PeerTube is fantastic with its decentralized model that prioritizes user privacy and control. However, it still struggles to gain widespread popularity.
What do you think could be done to enhance PeerTube’s appeal and functionality, possibly even becoming a serious alternative to YouTube?
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Personally? Onboarding.
I’ve looked at the instructions on how to install peertube several times now, but its just not worth the hassle at this point. Until I can run it in just a single docker image, without an external database or email service required, then I’m not going to bother.
Its really frustrating, because I really like the project, but I just don’t have the ability to use services like it without docker or podman.
for end users too. the federated model can get a bit confusing at first and can use some onboarding.
That’s not going to happen. At least as I see it. They pretty much follow best pratices. Lots of webapps use a database, redis, a reverse proxy and sometimes they’re able to send out mails. That’s exactly what’s happening with Peertube, too. And splitting it allows for customizability, different setups, you can maintain one part of it at a time or keep them updated. And not everyone needs to reinvent databases, they regularly better use the official postgres container. Docker is a container platform. If you merge everything together into one large thing, that’d be more a classic install without containers and everything runs on the same OS.
And they let you do that. There are packages for like 3 distros: https://docs.joinpeertube.org/install/unofficial
Or you need docker-compose and it becomes easy to manage the 3 or so containers. But it’s exactly the same for Peertube as it was for all the other services I installed on my server.
Napster only required one app. I don’t see how forcing everyone to use three apps together helps with adoption.
Isn’t Napster a desktop app for streaming? That’s a very different kind of software. Peertube needs to provide content to several people, make it accessible to potentially the whole internet. It connects you with hundreds of other instances and hundreds of thousands of other videos, accounts and comments. All of that needs to be organized, handled and stored somehow. There is just no way around a proper setup. I mean you also can’t build an entire house with just your trusty Honda Accord and a cordless drill at your disposal. You need professional tools for that. And sure, you can build a dog shed with that. But it doesn’t really help discussing “adoptability” of houses if they were to be constructed with just a cordless drill, if physics doesn’t allow for that… The answer is to just use docker-compose in this case. It’s easy to use and does the proper set up.
I’m talking about the original Napster, which would function shockingly close to how PeerTube presents itself. The only thing missing from there original Napster would be a media player.
If that can be done in the 1990’s, there doesn’t seem to be a reason why it can’t be done today.
Content. I’m there for the content, not the platform.
Who is on PeerTube that we should be watching?
How often are watch-worthy videos on PeerTube posted on Lemmy?
I’ve seen one or two interesting videos posted to Lemmy from PeerTube in the ~6 months I’ve been here. I think both were from someone called Linux Mom or something like that and I’m not sure but it looked like they weren’t posted by her but by someone else uploading her videos from YouTube to the service. One video was her showing how to use a device to backup old game cartridges and the other was a video for Linux beginners.
that might be me. Ive been pushing as much as possible on /c/video peertube stuff. Whenever I find it.
One of the best and worst things about peertube is that the suggested videos side of things that youtube has isnt a thing. You can search based on hashtags but getting the same fix like youtube is very hard. Its also good in that most creators that are on their are really interesting/dedicated to their craft. And copyright isnt really a thing on peertube, so music/videos/etc…are a LOT better. At least for a time.
This is probably the video? https://lemmy.world/post/15969866?scrollToComments=true
!veronicaexplains@tinkerbetter.tube now has her own peertube instance: https://tinkerbetter.tube/videos/local
Copyright absolutely is still a thing, the network is just under the radar at the moment and the people who could be suing over it don’t have visibility on usage of their stuff. But, make no mistake, if it ever gets big enough to get noticed, those people and corporations will absolutely sue.
You are correct, I guess what I mean is that its not being enforced all that much.
There’s great biking and transit content from Canada at Peertube instance video.canadiancivil.com
Lots of great content. (And maybe exclusive content so people have to go there.) I think concerning functionality, it’s pretty alright as is.
Data streaming costs have to be better addressed. How does the bill get paid? It’s really that simply.
More peers.
Which can only really be addressed by making it easier / less of a hassle to become a peer.
I for one would love to host a peertube instance, but I keep running into a wall when I try.
I mean a large problem with services like Lemmy Mastodon and peer tube is that they’re complicated. There’s a learning curve require that I don’t have to have if I go to a place like YouTube or any other video site. Peertube requires me to learn about servers and other things in order to fully utilize their service and that’s a massive barrier to the public. Currently it’s preventing me because I just frankly don’t have time to go learn about more technological Concepts to best use a service.
