What could be done to make PeerTube more popular?
joinpeertube.org
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?
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.
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
Reece Martin on RMTransit
Oh the Urbanity! A Transit Power Couple Patrick and Jasmine
There's a webpage for that https://ideas.joinpeertube.org/ Top 5 are:
Feel free to vote or add more ideas.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but since a lot of creators rely on youtube's monetization, it might be necessary for peertube to impement some form of monetization too.
Yeah, if you have that you can get parallel uploads and streams. Also you get tutorials and pretty much all content.
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.
Same, I've resorted to blocking the peertube link bot because I was tired of trying and it not working. It had its chance to make a good impression, it failed 🤷
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
Content, monetization, and ubiquity.
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"
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.
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.
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.
He's answering the question of why it's not more popular. And he's right.
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.
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..
And for that, you need monetization.
Stay on topic.
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'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.
I think we had several of those. I remember a few other projects that did some peer2peer content delivery and streaming. I'm not sure. Usually with those, people start complaining that it's "too complicated" because they need to install some software just to watch a video. Or they want to watch it on their phones and that's kind of impossible with p2p without draining the battery real fast. Or they're used to videos playing almost instantly (from using YouTube) and now it needs to buffer (more than) a few seconds for less common or trending videos and that's inconvenient, too.
And the crowd on the internet and usage patterns have really changed over the last decades.
for end users too. the federated model can get a bit confusing at first and can use some onboarding.
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?
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.
Yeah YouTube shorts is like smoking crack (I don't do Tik-Tok), when compared to your experience of Peertube, yours, metaphorically, seems more like teenagers trying to roll a joint of nutmeg,
They definitely are like crack for a lot of people, I use a youtube front end when I can, and when it's down a browser addon to remove them.
My daughter is 18 and just a couple months ago started doing the same, after realising shorts were almost an addiction.
Another friend has admitted she cannot stop watching them but so far hasn't done anything about it.
Oh yeah, I'm over thirty and have had and seen a few addictions.
I stayed away from the shorts and tiktoks for a long time, now I've been watching the shorts. It'll just suck hours.
Kinda like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJpCIaOYWZQ
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).
Data streaming costs have to be better addressed. How does the bill get paid? It’s really that simply.
I think the following has a good chance of working:
Basically, "YouTube fucks up a bunch enough for people to try to move".
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.
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.
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.
That would mean that some walk away from YouTube. Thus shrinking the ad revenue.
It's a problem.
Yes and no. If you are solely earning money on ads, but there are also users who just doesn't use YT or at least use something like Invidius. No ad revenue from these users.
I also believe that most content creators earn money by donations and sponsorships.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Lots of great content. (And maybe exclusive content so people have to go there.) I think concerning functionality, it's pretty alright as is.
There are currently two main reasons I don't use PeerTube:
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.
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.
Search up front.
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.
I don't think it's possible to seriously compete with youtube. Youtube would actually have to die first.
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.
It goes like this.
The world has been getting more and more uptight these past few decades. Things have to be THIS way, not THAT way. And corporate greed is what gets to decide what THIS way even is. So you HAVE TO watch your videos on youtube. Why? Because that's what everybody does.
Then youtube starts making their own platform shit......but it still has the content and the userbase that nobody leaves. And everybody ignores the obvious. They want the glitz and razzle dazzle of a fun exciting new time, to the point everybody forgets the fundamental rules of life. We're letting google dictate the internet, we're letting amazon dictate shopping, we're letting spotify dictate how we listen to music. All while ignoring the fundamental rules for living. And that rule is very very simple.
All you need to sell a product is a good quality product, at a reasonable price.
But corporations don't want to supply that, and so they've trained us to instead be distracted with apps, and AI, and all these bells and whistles to day to day life that are quite frankly not needed. In the 1980s you could roll your car window down without the car being on. There was a little crank, and you just roll the window down by turning the crank. Then you had to have the car be on, so the motors could roll it down for you. Now we're at a point where you're encouraged to get on the cars app, and pay for features and subscriptions to do basic functions like heat the car seats, or use the radio.
And when it comes to video, google has trained people that youtube exists, and nothing else does. Well, the price of using youtube is free. So you're not going to compete with youtube on price. So then you need to have a quality product. And in this case, the product are the videos. Top tier quality videos, that people want to watch, from creators that people have a fanbase for.
I haven't watched anything on peertube yet, because I don't see any creators I watch also using peertube. I'll give you an example. If MXRPlays were to make Peertube their exclusive home, I would watch it in a second. Even if they made it their secondary home I would watch on peertube, just so that they could have some control over their own livelyhoods. They're CONSTANTLY getting demonitized on youtube for showing something that's just barely breaking a rule, or in some cases completely fictional and never happened. For example, one time they got a strike on their channel for "Showing or encouraging violence towards children". They went back and watched the published video from their own hard drive (since the published one was deleted), and they never saw any child anywhere in their video. They never saw any violence in the video. They never saw anything that they could say was anything close to that. And youtube constantly goes after them. It seems like every 2 months they have a hiatus because youtube has another strike against them.
Or maybe Game Grumps. They don't have any issues with youtube as far as I know.....but if they were to just migrate all their content over to peertube, hundreds of thousands of people would also migrate with them.
I don't know if Markiplier or JackSepticeye are still big names on youtube, but I imagine they would each bring a big audience. So that's it. That's the way you make peertube popular. You consistantly put out popular content, preferably exclusively, but at this point even non-exclusively would be good too if they mentioned it on their platforms.
Browsing != Searching
Piracy.
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
Have more content, and make it easier to join and post content.
Legislation that hobbles youtube