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?
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?
There’s great biking and transit content from Canada at Peertube instance video.canadiancivil.com
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’s about all I’ve seen that grabbed my attention, and the second was only because I liked the creator from the first. But again, I don’t know if it was an official upload that she supported, and if it wasn’t that’s not a good way to attract creators.
people see “alternative” and think “competition,” when they should consider it as “coexistance.” so either some youtubers would have to also upload to peertube as an additional option in case of site maintenance and other such trouble, or people on peertube could upload to youtube a week or so later and as part of their end credits/description/whatever, say that viewers can see this content one week early on peertube. It wouldn’t be THE fix for peertube, but more like the first step in a series of ever-increasing tweaks that could lead to this theoretical fix.
Of course, this is based on old practices such as “In theaters Friday, but you can see Thursday at Midnight” and other such strange ad campaigns, so the idea may not be entirely transferable. But that shouldn’t mean someone shouldn’t at least try that and see what happens.
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.
Make it easy for creators to be paid, recruit services like nebula and means tv to use it as its backend, make the ui prettier than YouTube not just an orange copycat.
And make it possible for people to set it up as a tiktok competitor focused on short videos with stitches and video replies easy which makes discussion and and creators explaining complex topics easy and straight to the point (which is why i use TikTok theres so much useful knowledge people teach without long intros and fluff like YouTube)
The idea of PT being able to compete and differentiate itself from Google to content creators by paying them money is ridiculous. You’re attempting to attack the main strength of the competition, and they are way, way, way, WAY better at it than you are. It’s fucking doomed from the start. You have to play to your strengths, and manufacturing commercial content for revenue is just not what PeerTube’s design is even intended for.
Ten years ago you could have made an exciting pitch involving a block chain that pays hosters and content creators but now we can see how stupid that is. Well it doesn’t get less stupid without the blockchain.
From what I watch on YouTube, the best content isn’t monetizable… pretty much every creator I like relies almost completely on Patreon and merch.
I think the most important thing is having a good experience. First of all there doesn’t seem to be a good hub for peertube. I don’t exactly understand how it works and i assumed it would work like Lemmy, like hop on anywhere and you’ll find videos from all over but that didn’t seem to be the case in the few peertube pages I found.
They look like shit, like someone’s personal web 1.0 page from late 90s, and has an extremely limited video collection from like a single person. idk if I’ve done it wrong; let me know…
It’s the experience. For all its faults, YouTube has an easy url and app, it pushes videos on people so even if you don’t have an account you can experience it passively (which I’m sure not something people here would want but requiring the user to be proactive is a barrier to entry which severely limits popularity which disincentivizes content creators) and while everyone shits on its UI it’s centuries ahead of any peertube site I’ve seen (admittedly i haven’t seen many but after a few very disappointing ones i just stopped looking).
If Peertube has the Breadtube (Breadtube is dead, long live Breadtube) and Magic: the Gathering content I want to watch I’ll use it.
There are currently two main reasons I don’t use PeerTube:
- Videos have inconsistent playback performance.
- It’s pretty confusing and difficult to use if you are just looking for an experience similar to YouTube.
If they can find a way to make playback performance consistent and make the entire experience better, then I’d consider using it. But, I already use YouTube alternatives like Odysee and Rumble, so I don’t know how much I’d end up actually using PeerTube.
i think all the issues can be surmounted if they find a way to pay creators like youtube does.
A lot of niche YouTubers say that they get most of their revenue from patreon and other sites like that so it seems like there’s already existing avenues to post videos and get paid via a different site
Yeah, it’s not about monetization. I think for content creators the biggest limiting factor is the user base. If you make a video but nobody sees it then what’s the point of making a video? You want people watching your creations and the more users a site has the more likely you’re going to have people watching your video. So a real suggestion would be something like video visibility which is kind of a hit or miss on Youtube since the magical Youtube algorithm pretty much throws only clickbait.
maybe we can somehow encourage creators to post to both in a why not kind of way, until peertube has critical mass?
Content, monetization, and ubiquity.
