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?
I’d like it to be built entirely around a P2P network of easily self-hostable instances as a distributed storage/indexing backend, and a local desktop app as a suggested entry point, but that’s not the case, unfortunately.
With its current architecture, I simply haven’t managed to go trough the trial of finding a suitable instance! So if I’m watching PeerTube videos, it’s only occasionally, when a link was posted elsewhere, as I’m lacking a proper entry point to continuously interact with it, let alone uploading.
lack of videos
Nothing interesting and I have a few hundred subscriptions of many different YouTube’s who defenetly won’t move. The last time I looked, the top video of all times had a few k views and everything at the top just didn’t spike my interest.
Can’t figure out how it works and I really tried. On a few occasions I spent about an hour looking for channels or videos I found interesting. In all that time I found 1 video. I keep on checking back once in a while to see if its better now, but so far no luck.
Same experience.
WebTorrent is a challenge at times, and the lack of content. Show me daily uploads of a let’s play gamer for over a month and I’ll get back in. I do believe in the tech, I support decentralization. But until the content is there, the platform has no use to me.
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.
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.
I have my own PeerTube instance, but it’s been spun down for a while now. The videos I made just take up space with little to no benefit to myself.
In an immediate sense for me, the content I want to see. I’ve found virtually nothing on PeerTube that’s worth my time watching, whereas YouTube has all sorts of interesting stuff.
But that really just leads to a deeper question of why that content isn’t there.
Google’s got the economics set up so that they can pay content creators. PeerTube doesn’t. That means that people who want to do this for a living are going to be on YouTube.
Not all of the content I want to see falls into that camp, but certainly some of it does.
Then there’s network effect, which benefits an incumbent. PeerTube has a limited userbase. Even for people who are putting up content without intention of making money, they probably want to reach a large number of users relative to the effort they put in.
I think that the big factor is going to be the economic side. Google’s got a setup where they can make money for their own infrastructure and pay content creators. PeerTube doesn’t, and I don’t really see a way that that changes.
I kinda hope it stays that way, creators who do it because they want to share not monoplise. I think like here its just slower. It will hopefully grow organically
Personally, I dont watch a lot of youtube and I try to avoid it.
Have any of you tried asking your favorite creators to post on multiple platforms? If so, what is the response?
Peertube, while great in concept, doesn’t do anything better than YouTube but asks you to give up a lot of comfort and familiarity as a user. By and large, most people don’t care about decentralization, and if search doesn’t work well and you aren’t getting good recommendations, it’s a strictly worse experience for them.
Users will go where the content is shared, so the real question should be “Why haven’t content creators left YouTube yet?” and the answer is quite simple, they married their livelihoods to the trapped userbase and switching platforms, even to another walled garden, would be financially detrimental. Uploading to another platform is extra work that they don’t want to do and actively harms their bottom line.
I’m not really that into watching videos.
I’m irritated with how obtuse Peertube is to use. I’ve tried a couple of times, since content creators like Veronica Explains are there, and because I know it is developed in France, it is open and decentralized, but ffs, I can’t figure out how to reliably follow anyone, find content, or even have an account. I’m not willing to set up my own instance just to do any of that either.
Peertube seems like something I should be using regularly instead of youtube, but I have not been able to wrap my head around how to use it effectively, so I gave up.
I made an account on peertube.wtf a while back intending to make content but there doesn’t seem to be an audience there for the content I was making and there didn’t seem to be any creators making any content I wanted to see either. Also I could only really use it at home because there was a creator who kept publishing unmarked nsfw content and the single admin couldn’t keep up with how often they were getting through to the instance.
Yeah, anything niche is mostly going to be porn, unfortunately. I make dollhouse miniatures, and the last time I went looking for stuff about it on peertube, it was 90% fetish content and 10% uploads from TV shows, nobody was actually making dollhouses.
Edit: Just looked again, they’ve gotten rid of the porn, now it’s just entirely stuff from a Netflix kid’s show. Still nobody actually making dollhouses.
Peertube is Youtube 20 years ago.
Cool but lacks of content and creators
