The fascinating thing about PeerTube right now is that the frontend experience actually seems to be best on other services. This is primarily because discoverability between instances is fairly poor due to both federation mechanics and due to the nature of bootstrapping social. Because Lemmy and Mastodon feature their own human driven mechanisms for content discovery this problem is largely solved so long as you are browsing through another platform (the same mechanisms do not seem to transfer well to a youtube like frontend, although nobody has tried yet). Comments made on Lemmy and Mastodon will also federate back to PeerTube so you’re not segregated based on what service you follow from.
Check out some popular channels:
!veronicaexplains_channel@tilvids.com
!letstalkphilosophy_channel@tilvids.com
!alliterative_channel@tilvids.com
!kde@tube.kockatoo.org
!lofiorchestra@makertube.net
!random_retro@makertube.net
Tips:
- All of the above are channels. On Lemmy you can only subscribe to channels while on Mastodon you can subscribe to both channels and users. This is important as some videos get federated under the channels and some under the users. I believe this is up to the individual creator.
- Whitelist only is still fairly popular among PeerTube instances so you may not be able to access all creators from your Lemmy instance.
- Federation does not backfill so if the channels appear blank don’t panic. It will fill in with future videos.
- If you follow these channels from Mastodon and then put them in a list you have a feed that is analogous to Youtube’s subscribed page.
- Major advantage to following from Mastodon in these early days is it puts you in a better position to help these channels grow, If the boost button is right there things are a lot more likely to gain traction.
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In case, you’re not aware, there’s SepiaSearch as a search engine across PeerTube instances…
I’m talking mostly about the problem of content surfacing. SepiaSearch is absolutely an important part of that process. What I’m trying to point out is that we may have a fairly robust and ethical alternative to the Youtube algorithm in the networks of existing services.
Yeah, I do agree. It’s tricky for individual PeerTube instances to build up a sufficiently large community and thanks to the magic of federation, we don’t have to build all the community features into PeerTube, like traditional/centralized services do.
This is gold. PeerTube experience is a mess right now, we totally need 2 or 3 big instances like here on Lemmy.
I am of the belief we do not need PeerTube at all.
We need a custom Lemmy instance that has video upload baked in, as well as a method of monetizing it for the server/“creator” (who is in a structural sense the moderator of the community to which it was uploaded).
Lemmy is simply better at distributing the information. PeerTube is a red herring and P2P video sucks. We need to make it easy for a server operator to have a mechanism for paying for the bandwidth (take payments and contain distribution to paying users, and account for bandwidth when distributing operating income after costs).
I really don’t see any reason the two can’t simply work better in tandem. Video hosting is definitely a whole different beast technically and I don’t mind the idea of having a fairly dedicated and experienced team in the form of framasoft. Particularly because Lemmy has it’s own set of scaling issues that probably need to be worked on. That said I think that the problem of content discovery is also hard (maybe the hardest) and probably will turn into it’s own set of services with some fairly sophisticated tooling but in the short term while that niche remains unfilled Lemmy and Mastodon seem like the natural choice.
Like I said, I think they should wield their expertise towards making alt implementations of Mastodon and Lemmy that support multiple ways of video—paywall or otherwise—because the primary problem with video is always distribution and engagement. Miming YouTube more directly will always fail. It has for two decades now.
The point of p2p is to reduce the costs and it’s a great idea if it takes off. Lemmy is expensive enough already without having it worry about enormous storage and bandwidth requirementsffor video hosting…
Why does P2P suck? It’s not bandwidth that’s the issue, it’s storage.
Removed by mod
Pretty sure that’s just bullet point 3 under notes. In a related thread somebody did point out that there’s a bug that causes peertube channels to stop updating but this seems independent of Lemmy. As in if you are viewing from a peertube instance you will see the same bug.
I’m using a lemmy app on my phone. When I click the above links I get a ‘format error’. If I put the addresses into search I just get this post and a few similar posts, not any peertube content.
Unfortunately a lot of mobile apps are still struggling with Lemmy URLs, not sure why. But these are working from lemmy.ml, just checked on desktop. Maybe you can log in to the mobile browser version and get them to work that way?
I do wish app developers would make this one a priority!
My particular one is Liftoff. Issue filed!
Ah yes I’m on Liftoff too, I know the dev had to take some time out due to having newborn twins, which, to be fair IS probably a higher priority than fixing bugs with links. But it would still be nice! 😆
does it work with kbin?
I have no idea. What do the links above look like for you guys over there?
I was foolish enough to click those links and now they’re permanently and unstoppably federating with my instance. If the instance doesn’t want to pull i.e. veronicaexplains, it now have to block the entire tilvids.com instance. I don’t think that’s cool, is it unreasonable to believe a link that says “@tilvids.com” will open the tilvids.com page? Is that how links work on lemmy now, I haven’t been active for a few sub-versions.
Links starting with the ! symbol are generally the way to make instance-agnostic links on Lemmy, yes. That’s been the case since I joined in June but not sure about before that.
But don’t worry, you (or someone else on your instance) would have to actually be subscribed to the veronicaexplains channel in order for it to properly federate and pull in new videos. Just looking at the profile shouldn’t do it.
Still doesn’t really work for me. Just doesn’t pull up on my Lemmy app. It does for Mastodon, but the accounts are more of a feed of posting links to the original page. Would be cool if they worked like embedded videos.
edit: nvm nothing shows up on my mastodon mobile app when pulling up their profiles. Just their profile info.
Like any other type of Fedi profile, it’ll be blank with no content shown on Mastodon (or Lemmy) until it’s federated with your instance. Which means someone there needs to be subscribed. Once that happens new videos will show up in feeds and on the account/channel page as expected.
As far as actually watching the videos goes, seems like it depends on your client. I know the Mastodon web interface gives you the embedded video to watch without leaving the platform, but can’t speak for the various mobile apps.