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Content: PT skews heavily into Linux and Linux adjacent topics. And that’s fine, but when I say I watch more YT than regular TV, I’m not kidding. And its because of the diversity and variety of channels. Things like History Hit or Every Frame a Painting, and silly shit like Red Letter Media. YouTube isn’t just “let’s plays” and game streaming. So Peertube can’t be “Just Linux”
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Monetization: Creators have to get paid. That’s just reality. It would be a fine world if everyone could spend hours doing their passion for free and not have to worry about deeding themselves. If you want #1, you need a certain amount if full time creators, and for that they need to get paid.
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Ubiquity: Watching more YouTube than regular TV, I don’t want to sit in front of my computer to do it. We need to be able to access it from smart TVs, ROKU sticks, etc… And not just a port of the website that requires a mouse and keyboard, but something optimized to work with smart TV remote controls.
The issue with the Fediverse (not that I don’t love the fediverse, I do) is that all of those three things require large scale framework and organisational planning; which is the antithesis to what the Fediverse is all about.
Tl;Dr – Large scale success of PeerTube as a thing is largely impossible without abandoning the concept of federation itself.
Why does PT have to be a place that creators get paid? Yes, that is essential if we want peertube to TAKE OVER THE WORLD. But what is wrong with providing a platform that ISN’T driven by content revenue along side YouTube? Those creators have needs that aren’t being catered to elsewhere.
Nothing is wrong with that at all. But you’re never going to get enough content to increase your total subscriber base as long as your creators have to spend most of their time working other jobs.
What if I’m not manufacturing content, what if I just have things I want to say? Why can’t we have one fucking platform that isn’t monetized?
Sure. Absolutely.
But that’s not what this thread is about and that isn’t what I was replying to. If you want to start a thread saying “Why PeerTube doesn’t need to grow to be a great place.” knock yourself out. I agree with you.
But this thread specifically is about, and I quote…
…possibly even becoming a serious alternative to YouTube?
And for that, you need monetization.
Stay on topic.
Then expect Peertube to be more niche as no one wants to post to it.
okay? it’s meeting my use cases, tell me why I care?
The discussion is on how to get more people to use it.
Ok, show us all the free PT content you’ve made without getting paid. What’s that, you can’t pay your rent with PeerTube views, you need a real job you say? Well that’s why there’s no content, creators need to eat too.
I mean it’s not hard to find my PT server with my content on it. And yeah, NO ONE IS EVERY GOING TO PAY TO SEE MY CONTENT. That’s kind of my point. There’s millions of people producing content THAT IS NOT COMMERCIALLY VIABLE, and they do this even though it doesn’t pay the rent. Like, I honestly don’t even know what your point is except to deny reality.
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Money for creators
Along with the other things posted here, it would be nice if peertube had a landing page or even if there was a “watch peertube now” button that led to a page showcasing current popular videos or something.
I clicked your link to peertube.org, then had to “Ask Sepia, our iconic cuttlefish” for a search term to get a list of videos, which after scrolling for a bit moved into lists and channels. A click of the “show more videos” button opened a new tab, and upon clicking a video to watch yet another tab opened to what seems like a fediverse instance for peertube?
For it to be a viable alternative, it needs to capture the way people watch and engage with youtube. If I am watching a video on youtube, there are suggestions for similar content below. If I go to the home page and scroll, either the most popular content will show if I am not signed in, or if I am, content related to videos I watch will be shown.
If I click to watch a video, it will open in the same window.
This is the sort of usability that will entice those new users to make the leap.
Make it easier to find an instance to sign up for?
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.
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 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.
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 take off. And this is coming from a nerd.
What I’m about to say is probably dumb but… I think it wouldn’t be really possible for PeerTube to become a serious alternative to YouTube, because of decentralization.
Like, sure, that may be a good thing in certain cases - we’re literally on Lemmy - but I want to be able to access content from most PeerTube instances using one singular instance, which isn’t really possible with PeerTube. As a result, the majority of instances feel dead.
I think what we need is an open-source and centralized alternative to YouTube (if that doesn’t already exist), but I might be missing something.
Isn’t the entire point of federation to be able to do what you’re describing?
Because videos are heavy and can be lost during federation, a PeerTube instance can only federate with another few instances and not with the entire network iirc, so the content is widely dispersed among PeerTube instances, which means that each instance has very little content.
This is why I think the solution would be to have a centralized open-source platform for this. Because there’s no federation, people are encouraged to go to the main instance, meaning that it will be more alive.
