Why is it still a struggle to find good stuff to watch on PeerTube?

In 2018, a platform was launched to build an open, decentralized web for videos. In 2021, the network is still struggling to grow. I take a look into some of the problems with content discovery, along with some small suggestions for instance admins.

  • TheConquestOfBed
    8·
    3 years ago

    Easy, there’s no advertising money incentives on peertube. People who put in the most effort aim for sponsorships, and sponsors aren’t looking at peertube.

    To succeed, peertube would need to leverage leftist mutual aid networks to get community funded videos and livestreams.

      • TheConquestOfBed
        3·
        3 years ago

        I don’t think it’s a bad thing, design-wise. I just think consumerist culture sucks.

  • Vegafjord eo
    4·
    3 years ago

    I have a couple peertube instances. These are norwegian and I plan to connect them to other peertube instances with similar themes. The first one is about extinction rebellion in scandinavia and the other is about earthspace mastery (guitar, juggling and handstanding for example).

    My biggest problem so far is that I have lacked the energy to stay active on them.

    • Sean TilleyOP
      5·
      3 years ago

      Yeah, running multiple instances can be quite the investment of time and energy (sometimes also money). It can initially seem easy to run an instance, especially if you’re self-hosting one, and maybe have one or two more as a side-project. But, the demands that come from running multiple instances can steadily increase over time.

      This is partially why I had to open up VidCommons as a joint project. Even though I still do most of the server maintenance, trying to run it all by myself was an absolute nightmare.

      • Vegafjord eo
        2·
        3 years ago

        I use spacebear federation. So at least I don’t have to think about the technical stuff. I pay 20$ a month for each instance. And if I remember correctly, I get 25gb on each.

    • smallcircles
      3·
      3 years ago

      It may also be a good idea to promote other use cases that stimulate spinning up PeerTube instances, or use an existing host for that. For instance there are so many initiatives, non-profits, public institutions that want to improve the tech landscape, yet exclusively dump their video content to YT, reference it in their pages and expose you to the trackers that involves. Their strategy should be to first publish to their own PeerTube and then afterwards to alternative channels. This also protects them from their channel taken down or censored for some reason or other, assuring no links get broken and they have an archive to fall back to.