Admittedly a risky crosspost, but cannot find conflicting community rules. I believe the possible discussion justifies it.
cross-posted from: https://piefed.blahaj.zone/c/peertube@piefed.blahaj.zone/p/999813/what-s-stopping-you-from-using-peertube
Or ‘What is PeerTube lacking that you simply cannot do without?’
I believe it’s a safe assumption that fediverse users want to move away from the monopolies and closed gardens so often associated with video streaming, and yet it’s not a task that’s ever been made easy. Maybe an ounce of inspiration is the cue we need, and so my question to you is; What’s Stopping you from using PeerTube?
lack of videos
I also find the federation makes it even more fragmented and difficult to find content from the few creators I’d follow (mostly reposts from Youtube).
And it’s not even like the different instances follow a theme consistently.
It should just be you check on a bunch of instances and you get a combined feed of them all. If thats possible on the app, it isnt obvious enough.
I think the architecture of federation is flawed. Different instances should share the same common elements while each hosting their own.
On Lemmy there shouldn’t be 5 different subs of the same thing where everyone just goes on the most popular one. Everyone should be rehosting the same sub on their own… I mean that’s how the internet works. That’s DNS is shared…
Peertube’s main usecase for me would be links based video hosting. So if I wanted to embed or link a video in a webpage, or a course moodle.
The times I tried it I did not see anything remotely interesting. Then I checked again after knowing how these federated networks work and it was the same but I wondered, do I have to make an account somewhere in order to not having to check every single instance? Does it even use instances the same way as lemmy or piefed? How do I find more instances?
In the end, there were too many questions and very little desire to look for the answers.
The content I want to watch.
There’s nothing to watch. The feed is full of TV-ish garbage on political topics, and I cannot even block it from appearing.
Content is lacking. I don’t like the UI. Fewer features, and non-responsive admins.
Basically it just isn’t up to snuff.
There are genuine reasons to not like PeerTube, like the lack of monetisation, lacking types of content (Like you mentioned), incompatibilities between instances due to not catching up to new PeerTube versions, hard power-hungy federation, etc…
But what missing features are there though? I can maybe think of lack automatic subtitling in many instances. Your point about non-responsive admins is weird though, I’m actually not experienced, but the 2 instances I’ve used (TILVids and ExquisiteTube) have highly responsive admins, which instances have you tried?
I’m genuinely curious to hear your other difficulties (If you can) because I myself don’t know what else is to be expected by regular users
Next to the lack of content argument, I simply don’t get how it works. It’s federated, but feels much different from lemmy or Mastodon. I would say the instance feel ‘less connected’ as there is no good way to explore instances, at least in my experience. You can’t make an account and when you can it’s only valid for that one instance. Content exploration is a nightmare and a lot of content is in french, which I’m not great at. The (iOS) app is hardst working and the website(s) are confusing. I tried peertube for a while but i was mostly stuck on one instance with only one or two channels that made content that I found remotely interesting… I am really hoping it takes off at some point, but I think a lot of development still has to be done to make it usable for the casual user
no content, can’t make account. Its like the instances dont even want users. Tried 2, first didnt even send confirmation message and never heard from second. Both probably wanted me to write an essay about why i want to use peertube.
I had some content of my own that i would have liked to upload, as i would much rather have it be there than in youtube. But it seems it isnt wanted.
deleted by creator
I also can’t seem to figure it out…
I tried registering on a couple of different instances, but none were allowing any new users. So no liking or disliking videos, for me…
I also can’t seem to search across different platforms, which kinda kills it for me tbh.
I was looking to see what ‘peer tube’ was in the post but it wasn’t explained. This one is for the savvy insiders who are hip to the scene.
Nothing interesting and I have a few hundred subscriptions of many different YouTube’s who defenetly won’t move. The last time I looked, the top video of all times had a few k views and everything at the top just didn’t spike my interest.
Not sure how it’s working right now, but it’s the combination of having your IP exposed and lack of moderation. Like constantly being on a bittorrent public tracker, right? It’s fine, but not great.
Can’t figure out how it works and I really tried. On a few occasions I spent about an hour looking for channels or videos I found interesting. In all that time I found 1 video. I keep on checking back once in a while to see if its better now, but so far no luck.
I’m irritated with how obtuse Peertube is to use. I’ve tried a couple of times, since content creators like Veronica Explains are there, and because I know it is developed in France, it is open and decentralized, but ffs, I can’t figure out how to reliably follow anyone, find content, or even have an account. I’m not willing to set up my own instance just to do any of that either.
Peertube seems like something I should be using regularly instead of youtube, but I have not been able to wrap my head around how to use it effectively, so I gave up.
It’s nearly impossible to find new stuff that interests me on it.
I only use youtube for a handful of specific channels (including livestreams for skateboarding events), not for general browsing. None of these channels are cloned on peertube last I checked. I don’t have the equipment or knowledge to host a server myself and even if I did I would feel weird cloning the channels I watch because youtube is the main source of revenue for them.
I support most of the channels I watch on patreon and do remind them occasionally that it would be nice to move away from youtube.
