I had a similar experience. I like the idea of PeerTube, but not the execution. It needs significant improvements to make it more friendly for viewers to use as a video portal, rather than relying on subscribers and platforms like Mastodon to fill that gap.

Yes, but that’s even hard on youtube, because you have to scroll down.

The mobile version of this is kind of clunky, but PeerTube seems to mirror the functionality with the desktop version of YouTube.

It’s easy to do though, despite quite hidden. If you aren’t logged in and press comment or subscribe peertube asks you for you fediverse handle and redirects you to your fediverse instance (on mastodon: corresponding post for comment; follow popup with the group/user for subscribe).

Why can’t that be exposed on the main login page? The general public are used to OAuth logins, where you can pick to use a Facebook, Google, Apple, GitHub account to use, instead of creating a new one. Just expose that kind of UI to the main login pages, everywhere.

A common UI trap is to only have one way to do something and use that as justification that the feature was implemented.

It certainly doesn’t work with lemmy right now.

Which is a shame, but there are few bug reports in GitHub about it at least.

Hey, Sean, thanks for inviting me to your community and replying to this post. I read through your blog article, and I’m glad we seem to be aligned with our goals here.

I’m still curious why the situation seems so different between the Lemmy and PeerTube instances. I’m not sure if the Lemmy admins are doing the same level of curation, but given the sheer amount of instances they connect to, I doubt it. So, I think they are using the same automated subscription feature you tried using. Yet, the content of even unfiltered new posts on any Lemmy instance are fairly high quality.

Comparing the stats between Lemmy and PeerTube has rather strange differences. I would have expected PeerTube to be still fairly low population, compared to Lemmy, with its recent Reddit migrations. But, no, PeerTube actually has a comparable user count to Lemmy. Other observations:

• PeerTube has 15x more posts than Lemmy, which contributes to the video quality problem
• The top list of servers on Lemmy are mostly the ones you’d expect, and are the ones interconnected with each other. The top list of PeerTube servers are… not. Like, truly some WTF ones in there.
• As a French-developed app, PeerTube’s top servers are mostly non-English. Given the obvious language barrier, that makes it difficult to interconnect without much better language filters.
• Lemmy has user voting and per-channel moderation. PeerTube has likes/dislikes, but it’s not immediately visible or usable, and the channel is owned by the same person uploading videos, so it’s not really moderated in the same way.

So, I guess the approach you’re taking seems to work with the tools you have available. But, I also hope the development team continues to hammer at this problem, because the PeerTube communities seem to be much more fractured.

PeerTube accounts are for video makers, not video watchers.

Personally, that seems like a short-sighted way to use the platform. If there was ever an exodus of YouTube users, new users should be able to sign up to a PeerTube instance and browse in a similar manner as YouTube. They would search for “PeerTube”, find the “join PeerTube” web site, and sign up, just like how they joined Lemmy or Mastodon. Most wouldn’t think to log into a local Lemmy or Mastodon instance and try to somehow link to a completely different platform like that.

If I want to watch a PT video, I can do so without an account.

People will, very quickly, want to be able to subscribe to channels.

If I want to leave a like or comment, I’ll do so from my mastodon or misskey account.

Nothing about this interface tells me I can log into an outside account. In fact, if I happen to click a link to watch a video, there’s nowhere to go to in order to watch the video from my non-PeerTube account. I would have to log into my local Lemmy instance, and find the video from the POV of the local instance, like here.

Even then, I can’t just watch the video and write a comment at the same time, in any sane way. I would have to watch the video in a different tab, from the PeerTube web site, and then go back to the local Lemmy instance to make my comment. And the PeerTube tab would take a while before the comment shows up.

To a user that is either non-technical or not familiar with how ActivityPub protocols work, this is a very jarring experience, if they even get that far. Most would give up in frustration far far sooner.

The reason Peertube servers don’t tend to federate with each other is because they don’t need to: they federate with mastodon/misskey/pleroma servers for the people who want to watch.

None of these have YouTube-like front-ends to discover new videos or look at a subscription feed. The PeerTube page does.

Video is video. Posts are posts. Not everybody likes mixing the two.

I watch videos from my TV far more often than I watch from a computer or phone, and I’m sure other people do, too. So, we’ll eventually get to the point of a PeerTube TV app on Roku or Android, which would need to have the ability to log into a PeerTube instance to access their subscription feed.

As for finding new videos on PeerTube, I recommend using sepiasearch.org

That’s neat, but it’s missing a good front-page view like this.

But, all of these instances are already hosting the videos. Why not serve the links to the content on the Discover and Trending pages?