Don’t get me wrong it’s not a dig at the services. They are excellent and I’m glad they’re here and one day I will figure out peertube but until these sites are as easy to use as going to a link and just doing whatever the person wants to do if they’re just not going to take off. Places like limmy and Mastodon and even peertube need a centralized portal so that is just super easy to start.
This is absolutely a thing. I barely got onto Lemmy in the first place because having to choose a server is such a barrier to entry. Having to pick a community when you don’t even know what the service is like yet is a major turn off for some people, myself included.
Right I forgot about that. That’s also a thing with Mastodon. I think in decentralized Services need to push that there are each other so it doesn’t matter which one that you end up going with. That’s at least what drove me to get on let me in the first place cuz I know that whatever instance I would get on would allow me to participate with everybody else the same way you and me are on different instances right now.
Yeah that made it feel better once I knew that too. It just needs to be made optional I think, in the sense that there should be a “give me a random server with good ping and stats” kind of thing maybe.
Right? I have been thinking how someone could build something like that. I would love to try my hand at a landing page like that
I’ve yet to get peertube working and I … just don’t care to take the time to figure it out. If it doesn’t work on mobile easily it won’t get take off. And this is coming from a nerd.
Same, I’ve resorted to blocking the peertube link bot because I was tired of trying and it not working. It has its chance to make a good impression, it failed 🤷
We need to make it more profitable to post on peertube than to post on yt.
That’s probably impossible, since there are no ads on PeerTube. There’s nothing keeping content creators from using YouTube AND PeerTube though.
I think if we do a crypto based pay per gb for generalised data delivery we could do it.
Adding crypto is just adding another layer of complexity imho.
An integration with Liberapay would be in the right direction, I think.
That would mean that some walk away from YouTube. Thus shrinking the ad revenue.
It’s a problem.
Yes, do both platforms, and also we’ve already figured out that the patron model works. If enough people like something, some will pay to support the creator.
That fact doesn’t grow peertube right now, but I think it means we don’t actually need to monetise peertube directly.
There’s a webpage for that https://ideas.joinpeertube.org/ Top 5 are:
- Share channel administration between several users (103 votes)
- “Audio only” video quality (91 votes)
- Mobile phone client (91 votes)
- Allow third parties to contribute bandwidth (89 votes)
- Support multilingual videos (67 votes)
Feel free to vote or add more ideas.
I am assuming it is about at the fediverse finish?
I prefer video on teevee so that boxes me into spytube. can’t even get nebula for my device or whatever anchors are shilling now.
Such device coverage does not require mega corp market position it seems.
While first in time group grew quickly, their replacement will take a hot minute to mature imho
I am surprised fediverse is as active as it is and has enough depth to gain users.
I am also doing my part around this here place too lol
I think something that gets overlooked is the ease of use of setting up a Peertube server yourself.
If I want to host my own Mastodon or Lemmy instance it is pretty straightforward, and I can just do so on my unRAID server with a simple ready-made docker container. But when I want to do that for PeerTube, as a novice I somewhat run into a brick wall.
What kinda of users do you want? Creators or eyeballs? The joinpeertube website doesn’t seem to cator to users wanting to just watch videos.
I’m trying to get some of the bigger FOSS game developers to use PeerTube for their videos, but it ain’t easy. I’m actually surprised at how many of them don’t have a presence on any of the FOSS social media platforms.
It really all just comes down to the content and the service that can be provided to the content creators.
Storage space is expensive and is the biggest hurdle. Most PeerTube instances have very small storage quotas, so a content creator would run out of storage fast.
Personally I have a very small yt channel that I haven’t uploaded to for months. I’m making stuff again, and my plan is to start uploading things to peertube early and then to yt, and I will tell people in my videos that they can find my videos early there.
I doubt I’ll make a huge difference from me personally, but I’m sure if more creators did this it would start to. There needs to be a bridge between the platforms.
The thing is, they’d have to do it for the sake of creating an alternative space, and not for like patreon benefits or something. I guess the peertube videos could be unlisted and there be links from patreon, and then they go public after the yt one does? I don’t even know if peertube has this functionality.
But again, this would have to be done because the creator believes in federation as a long term solution. It certainly would benefit creators personally to have a backup they’re more in charge of. The difficulty is they don’t seem to know it’s a viable option.
