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?
It’s both horrible discovery and a limited number of creators.
But, for discoverability, https://sepiasearch.org/ might help you find things to watch, since it’s the only good multi-server search I’ve seen. (And run by the peertube devs.)
I say this everytime someone talks about peertube. You should not need to leave the website to use the website. If I search “crazy guy uses rake to play football”, and it’s not in the results page, I’m not going to go to ANOTHER website, to search THIS website, for a guy who doesn’t understand how to play sports.
The thing is, there may be content that people will find on Sepia search that you DO NOT want on your instance.
I completely agree.
Normally, you wouldn’t have to do this. The problem is that Peertube devs made the HORRIBLE decision to make federating “opt-in” only. This means most content isn’t available on most instances. It’s a snowball effect where most owners make the decision without thinking to have some mystical barrier to enter their esteemed federation.
They don’t understand that most users don’t give a shit about “proving” themselves to enter some random person’s instance. (and rightfully so)
Peertube made a lot of good choices, but a lot of bad ones too by the censorship/walled garden crowd.
Hopefully someone with more resources than me can run an instance that fills this void: just let people upload and interact like youtube back in the early 2000s.
Quick! Somebody get a baby named charlie to bite me! He could bite my finger!
That kids in college now. Yeah. Feel old now, don’t ya?
Implying I didn’t feel old then, lmao
Yeah, I agree.
When it comes to building a fediverse service there’s a really delicate balance to find with making it unambiguous you’re engaging with multiple services, vs creating a singular and cohesive enough user experience, and it seems like the peertube devs just learn reaaally far towards the former at the expense of the latter.
Its a bit frustrating.
Edit: I learned from another user on this thread that sepia search can be enabled by an instance as their search functionality. That definitely helps
You say that yet Google search / Internet search is very much a big thing. For the record, I agree with you.
Google search started out when the internet was a collection of unrelated websites and you needed a search engine to discover any of them. If Youtube’s search was so useless that you had to leave Youtube, open up Google, search for the content you wanted to see there, and then ended back up on Youtube, you’d be pretty pissed.
But it’s not PeerTube, it’s ABC’s PeerTube and BCD’s PeerTube and CDE’s PeerTube, etc.
That’s fine. That’s how federation works.
The problem is that the different peertube instances are defederated BY DEFAULT so it’s exceptionally rare to find ones that can share with each other.
The censorship crowd needs to stay far, far away from peertube if there is ever any chance of it being successful.
The question that basically everyone is going to ask is “so?”
Username checks out
yes the throat fuck it does, and
On Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed etc. you join one instance and you get access to the others. See this very comment section, I’m on sh.itjust.works, you’re on lemmy.ml, we’re both commenting on a post on lemmy.world. “Everything’s political so defederate because their ideology isn’t pure enough” notwithstanding, you open an account on one instance and the content on all instances is discoverable.
On PeerTube, for some weird reason, that functionality is something the instance owner has to enable. It’s off by default. So, in practice, PeerTube is capable of, but isn’t, federated. Which means you have 90 different little YouTubes, each of which is hosting a total of 90 videos, and you can’t watch all 8100 videos from one place, be it one website if you’re old and lame enough to have a PC or from one account on one app.
In fact, I think the behavior of TILvids has already killed PeerTube as a platform. I think it’s already dead, because some jackass with delusions of grandeur wants to build a walled garden out of an open ecosystem. You want to run an edutainment instance? Great! I’ve been saying since I joined Lemmy that general purpose instances are largely a mistake. On PeerTube I’ve seen more instances attempt to segregate by content type (there’s an arts, crafts and makers instance, for example. I could see making a gaming instance, etc.) TILvids raises a valid concern; alternative video hosting sites inevitably become hives of the scum and villainy that got themselves kicked off of YouTube. Here on Lemmy we have those instances that everybody defederates, effectively isolating that shit. TILvids’ approach to this is quarantine everything that isn’t them, which I see as strangling both themselves and PeerTube by two mechanisms:
It’s going to stifle general adoption of the platform by viewers. People go to Youtube to look at one kind of video, say, archery competitions, then they notice in the side panel a thumbnail of a leatherworking tutorial, and they go “Ooh I always wanted to see that.” Pretty soon you’ll open up Youtube to watch 4 minutes of cats yawning, a Desert Bus speedrun, a stand-up comedy routine and then three different recipe tutorials for making bagels. No one says “I want to find a website that hosts edutainment video content.” They turn up looking for celebrity nipple slips or people falling off skateboards, they’ll stay for the edutainment.