I dunno dude, your average uploader might not be making a ton off AdSense, but the large creators that bring in the majority of users are making bank. The sponsers and Patreons are there to diversify income streams, as Google is notororiously prone to mashing the demonetization button.

Both YouTube and Twitch are very top-heavy organizations. Something like the Top 5000 channels make up 75% of Twitch. The rest are picking up the loose pennies on the ground. If PeerTube becomes a platform for the other hundreds of thousands of channels that don’t get paid millions of dollars, so be it.

Overall I think you’re being unrealistic with the Fediverses place in social media, and overly optimistic about the future of it. I doubt the platform will ever have true mass appeal, which is fine.

It’ll be a slow burn, that’s for sure. But, platforms like phpBB, MySpace, Fark, Digg, and Tumblr didn’t fall in a day. It was a slow descent into bad decisions and inadaptability that caused these platforms to vacate over a period of years.

I’m not sure I understand the difference between those problems on PeerTube vs. Lemmy. Lemmy NSFW instances exist, especially since the Reddit NSFW community established a foothold, and they are all properly separated into their own groups and instances. Lemmy admins maintain their own block lists (see the bottom of the instance lists linked) to get rid of the antivax/nazi nonsense, which usually isn’t that large, compared to the thousand or so instances they connect to.

Heck, even Lemmy.film and others have links to the porn/NSFW instances, so somehow they are maintaining a relationship to keep things clean on the non-NSFW side.

TILvids has the worst possible solution by subscribing to nobody in the PeerTube landscape.

YouTube pays its creators in peanuts. That’s why almost every YouTube video has a sponsor, or is thanking its Patreons, or both.

I have a full-paying job, so I don’t bother with monetization. I feel like monetization is a boat anchor designed to shackle creators with arcane unspoken rules and unfair copyright claims. (My Babylon 5 video is still technically marked as ineligible because I criticized TNT when talking about Crusade.) I specifically signed up for Google AdSense to turn off ads on my YouTube videos.

I think what PeerTube is doing by having a Support section is good enough. Donate to your instance or donate to your creators directly. It’s a helluva lot more money than YouTube would be paying.

I think there needs to be an option to link to a PeerTube instance without having to always host the material. Have some sites where you host videos, but other peers where you don’t because you can’t afford to host all of it. That would at least solve the federation problem. Hopefully, they can have enough “tier 1” peers (seeders) to serve the content from multiple sources.

Also, why can’t videos use torrent technology to serve the data by other viewers?

DaVinci has its quirks and one or two things I wished it had. But, it is far more feature-rich than 95% of the population needs. And for the other 5%, there’s plenty of plugins.

Which ones? About 90% of the local videos list appear to be Linux channels.

Very cool. Population of videos takes a while, but at least the ability is there. I still wonder how practical it is.

This is not unique to Reddit, either.

I started diving into YouTube advertising a few months ago, just as a tool for promoting a video of mine that I felt should have gotten more attention than the sub-thousand views it was stuck with. For the record, I don’t try to force advertising on people that don’t want it, and I was glad to achieve my 2k subscriber count to qualify for AdSense, just so that I can turn ads OFF on my videos. I have a stable full-time job and I feel like it’s better to make my videos ad-free then to get whatever small amount of money YouTube is going to pay me for my hobby. If you want to use uBlock Origin to block YouTube ads, including my own, that’s fine by me.

Anyway, my experience with Google Ads has been enlightening. First off, just to get clicks of any good quality is already expensive. I tried to be as inclusive as I could, but I have been fighting Average View Duration all the time. I want people clicking on the video that really want to see the video, not people who are confused about why they are there, whether it’s in the wrong language, wrong set of search keywords, not the right device type for long-form videos, etc. So, I end up filtering down countries to ones with at least some amount of English-speakers, and aggressively trimming down keywords to just ones that are specific enough for the video content. Even then, I wished the Average View Duration was as high as some of my more organically-grown videos.

What’s worse, and this is the point that is relevant to the OP, is that I can’t match up Google Ads’ click rate with my channel’s video analytics, even though they are the same parent company! I can sort views by country in Google Ads, and it does not show the same set on the Geography tab in YouTube’s video analytics, despite a view meaning the same thing in both platforms. For a time, it was consistently 30-50% less on video analytics, which is frustrating, because it makes it hard to figure out which countries have good AVD for the video and I wasn’t sure if Google was just ripping me off on advertising costs.

Funny, I check it today and the problem is much less pronounced. I honestly think that recent advertising study lit a fire under Google to get them to fix problems like these. I wasn’t using TrueView ads, but this might have been a side effect of that.