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?
Ubiquity. YouTube may not have a monopoly in the strictest definition, but it might as well in practice. Honestly, YouTubes competition is not similar platforms, but Online Streaming services. Nebula comes to mind, though I think there’s a couple of others where it’s creator driven. (As opposed to Television streaming services/cable)
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.
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.
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.
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
In an immediate sense for me, the content I want to see. I’ve found virtually nothing on PeerTube that’s worth my time watching, whereas YouTube has all sorts of interesting stuff.
But that really just leads to a deeper question of why that content isn’t there.
Google’s got the economics set up so that they can pay content creators. PeerTube doesn’t. That means that people who want to do this for a living are going to be on YouTube.
Not all of the content I want to see falls into that camp, but certainly some of it does.
Then there’s network effect, which benefits an incumbent. PeerTube has a limited userbase. Even for people who are putting up content without intention of making money, they probably want to reach a large number of users relative to the effort they put in.
I think that the big factor is going to be the economic side. Google’s got a setup where they can make money for their own infrastructure and pay content creators. PeerTube doesn’t, and I don’t really see a way that that changes.
I didn’t know it existed! I have begun to hate YouTube, the suggestions for other videos are crap and it is overflowing with too many, too stupid ads. Peertube, here I come!
Youtube is unuseable without uBlock Origin & SponsorBlock imo
nothing stopping me at all I found out just now. I was able to search for and find a bunch of interesting videos and even followed a creator from my mastodon account and replied to a video post through mastodon with no issue. Now if the question was what is stopping me from posting my own videos to peertube its because I can’t find any server I would like to tie my content to and I don’t want to pay even $7/mo for a VPS to run my own and my shared hosting company won’t allow me to run it.
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
I’m one of those people who watch videos at double speed. My experience with Peertube is that it just isn’t fast enough to keep up.
I’m not really that into watching videos.
The content I want to watch.
Never really heard of it, and nothing exists quite like YouTube and Nebula for decent long-form content.
If I were a video creator I certainly wouldn’t self-host on an ActivityPub platform.
If I want to host videos on PeerTube, I want to do so on my own instance, and the process of setting up your own instance is not as easy as I would like. I’ve tried it a few times, ran into a wall, gave up and went back to YouTube with my tail between my legs.
It’s nearly impossible to find new stuff that interests me on it.
