could be unlisted and there be links from patreon, and then they go public after the yt one does? I don't even know if peertube has this functionality.

But again, this would have to be done because the creator believes in federation as a long term solution. It certainly would benefit creators personally to have a backup they're more in charge of. The difficulty is they don't seem to know it's a viable option.

I’m trying to get some of the bigger FOSS game developers to use PeerTube for their videos, but it ain’t easy. I’m actually surprised at how many of them don’t have a presence on any of the FOSS social media platforms.

Lots of great content. (And maybe exclusive content so people have to go there.) I think concerning functionality, it's pretty alright as is.

There are currently two main reasons I don't use PeerTube:

1. Videos have inconsistent playback performance.
2. It's pretty confusing and difficult to use if you are just looking for an experience similar to YouTube.

If they can find a way to make playback performance consistent and make the entire experience better, then I'd consider using it. But, I already use YouTube alternatives like Odysee and Rumble, so I don't know how much I'd end up actually using PeerTube.

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.

Search up front.

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.

I don't think it's possible to seriously compete with youtube. Youtube would actually have to die first.

Browsing != Searching

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.

It goes like this.

The world has been getting more and more uptight these past few decades. Things have to be THIS way, not THAT way. And corporate greed is what gets to decide what THIS way even is. So you HAVE TO watch your videos on youtube. Why? Because that's what everybody does.

Then youtube starts making their own platform shit......but it still has the content and the userbase that nobody leaves. And everybody ignores the obvious. They want the glitz and razzle dazzle of a fun exciting new time, to the point everybody forgets the fundamental rules of life. We're letting google dictate the internet, we're letting amazon dictate shopping, we're letting spotify dictate how we listen to music. All while ignoring the fundamental rules for living. And that rule is very very simple.

All you need to sell a product is a good quality product, at a reasonable price.

But corporations don't want to supply that, and so they've trained us to instead be distracted with apps, and AI, and all these bells and whistles to day to day life that are quite frankly not needed. In the 1980s you could roll your car window down without the car being on. There was a little crank, and you just roll the window down by turning the crank. Then you had to have the car be on, so the motors could roll it down for you. Now we're at a point where you're encouraged to get on the cars app, and pay for features and subscriptions to do basic functions like heat the car seats, or use the radio.

And when it comes to video, google has trained people that youtube exists, and nothing else does. Well, the price of using youtube is free. So you're not going to compete with youtube on price. So then you need to have a quality product. And in this case, the product are the videos. Top tier quality videos, that people want to watch, from creators that people have a fanbase for.

I haven't watched anything on peertube yet, because I don't see any creators I watch also using peertube. I'll give you an example. If MXRPlays were to make Peertube their exclusive home, I would watch it in a second. Even if they made it their secondary home I would watch on peertube, just so that they could have some control over their own livelyhoods. They're CONSTANTLY getting demonitized on youtube for showing something that's just barely breaking a rule, or in some cases completely fictional and never happened. For example, one time they got a strike on their channel for "Showing or encouraging violence towards children". They went back and watched the published video from their own hard drive (since the published one was deleted), and they never saw any child anywhere in their video. They never saw any violence in the video. They never saw anything that they could say was anything close to that. And youtube constantly goes after them. It seems like every 2 months they have a hiatus because youtube has another strike against them.

Or maybe Game Grumps. They don't have any issues with youtube as far as I know.....but if they were to just migrate all their content over to peertube, hundreds of thousands of people would also migrate with them.

I don't know if Markiplier or JackSepticeye are still big names on youtube, but I imagine they would each bring a big audience. So that's it. That's the way you make peertube popular. You consistantly put out popular content, preferably exclusively, but at this point even non-exclusively would be good too if they mentioned it on their platforms.