Fediverse

Plus some sort of payout system.

There is now enough interesting content that I find myself spending more and more time on peertube. The trick is finding it I guess. Sepia search does help but it's not perfect. I've found that following the #peertube and #livestream hashtags on mastodon is a good way to catch a livestream or find people promoting their channel on fedi.

It's a chicken and egg issue. Nobody will create content on a platform with inferior usability.

Hard to capture that lightning

Always ready to complain. All these things need to exist in order to gain traction. You need to have content and multiple ways to view it. Complaining that there's an additional way to view it is just unnecessary negativity.

If you think there isn't enough content, be the change you want to see: make it.

Anti Commercial-AI license

I also feel like the algorithm is kinda brutal. Even if there's good stuff I'm not sure I'd ever really find it

To be honest, I had the feeling it is lopsided the other way around at the moment: There are quite a few good and passionate content creators, lacking in an audience and interaction. I mean - sure - it does not have the amount of content of a big tech platform like YT, and not enough to binge watch stuff all day long, but I think lack of an active audience is at the moment more pressing - as is discoverability. If not using outside channels - like promoting on their Mastodon accounts primarily - or using places like [email protected] or [email protected] to discover things, a lot of worthwhile content right now flies under the radar. And that is excluding unofficial mirrors of YT content, which I tend to avoid.

On the other hand - I know lack of a mobile app has come up at several times in comments on there, and I have myself by now anecdotally heard from a few people wanting to try PeerTube and then being weirded out by the unfinished mobile app in ways that were unrecoverable. In addition, adding more know-how and codebase for mobile applications into the greater FLOSS ecosphere and Fediverse is good in its own right, there is a severe lack of it.

The problem is that it is just a fundamentally un-profitable platform for creators. Ads don't work (... period but also) because of the decentralized nature of it. Any instance/frontend that added ads would be shunned in favor of those who don't. And any video hosted only on a single "instance" would rapidly cost way too much if it ever became moderately popular.

Which means there is no reason for Content Creators to... care. So the best it can ever get is "early youtube". And people SAY they want early youtube videos but everyone is deeply spoiled by the difference between a video that was made in a week of after work tweaking versus weeks of full time planning and editing.

Which is why peertube in general is one of the "fediverse" products that... I feel really weird about. I forget if Floatplane/Weapons of Guntube/whatever use it or something they rolled themselves, but this really feels like the kind of software project that has the end state of getting "adopted" by a corporation and the major devs hired on as consultants.

Like, twitter (mastodon), reddit (lemmy), and even instagram (??) make sense to me and are very conducive to self hosting since... they are message boards and that is how we used to roll. But video is expensive and hard AND needs incentives to create "good" content for it.