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I had a similar experience. I like the idea of PeerTube, but not the execution. It needs significant improvements to make it more friendly for viewers to use as a video portal, rather than relying on subscribers and platforms like Mastodon to fill that gap.

Yes, but that’s even hard on youtube, because you have to scroll down.

The mobile version of this is kind of clunky, but PeerTube seems to mirror the functionality with the desktop version of YouTube.

It’s easy to do though, despite quite hidden. If you aren’t logged in and press comment or subscribe peertube asks you for you fediverse handle and redirects you to your fediverse instance (on mastodon: corresponding post for comment; follow popup with the group/user for subscribe).

Why can't that be exposed on the main login page? The general public are used to OAuth logins, where you can pick to use a Facebook, Google, Apple, GitHub account to use, instead of creating a new one. Just expose that kind of UI to the main login pages, everywhere.

A common UI trap is to only have one way to do something and use that as justification that the feature was implemented.

It certainly doesn’t work with lemmy right now.

Which is a shame, but there are few bug reports in GitHub about it at least.

PeerTube accounts are for video makers, not video watchers.

Personally, that seems like a short-sighted way to use the platform. If there was ever an exodus of YouTube users, new users should be able to sign up to a PeerTube instance and browse in a similar manner as YouTube. They would search for "PeerTube", find the "join PeerTube" web site, and sign up, just like how they joined Lemmy or Mastodon. Most wouldn't think to log into a local Lemmy or Mastodon instance and try to somehow link to a completely different platform like that.

If I want to watch a PT video, I can do so without an account.

People will, very quickly, want to be able to subscribe to channels.

If I want to leave a like or comment, I’ll do so from my mastodon or misskey account.

Nothing about this interface tells me I can log into an outside account. In fact, if I happen to click a link to watch a video, there's nowhere to go to in order to watch the video from my non-PeerTube account. I would have to log into my local Lemmy instance, and find the video from the POV of the local instance, like here.

Even then, I can't just watch the video and write a comment at the same time, in any sane way. I would have to watch the video in a different tab, from the PeerTube web site, and then go back to the local Lemmy instance to make my comment. And the PeerTube tab would take a while before the comment shows up.

To a user that is either non-technical or not familiar with how ActivityPub protocols work, this is a very jarring experience, if they even get that far. Most would give up in frustration far far sooner.

The reason Peertube servers don’t tend to federate with each other is because they don’t need to: they federate with mastodon/misskey/pleroma servers for the people who want to watch.

None of these have YouTube-like front-ends to discover new videos or look at a subscription feed. The PeerTube page does.

Video is video. Posts are posts. Not everybody likes mixing the two.

I watch videos from my TV far more often than I watch from a computer or phone, and I'm sure other people do, too. So, we'll eventually get to the point of a PeerTube TV app on Roku or Android, which would need to have the ability to log into a PeerTube instance to access their subscription feed.

As for finding new videos on PeerTube, I recommend using sepiasearch.org

That's neat, but it's missing a good front-page view like this.

But, all of these instances are already hosting the videos. Why not serve the links to the content on the Discover and Trending pages?

I dunno dude, your average uploader might not be making a ton off AdSense, but the large creators that bring in the majority of users are making bank. The sponsers and Patreons are there to diversify income streams, as Google is notororiously prone to mashing the demonetization button.

Both YouTube and Twitch are very top-heavy organizations. Something like the Top 5000 channels make up 75% of Twitch. The rest are picking up the loose pennies on the ground. If PeerTube becomes a platform for the other hundreds of thousands of channels that don't get paid millions of dollars, so be it.

Overall I think you’re being unrealistic with the Fediverses place in social media, and overly optimistic about the future of it. I doubt the platform will ever have true mass appeal, which is fine.

It'll be a slow burn, that's for sure. But, platforms like phpBB, MySpace, Fark, Digg, and Tumblr didn't fall in a day. It was a slow descent into bad decisions and inadaptability that caused these platforms to vacate over a period of years.

I'm not sure I understand the difference between those problems on PeerTube vs. Lemmy. Lemmy NSFW instances exist, especially since the Reddit NSFW community established a foothold, and they are all properly separated into their own groups and instances. Lemmy admins maintain their own block lists (see the bottom of the instance lists linked) to get rid of the antivax/nazi nonsense, which usually isn't that large, compared to the thousand or so instances they connect to.

Heck, even Lemmy.film and others have links to the porn/NSFW instances, so somehow they are maintaining a relationship to keep things clean on the non-NSFW side.

TILvids has the worst possible solution by subscribing to nobody in the PeerTube landscape.

YouTube pays its creators in peanuts. That's why almost every YouTube video has a sponsor, or is thanking its Patreons, or both.

I have a full-paying job, so I don't bother with monetization. I feel like monetization is a boat anchor designed to shackle creators with arcane unspoken rules and unfair copyright claims. (My Babylon 5 video is still technically marked as ineligible because I criticized TNT when talking about Crusade.) I specifically signed up for Google AdSense to turn off ads on my YouTube videos.

I think what PeerTube is doing by having a Support section is good enough. Donate to your instance or donate to your creators directly. It's a helluva lot more money than YouTube would be paying.

I think there needs to be an option to link to a PeerTube instance without having to always host the material. Have some sites where you host videos, but other peers where you don't because you can't afford to host all of it. That would at least solve the federation problem. Hopefully, they can have enough "tier 1" peers (seeders) to serve the content from multiple sources.

Also, why can't videos use torrent technology to serve the data by other viewers?

DaVinci has its quirks and one or two things I wished it had. But, it is far more feature-rich than 95% of the population needs. And for the other 5%, there's plenty of plugins.

Which ones? About 90% of the local videos list appear to be Linux channels.