What keeps you away from PeerTube? What features does PeerTube lack? If you were the developer of PeerTube, how would you improve it?
Lack of content and lack of recommended page to find content
About a year ago I started trying to check out peertube to see if it was worthwhile for uploading my videos to. My first challenge was just finding instances to sign up on. Most of them didn’t allow registration. Then for the ones I did find, streaming videos was very slow and laggy. In some cases, I couldn’t even view videos. And then, it seemed that I could only search for videos that existed on that particular instance.
Like I said, this was a year ago so maybe it’s improved. But in general, it seemed totally unusable for someone just looking for a way to share videos.
I think the biggest thing for everyone is discovery.
I also think the worst parts of youtube are baked into the videos themselves now so re-uploads are just a worse experience even without the buffering.
The PeerTube Android App is a huge step forward, but it needs two important features to be a viable YouTube alternative:
- possibility to login with my account
- functionality to cast to Chromecast or similar devices
- more content (not a feature)
Right at this moment: content and performance.
If I start looking around at Peertube, will I find anything I’m interested in watching? There’s a LOT on Youtube right now, what’s on Peertube?
There’s a tendency for alternative platforms to be wretched hives of scum and villainy. LBRY for example felt like the place racist shitheads were banished to when banned from Youtube. The difference between LBRY and Peertube seems to be “something something blockchain.”
I noticed a video from a channel called The Giddy Stitcher titled “How to start a (good) Flosstube channel” which for a second I took to mean Free Libre Open Source Software tuber, as if she was going to give tips on how to run an channel on Peertube. No, apparently “floss” = textile arts/string/whatever and that term is similar to “woodtube” for Paul Sellers et al. She apparently uses Peertube to mirror her Youtube videos, and gets thousands of views per video on Youtube and maybe a dozen views on Peertube.
Anyway, watching this video, it buffered HARD. It got better after awhile but…you remember how, back in the day, you could just pause a video and it would buffer? And how it kinda doesn’t anymore? It was also that. They don’t offer lower qualities below 720p50 which probably doesn’t help; I’ve seen Youtube jump all the way down to 144p to keep the video playing at all.
I know, Peertube is “some people” while Youtube is run by Alphabet. But, maybe we should standardize on lower resolutions and aspire to HD later on, huh?
- Hard to get into and discover channels
- Services like Grayjay, which can put together both recommendations from PeerTube and YouTube and other platforms for some reason only pull the oldest content from PeerTube
- A lack of community outside the biggest Linux YouTubers
A few solutions might be to…
- Somehow find a way to have the PeerTube app work with YouTube
- Include subscriptions for channels so YouTubers can use PeerTube as a better patreon or ko-fi for storing videos and sharing content
- Promote better videos which may entice others to stay longer, have users consistently promote the service personally
