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?
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.