What's Stopping you from using PeerTube?
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/[email protected]/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?
72 replies
There's nothing to watch. The feed is full of TV-ish garbage on political topics, and I cannot even block it from appearing.
The content I want to watch.
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.
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)
nothing stopping me at all I found out just now. I was able to search for and find a bunch of interesting videos and even followed a creator from my mastodon account and replied to a video post through mastodon with no issue. Now if the question was what is stopping me from posting my own videos to peertube its because I can't find any server I would like to tie my content to and I don't want to pay even $7/mo for a VPS to run my own and my shared hosting company won't allow me to run it.
I'm one of those people who watch videos at double speed. My experience with Peertube is that it just isn't fast enough to keep up.
I'm not really that into watching videos.
I didn’t know it existed! I have begun to hate YouTube, the suggestions for other videos are crap and it is overflowing with too many, too stupid ads. Peertube, here I come!
Youtube is unuseable without uBlock Origin & SponsorBlock imo
lack of videos
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.
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.
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.
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.
The majority of YouTube content has never produced a dime for the creators.
The majority of creators get a minority of views.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
I've tried searching PeerTube a number of times, basically once a year, but no matter what topic I search for all I get are weird, stupid videos not even remotely related to what i want. From what i can tell there is no high quality content on the platform, and that makes me sad so i give up on it very quickly.
PeerTube doesn't have the videos I want to watch. All the people I want to see upload to YouTube. I don't like it either.
That said, I use ad nauseum and sponsor block extensions on waterfox. I see no ads and ad nauseum fakes clicks so Google has to pay creators for ads i didn't see. If I like a channel, I'll buy their merch or donate to their Patreon to support them. There's an argument to be made that my use of YouTube results in a net loss for Google while still supporting the channels I like, or at least not harming them.
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.
I only use youtube for a handful of specific channels (including livestreams for skateboarding events), not for general browsing. None of these channels are cloned on peertube last I checked. I don’t have the equipment or knowledge to host a server myself and even if I did I would feel weird cloning the channels I watch because youtube is the main source of revenue for them.
I support most of the channels I watch on patreon and do remind them occasionally that it would be nice to move away from youtube.
If I want to host videos on PeerTube, I want to do so on my own instance, and the process of setting up your own instance is not as easy as I would like. I've tried it a few times, ran into a wall, gave up and went back to YouTube with my tail between my legs.
I need more variety. I have a peertube account but I couldn't find musician and art videos on there as easily as YouTube. Maybe give it another few years and let it build up more content. Plus, creators need a way to make money off of it or it won't prosper. Donations are sufficient for some but I won't give up supporting creators on YouTube.
My peerness is too small
It's nearly impossible to find new stuff that interests me on it.
Last I tried, it was hard to find videos I would enjoy, and I couldn't create an account.
I like YT for playthroughs of horror games, video essays, music, highly specific skits, and some miscellaneous stuff.
None of the YTubers I follow are interested in anything other than YT, Twitch, or Patreon, as that's where their audiences are.
I considered joining Peertube as a creator, but there's still the issue of finding an instance.
I intended on uploading content but many instances (as far as I have seen) have limits.
This is fine and makes sense, but I have no idea how long/bulky any of my content will be, so I'm wary to get started.
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?
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.
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.
The main blocker for me is the siloed nature of PeerTube servers.
There are two or three active channels on video.canadiancivil.com I like to peruse, but there's not a reliable way I can find train, public transport and urbanism content outside of that server on Peertube. I'd like to be able to create my own Peertube identity without my own single user server so I can make my own subscription feed across the fedi-video-verse, but Peertube account signups are notoriously limited. In a couple months I might have the tools to set up my own, we'll see.
The other thing is music: YouTube has original studio versions, concert performances, karaoke versions, remixes and covers of nearly every popular song in existence, I don't think PeerTube could ever compete on that. So, being realistic, at least in the first category I would like to see more improvement.
The only people I want to watch content from are not publishing on peer tube.
Never really heard of it, and nothing exists quite like YouTube and Nebula for decent long-form content.
If I were a video creator I certainly wouldn't self-host on an ActivityPub platform.