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?
There’s nothing to watch. The feed is full of TV-ish garbage on political topics, and I cannot even block it from appearing.
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.
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Nothing, I use it all the time. I follow peertube channels from this account and I also follow channels through rss feeds
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 feel like the only real solution for a lot of these creators is to run their own sites like corridor digital does. The content can go anywhere, but if they rely on the income, that’s gotta come from somewhere
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
I’ve looked into it a few times and never saw anything interesting.
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.
I was looking to see what ‘peer tube’ was in the post but it wasn’t explained. This one is for the savvy insiders who are hip to the scene.
Completely fair, I made this post assuming that ‘anyone on fediverse social forums obviously knows what PeerTube is,’ thanks for pointing out the flaw in my unconscious biases, I’ll keep it in mind if I make more posts like this.
Essentially, PeerTube is to YouTube what Lemmy is to Reddit, a network of video streaming websites where the content of each website is, in theory, accessible through other instances in the network. I made this post in an effort to identify common reasons people who try PeerTube can’t stick around.
Hey, thanks for the explanation! All the best.
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.
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
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
Not sure how it’s working right now, but it’s the combination of having your IP exposed and lack of moderation. Like constantly being on a bittorrent public tracker, right? It’s fine, but not great.
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 would like to use it more, frankly. It’s been a few months since I last tried, but the main issue I have had with Peertube in the past is discoverability of creators and videos from outside of my instance.
I joined Makertube and was streaming amateur DJ sets for a while, ad I did see some cool videos and followed some people just browsing on the videos page, but ultimately it felt like I couldn’t easily see stuff from outside of Makertube at that time, so it felt really isolated. It’s hard to tell whether there just isn’t enough stuff there yet, or whatever it is just too difficult to discover!
I also had some major technical errors with crashing when I was trying to stream for >45 minutes at a time, which obviously wasn’t the fault of Makertube or Peertube, but honestly did but a damper on my desire to keep trying. I figured I would come back to it later, but I haven’t yet.
Overall I think that Peertube is very cool tech and very promising, but (for better or worse) it’s just not quite as good at putting videos or streams that I want to watch in front of me as Youtube is.
Ubiquity. YouTube may not have a monopoly in the strictest definition, but it might as well in practice. Honestly, YouTubes competition is not similar platforms, but Online Streaming services. Nebula comes to mind, though I think there’s a couple of others where it’s creator driven. (As opposed to Television streaming services/cable)
