Cross-posted from “If you could improve PeerTube, what would you improve?” by @asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev in !asklemmy@lemmy.world
What keeps you away from PeerTube? What features does PeerTube lack? If you were the developer of PeerTube, how would you improve it?
I think it’s mainly the content. We need some good content, creative people and interesting videos on the platform. Yeah and maybe discoverability. People also need to get those videos displayed/recommended to them. Other than that, a good app is always nice. That’s already been worked on. But regarding the technology, I think Peertube works quite nicely these days. And it has a good amount of features as well.
The question is how to get the creators there. A lot of people are on YouTube because of the ad revenue, but with no ads on PeerTube there’s no revenue to share. A lot of other for-profit companies have tried to lure these creators away with little success, so I’m not sure how a non-profit service is supposed to attract people who have turned content creation into a career.
Right. OP didn’t specify it has to be a technical shortcoming… or easy to solve. So I just said what I think is the biggest issue. Because I really think the platform itself, and the software are great. And still constantly improving.
I think this is really difficult to impossible to overcome. Other for-profit platforms have failed at this. Even the big players like Youtube, TikTok etc needed a huge pile of money, investors and an unethical business model to succeed. And I’m pretty sure we don’t want that with PeerTube.
I think what we currectly, realistically can do is have a few big content creators do it for fun. And host their stuff on PeerTube. But that needs some other motivation than making money.
Ultimately, the majority of the worth or value of a platform like this isn’t in the program code. But in the content and userbase. And I think that’s where the focus needs to be when we want to grow or improve it for the potential users.
For long-form video creators a Patreon like subscription service might work, but I very much agree with you that this is the main issue. Peertube works fine from the technical side of things.
There is a PeerTube plugin for premium subscriptions that does exactly this: https://github.com/kontrollanten/peertube-plugin-premium-users
- Most people who submit videos do it because they enjoy it, not to start a career (or at least it doesn’t begin that way).
- Most creators at this point have sponsor-spots in their videos. That’s still monetization they control.
- Donations are a thing. Both to Framasoft (Peertube developers) as well as direct to the creators themselves. This still makes up a large portion of creator income.
- Personal sales. Lots of creators have their own products these days. Some of them are novel and others are high quality.
- Affiliate links to product promotions.
Peertube makes it really easy to promote whatever you want in the “support” button.
So really the only thing they’re missing out on is adsense. Which, fuck Google. And is only a small (but not insignificant) portion of their income.
Search.
If I go to youtube, and I search for content, it’s either there, or it’s not.
If I go to peertube, I need to then exit the site, search on AN UNRELATED 3RD PARTY SITE, and then I can get results from more than the local instance.
If I go to an instance that’s nothing but stamp collecting, the trending videos are going to be about stamp collecting. That doesn’t mean all of peertube is talking about stamp collecting. I’m just on the wrong instance, and the site itself is fractured and borderline useless.
Now you can include a feature to tell peertube that you DO want to see trending, local only, as a stamp collector, on a stamp collecting instance, that would be really useful! But also, if I don’t give a fuck about stamps, as mkst people don’t, the default should be peertube wide trending across ALL instances. I mean, if I don’t care about stamps I’m on the wrong instance to begin with, but that’s besides the point.
I feel like peertube should be each instance is a different type of content. Want to watch guys go fishing? There’s an instance just for that. With multiple different channels, each from different people, each covering different fishing topics. But your whole life isn’t just one topic. So you go to a different instance, one for automobiles, and you follow the channels that post videos about your car. Then you go to a cooking instance, and find a channel that’s just a guy showing you how to bake pies and cakes while running from the police.
Your searches, will 99% of the time not find the most relevant results if we seperate the content based on instance. So the search as is, is really limited and fragmented to have to go to another site, search, find the video, come back to peertube, log in, go to the video directly, and THEN subscribe to the content.
See how jarring that is, compared to youtube? Search, click, play/subscribe. All in 10 seconds.
https://sepiasearch.org/ is already integrated into the app.
That’s cool and all, but I don’t use an app, nor should I be expected to download software just to use a website. I use my browser.
Improve cross instance search and for more creators to move from other platforms
I tried it, but gave up months ago. Decentralization is what we’re all about, but without a centralized index of what’s available, finding videos on PeerTube is more work than watching them is worth.
I really liked the livestream feature that was on reddit a few years ago. Would be cool to have a fediverse version of that, where people could casually stream from their phones with just a peertube app.
Yeah. We do have PeerTube Live, but it’s not official and integrated into the PeerTube app itself. It also can’t stream the screen of the phone, so there’s that.
Ok that’s pretty close! The reddit thing was about streaming your camera, and having a chat window where you could read comments from viewers.
The other key element was having a place where viewers could see what was currently streaming. That allows people to casually go see “what’s on” without needing to coordinate with livestreamers to set up a time to watch, keep track of streamer channels, etc.
