cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/8544858
Hi all. I recently decided to try PeerTube as a creator, and was quite surprised by a lot of what I found. Thought a writeup from the perspective of a newbie to the platform might be useful for others who are considering it.
Disclaimer: Some of the following might not be entirely accurate but itās just what Iāve picked up over the last week. Corrections and tips very welcome!
First up, Iām already a small-time craft YouTuber with around 7500 subs. Nothing earth-shattering, but enough to be pretty comfortable putting myself out there on the internet.
Iāve been on Mastodon about a year, and on Lemmy since just before the Great Migration, with two accounts and a decent amount of activity on both. Iāve also poked around various other Fedi bits like PixelFed, Bookwyrm, Firefish etc. So essentially I went into PeerTube thinking I knew what to expect.
Things learned:
- Itās surprisingly difficult to find an instance.
The instance search is hard to find, and then itās very limited with only 25 results (many of which are private). It claims to be pulling from this much larger list, so idk what the problem is there. The first time I tried to join PT, this was my stopping point.
Iāve now joined MakerTube, an instance dedicated to makers, artists etc. This fits my content perfectly, but the only way I heard about it was word of mouth. How many other budding instances are out there with no way to tell us about it? Who knows.
Instances need a way to be found, and people need a way to find instances. In the meantime this is a huge barrier to adoption, so if you know of a cool instance drop it down in the replies and help people out!
- Account vs channel
On signup youāre asked to create an account with a username, and then can optionally create a channel if you want to upload videos. Pretty standard stuff, you might think? Nah.
Most of your subscribers will be on Mastodon. Itās the biggest Fedi service by far, I imagine very few people are actually signed up on PT as a viewer account. The issue here is that when videos are federated to Mastodon, itās from your user account and not your channel so they all end up following the user instead.
This gets your videos to your subscribers just fine, but does make your channel sub count look a bit anaemic š
So yeah, learn from my mistakes. If you want your subscribers to see videos coming from your actual branded channel name, you need to make sure thatās your user account name instead and then use channels more like playlists. And no, you canāt use the same name for both, I tried that already!
- Categories are useless, tags are not
Much like YouTube, the default categories on PeerTube are extremely limited to the point of being useless. There is a plugin instance owners can run to add custom categories for their instance, but whether that gets federated out in a useful way I couldnāt tell you.
Tags, however, are interesting. Iāve not seen them used anywhere in the PT interface, presumably theyāre used in search. But remember what we said about most of your subs being from Mastodon?
It turns out when you publish a video with a tag like ācross stitchā, spaces will be removed and itāll be added as a Mastodon hashtag ā#crossstitchā. So anyone following that tag, can see it. Pretty sure Iāve had a few subs just from that feature alone, although the first time my own face popped up in my #crossstitch feed unexpectedly it was a bit of a jump scare.
- Licences
When you upload a video youāll be asked to pick a licence from a list, and no further info or explanation is given on what any of them mean. It turns out, as far as I can tell, they map to the general Creative Commons licences here. But itās very much not explicit and I was surprised to find it so difficult to dig up info on what they are.
- Viewers wonāt just come to you organically because search is bad
PeerTube from the viewerās side is actually a LOT worse than from the creator side. So it makes sense that there are very few viewers. Iām hopeful that as the experience gets a bit smoother itāll become more natural for people to discover channels, but so far itās pretty terrible.
The main issue is that search is almost unusable, and I am absolutely not the sort of person who throws around the word āunusableā.
Rather than the organic federated search results of Masto or Lemmy it seems like on PeerTube your results are dictated in large part by your adminās settings, and choices theyāve made about where to pull from. So assuming you can find a suitable looking instance, this might be something you want to ask your admin about.
There is something approaching a global search, but assuming you find and remember to use it youāll get duplicate results in just about the most inefficient layout Iāve ever seen in my life.
- Sorting algorithms? Also bad
Since I joined MakerTube last week, the default homepage sort of āhotā has shown the same first few results without change. Some as much as two months old.
Itās a similar problem to the ones Lemmy was having, and those only started to be looked at seriously once we had bigger numbers and people started complaining about seeing the same posts over and over. So again hopefully as more creators take the plunge and more viewers show up, these things will be dealt with.
- Enough whinging
Thereās plenty to like about PeerTube. I love the idea of a themed instance. I love how easy it is to import my back catalogue. I love the wider Fediverse integration and how easy it is for someone on another service to follow my channel from there. I love that Jan Beta chose the same instance as me, it makes me feel cool seeing his videos next to mine.
But Iāve seen various discussions with people noping out of PeerTube based on hitting the same roadbumps I did. So if this post helped, great. If you want to ask questions, feel free.
And if you happen to be into kind of awkward crafting videos, well, you know where to find me!
I had a similar issue, but I didnāt dig quite so deep as you did. Basically I couldnāt find any good instances, in fact the ones I could find were one with just a single anti-vax conspiracy theorist, and then the next one had Alex Jones and Steven Crowder. Like no shit I immediately stumbled on the archdemon instance.
After that I kind of just got a bit skeeved out by it and stopped looking. One thing I found really frustrating was that I couldnāt find any way to look at the networks like I could with lemmy. I think there needs to be a better way in general to view federation status between activitypub instances, because itās really invisible at the moment. Particularly I want to be able to see the pariah instances, and things likeā¦ idkā¦ have they defederated from the archdemon instance? That sort of thing is important to me.
Also loads of them werenāt available to sign up as a creator, so thatās yet another barrier. Iām still looking for good ones but Iām not ready to dedicate real time to it just yet.
Yeah itās weird, Iām not familiar enough with the project yet to know if these roadblocks are idealogical and done on purpose, or if it just needs someone to come along and help smooth the whole experience out š¤·āāļø
I really doubt itās on purpose. The hyper-streamlined onboarding of modern centralised platforms like youtube come from decades of R&D fueling the capitalist need for ceaseless growth. This is a completely new system and whilst we can take some lessons - like how to make a link aggregator work or how to structure comment threads, there are a bunch of extra new challenges.
Like how do you link between instances in a way that is unambiguous and seamless for all users and guests, even if those links are in comments? How do you visualise federation networks? How do you help people decide between instances? How do you deal with the fact that anyone can make an instance because itās an open platform?
This is relatively speaking an immature platform and framework, and one of the issues with FOSS software is that it has less resources because developers are monopolised by the tech industry, and it doesnāt have that same drive towards infinite growth. Itās inherently going to be slower. The thing that I have seen though is that without the same constant crises and collapses and shakeups that happen in the proprietary capitalist world, its growth tends to be much more steady. Itās a process of slow attrition, but the growth it gets it tends to keep. Like now that youāre on lemmy/kbin, would you go back to reddit? I know I wouldnāt. These transitions take years, they always have.
Iām sure the same thing will happen with peertube in time. It just needs a big shakeup with youtube and a stronger fediverse behind it when it happens. Itās got a bigger barrier to growth in terms of server capacity, but I think if the fediverse grows enough that wonāt be a big issue. Server costs arenāt that much for people to handle as long as theyāre evenly distributed.