YSK that you can follow peertube channels as if they're communties in lemmy (and presumably kbin)

SJ_Zero@lemmy.fbxl.net to You Should Know@lemmy.world – 15 points –

I was waiting until I saw something show up in my feed to verify and I just saw it.

Peertube is the fediverse version of youtube. Different peertube instances can connect together so people can view videos from all over the Internet from the one user interface.

I was running some testing figuring out what I could federate with, and I found that if I plug the URL from a peertube channel into my lemmy search, it shows up like a community. Then I can follow it and new videos will show up in my lemmy feed. (I expect the same would work in kbin)

So for example, the minetest videos channel is at https://share.tube/c/minetestvideos/videos -- Just plug this URL into search, and suddenly minetestvideos is a community you're following on lemmy or kbin, and new videos will show up in your feed and you can watch them and comment on them right from here!

It's a really great example of how ActivityPub support lets you connect things you'd never expect to be able to connect. Imagine if on reddit you could just subscribe to a youtube channel!

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Works on lemmy. Thanks!

Just tested it and it also works with mastodon and pixelfed, but I don't see any posts. I'm wondering if it just takes time to cache.

Yes, they way activity pub works it will only pull over new content after the moment the instance you're on becomes aware of the instance and community/user you're pulling from.

that's unexpected. I was under the impression that Peertube didn't use ActivityPub, so while it can Federate with other Peertube-like sites, sites running Lemmy would be out of the question.

It works on Kbin. Just put this into search: minetestvideos@share.tube

It does not work on /kbin ATM.
Example: https://kbin.social/m/thelinuxexperiment\_channel@tilvids.com shows nothing even when originating instance shows 20+ videos published on the channel.

Tilvids doesn't federate like other peertube instances, which can be an issue. I don't know how federation with mastodon and Lemmy are, but peertube doesn't federate with it. (If tilvids does federate with Lemmy that'd be amazing because there's some great content but I'm not going to specifically visit the site... I'm going to give that a shot!)

Another thing is that most of the time federation starts with the time you subscribe for the first time on an instance. The peertube channel I subscribed to has 3 videos on my Lemmy instance but hundreds on the parent instance. This is normal behavior for activitypub. It's unusual the way Lemmy (and presumably kbin) pull the history of communities the way they do. I suspect there's something going on to achieve that which may not happen with every kind of community.

Yes, I noticed that. I heard something about searching individual posts so they can populate the server where you're on. But I know nothing more.

I love how Ernest is the owner of every single external account/community. I'll miss that lil' bug once it's fixed.

and every single domain for self posts is your local kbin instance. It's a little silly, but rather fun in its own way.

That took me a bit to figure out- me being the suspicious type and new to fedi, I needed to investigate. So a bug prompted me to learn something about how this place functions.

I'm assuming that in these "communities" only the channel upload can submit content to them?

I ran a test with my own channel on Peertube, lemmy, and my soapbox instance. I subscribed to my peertube channel with the lemmy and soapbox accounts, and then posted a message using lemmy. The message posted successfully, but did not appear on peertube or soapbox, but when I viewed the community using another lemmy account on the same lemmy instance I did see the posts. Next, I tried mentioning the peertube channel using soapbox. I knew that post would survive on that instance, but it also didn't show up on peertube or lemmy.

My conclusion is that if you make a post on a community using lemmy, it will survive on the instance you're on, but it will not be sent to the peertube instance and will not be federated to any other followers.

I assume so. I'll have to run some tests on a peertube channel on my own instance.

Sounds crazy and interesting. Although, isn't it better to have separate things for separate type of content (videos, toots, posts) instead of mixing it all together?

I run all the different services because I generally agree with you, but there's value in being able to choose how to interact with everything. some people really want to have new videos show up in their lemmy feed or their mastodon feed. If that's how they want to do it, they're right. Same with interacting with lemmy from mastodon -- If that's what you want to do, then you're right and it's a win for you if you can do it that way.