It’s going to kill any mechanism for new creators. A big benefit to Youtube is any idiot can make a video and upload it to the internet. That’s where we got Hank Green and CGP Grey. There needs to be a space that permits that on or adjacent to your platform. Currently their recruitment strategy for creators seems to be “Get established on Youtube, then maybe we’ll let you upload your content here too for some reason.” It’s not going to take off as a self-sustaining platform that way; there needs to be a place for people to upload their early bad crap and build experience.
Everyone on PeerTube is trying very hard to make their chosen platform unadoptable.
Is it because video hosting is substantially more expensive than mostly text and some images (Lemmy and Mastodon) that it brings out that kind of behavior? As in they have more skin in the game so they try to protect it more? Any thoughts on the new Loops platform? Is it suffering from the same issues?
I’m not entirely sure what you’re saying. Google owns youtube. If you’re saying people search google, and then click the youtube link results, I mean, yeah, people do that. But it’s not a necessity. I can go to youtube, and search straight from youtube. I CAN search from google, but it’s not a requirement like it is with peertube.
PeerTube doesn’t have search at all? Yea that is kind of nuts. I’ve had bad search experience across Lemmy and Mastodon as well. I wonder how much is due to decentralized nature of the servers, the federation aspect, or just poor search functionality.
Peertube has a search, but by default it only searches it’s own instance. Instance owners can choose to federate with other instances, but thats a choice they need to enable.
You can use outside searches to search all of peertube, but it’s not a given that you can on peertube directly.
Instance owners can enable Sepia Search (Global Search Index) on their instances.
To instance owners (like myself) looking to be added:
This has helped with my channels discoverability. Im still not seeing my videos on the search, even directly searching for the title of the videos, but im hoping that changes when the index gets updated.
I didn’t know that, that definitely helps
I’m not opposed to a microservice that indexes the fediverse for creating a robust search index. Without it, you’d have to nearly search each server on each service.
Sepia Search is something that’s also build into PeerTube, if the admin have enabled Global Search. Sepia Search uses this list of instances: https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances
The same can be enabled in PeerTube. You can see here, that I have it enabled on my instance:
Ah cool. I never noticed that option, but that certainly improves things.
That should probably either be default or a thing asked on setup since I’d wager most people probably actually do want that.
I’m so glad you pointed this out. I did not have this enabled on mine and I forgot about this option completely. I just enabled it.
i found sepia search to be very good! i noticed the ios peertube app seems to have integrated it so a lot more videos are discoverable. @ellyxir@humanwords.cc
100%. I created my own instance and set it to auto-follow other instances. There’s like 975 or something and still not really much interesting. Can confirm TILVids also denied my federation request.
I’m doing my part by uploading my own videos 🙂
If I set it the discovery to “trending” the top video is 2 years old 🤷
Sort by “hot”. And also, check this list out for content: https://lemmy.wtf/post/15810205
Also also, you can still follow channels on tilvids.com, from your own instance, by following the channel’s handle.
If I go to the TILvids channels, the last 6 months of videos are missing.
Do you have an example?
If I go to The Linux Experiment via peertube.wtf, I can see many years of videos.
From what instance is that?
Mine
What’s the URL?
That view of The Linux Experiment is quite similar to the view from lemmy.ml, with the latest post also being from 9 months ago. I wonder if your PeerTube instance and Lemmy 0.19.x have the same problem, where “something changed” at PeerTube, and new videos stopped appearing at federated sites that didn’t change to accommodate the update. Are you running an old PeerTube version?
Nope
deleted by creator