Cross-posted from “If you could improve PeerTube, what would you improve?” by @[email protected] in [email protected]
What keeps you away from PeerTube? What features does PeerTube lack? If you were the developer of PeerTube, how would you improve it?
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I think it’s mainly the content. We need some good content, creative people and interesting videos on the platform. Yeah and maybe discoverability. People also need to get those videos displayed/recommended to them. Other than that, a good app is always nice. That’s already been worked on. But regarding the technology, I think Peertube works quite nicely these days. And it has a good amount of features as well.
The question is how to get the creators there. A lot of people are on YouTube because of the ad revenue, but with no ads on PeerTube there’s no revenue to share. A lot of other for-profit companies have tried to lure these creators away with little success, so I’m not sure how a non-profit service is supposed to attract people who have turned content creation into a career.
Right. OP didn’t specify it has to be a technical shortcoming… or easy to solve. So I just said what I think is the biggest issue. Because I really think the platform itself, and the software are great. And still constantly improving.
I think this is really difficult to impossible to overcome. Other for-profit platforms have failed at this. Even the big players like Youtube, TikTok etc needed a huge pile of money, investors and an unethical business model to succeed. And I’m pretty sure we don’t want that with PeerTube.
I think what we currectly, realistically can do is have a few big content creators do it for fun. And host their stuff on PeerTube. But that needs some other motivation than making money.
Ultimately, the majority of the worth or value of a platform like this isn’t in the program code. But in the content and userbase. And I think that’s where the focus needs to be when we want to grow or improve it for the potential users.
Making some sort of monetization scheme in which creators are paid more per view than YouTube, would solve a lot.
Then creators might as well spend the extra couple of minutes to also upload to PeerTube, because they make more money per view there.
What keeps you away from PeerTube?
The app not being on F-Droid. Once it’s there, I’ll at least try it out. Bonus if there’s an Android TV app too. I’ll watch stuff on PeerTube if I’m given a direct link, and I tried playing around with NewPipe but the experience feels bolted on to the rest of the app.
Well that’s new. Thanks!
I mean, if it had invidious’ functionality tacked on, i might be swayed to use it. That being said, rip public invidious instances
So many things:
- A closed caption system like youtube. I’m deaf so 90% of peertube videos are just unwatchable to me.
- A working mobile app.
- An easy guide to instances that is clear on which instances are mainly local vids and which basically federate with everything. Ideally, a couple, lemmy.world, lemm.ee style peertube instances that are general purpose and kind of have everything I can direct people who want to join too.
- A non-personalised algorithm. Ie. recommend similar high rated videos.
The biggest thing is content and discoverability.
Any good channel recommendations?
Search.
If I go to youtube, and I search for content, it’s either there, or it’s not.
If I go to peertube, I need to then exit the site, search on AN UNRELATED 3RD PARTY SITE, and then I can get results from more than the local instance.
If I go to an instance that’s nothing but stamp collecting, the trending videos are going to be about stamp collecting. That doesn’t mean all of peertube is talking about stamp collecting. I’m just on the wrong instance, and the site itself is fractured and borderline useless.
Now you can include a feature to tell peertube that you DO want to see trending, local only, as a stamp collector, on a stamp collecting instance, that would be really useful! But also, if I don’t give a fuck about stamps, as mkst people don’t, the default should be peertube wide trending across ALL instances. I mean, if I don’t care about stamps I’m on the wrong instance to begin with, but that’s besides the point.
I feel like peertube should be each instance is a different type of content. Want to watch guys go fishing? There’s an instance just for that. With multiple different channels, each from different people, each covering different fishing topics. But your whole life isn’t just one topic. So you go to a different instance, one for automobiles, and you follow the channels that post videos about your car. Then you go to a cooking instance, and find a channel that’s just a guy showing you how to bake pies and cakes while running from the police.
Your searches, will 99% of the time not find the most relevant results if we seperate the content based on instance. So the search as is, is really limited and fragmented to have to go to another site, search, find the video, come back to peertube, log in, go to the video directly, and THEN subscribe to the content.
See how jarring that is, compared to youtube? Search, click, play/subscribe. All in 10 seconds.
I want the ability to have everything behind a login. I don’t want people not signed in watching videos and wasting bandwidth.
You can. You can set a video as “internal only”. So only users registered on the server, can watch it.
Yes but they won’t federate out which defeats the point of peertube.
True, but I wouldn’t want to have a wallen garden, like Instagram or Twitter, where it forces you to create a user.
It would be instance by instance policy. I think there are many cases where an instance should only be available to users behind a login while still federating with its network.
Getting Lemmy(and other fedi services) to fully support linking videos would help. Piefed and and other platforms support it pretty well.
for example: https://piefed.social/post/398574
direct link vs just the url. Lemmy will not work with the direct link like this nor the comments appearing in both instances.
Improve cross instance search and for more creators to move from other platforms
