I saw a few videos shared on PeerTube recently, and created an account on an instance. However, unlike Mastodon and Lemmy I’m struggling to discover channels to subscribe to. When I use the search functions on my instance, most results are either interesting channels which haven’t been updated in years, or random foreign language TV shows and episodes.
Just for example, if I’m trying to find videos on “Gaming” on one of the largest instances, the most recent video is over 1 year ago: https://tilvids.com/search?categoryOneOf=7
Is discoverability on PeerTube bad, or are there barely any active channels?
Edit: BTW one very active creator on PeerTube is https://tilvids.com/c/thelinuxexperiment_channel/videos and his videos are excellent. But can there really only be a handful of active creators to follow on the whole platform?
There are no great instances because all federation is opt-in.
There’s also no general, standard “Peertube affiliated” instance that tries to federate with as many others as possible.
I think there were just some very poor design decisions made for the platform by people who don’t know what they’re doing.
Ex: Blurring sensitive videos blurs the title as well, without the option to change it.
The community doesn’t help because most instances have “request an account” nonsense or literally don’t allow users to upload videos.
I re-iterate my previous comment: “most instances are just places where the owner can jerk themselves off for excluding everything.”
There will be great peertube instances, but the culture needs to change first.
That said, check out https://dalek.zone/. It’s one of the few peertube instances I’ve come across that legitimately seems interested in making it a viable platform. Registrations and uploading new videos don’t require approval, and it federates with way more instances than average.
Do we need to start over? Like fork PeerTube and fix all the “We choose to do this wrong because our parents didn’t hug us as children” problems?
No, I don’t think it’s anywhere near that bad.
I just think that going forward, Peertube developers and instance owners should make the platform more accessible and interconnected.
It’s a bigger responsibility to actually host content instead of just links to content, which I don’t think most peertube instance owners can handle.
But federating with other instances IS links to content, not hosting content.
I’m actually referring to both. Instance owners are afraid to allow users to host content and they’re afraid to link to servers that host content.
So why run an instance in the first place then?
Good question. My honest answer is 🧩.
I’ve seen it enough in the tech sphere to recognize it for what it is.
Check out the pinned posts here: [email protected] for info on instances that fits your needs.
You can mouse over the blurred title and see what it is.