With the mass migrations of Reddit users to Lemmy/Kbin, and Twitter now speedrunning its own mass extinction, it seems me that the eventual future of social media is de-centralized. I like how Lemmy is slowing turning out, even if it still has some work to do and growing pains to fix up. It’s still able to inform me of all of the current events I want and has a large enough community that it doesn’t feel empty.
I think a similar path will present itself for a de-centralized video media platform like PeerTube, since YouTube will eventually piss off enough of its users to cause a similar kind of exodus. Wanting to jump in on the concept at an early stage, I signed up for a channel on spectra.video and uploaded my video collection there.
But, I don’t really see the same kind of community and usefulness on PeerTube. I check out the Discover and Trending pages, and it just seems like the same set of videos, really. There’s not enough content to keep PeerTube from looking like a small indie project. I can click on Recently Added and it is usually other people just dumping their channel collections, instead of recent adds of new videos. It’s very easy to scroll down and find videos from months ago.
After poking around on various other PeerTube sites, I think I found the real problem with the platform: Federation.
For example, let’s look at how federated Lemmy’s community is:
All interconnected with hundreds and hundreds (if not thousands) of other instances. If you sign up for one Lemmy account, you have little risk in not being able to access a remote community elsewhere. It feels like a federated community, where everything is de-centralized, but communication is linked everywhere. I can even link to my own video channel from Lemmy.
Now, look at PeerTube’s instance lists, based on what I’ve seen on the Join PeerTube site:
- Spectra.video
- TILvids (basically non-existent)
- Neat.tube
- Video.blender.org
- BassPistol
- Diode.zone
- FTV
- PeerTube.io
- Review.PeerTube.biz
It’s all so bare. At most, 80-90 instances for some sites. I can’t see a lot of other instances’ videos, and they can’t see mine. Not from here or here or here or here or here or here or here or here.
It makes PeerTube a large collection of small silos, instead of a real federated community. People want to be able to sign on to an instance and find the content they want without having to jump through all of these different instances. Subscription feeds rely on having a unified list from many different instances. The technology has a lot of potential, but the PeerTube community is not nearly as organized as the rest of the Fediverse.
This sounds like a somewhat simple problem to solve, but I’m not sure what other kind of technological hurdles exist. How did the Lemmy community solve it?
Personally, that seems like a short-sighted way to use the platform. If there was ever an exodus of YouTube users, new users should be able to sign up to a PeerTube instance and browse in a similar manner as YouTube. They would search for “PeerTube”, find the “join PeerTube” web site, and sign up, just like how they joined Lemmy or Mastodon. Most wouldn’t think to log into a local Lemmy or Mastodon instance and try to somehow link to a completely different platform like that.
People will, very quickly, want to be able to subscribe to channels.
Nothing about this interface tells me I can log into an outside account. In fact, if I happen to click a link to watch a video, there’s nowhere to go to in order to watch the video from my non-PeerTube account. I would have to log into my local Lemmy instance, and find the video from the POV of the local instance, like here.
Even then, I can’t just watch the video and write a comment at the same time, in any sane way. I would have to watch the video in a different tab, from the PeerTube web site, and then go back to the local Lemmy instance to make my comment. And the PeerTube tab would take a while before the comment shows up.
To a user that is either non-technical or not familiar with how ActivityPub protocols work, this is a very jarring experience, if they even get that far. Most would give up in frustration far far sooner.
None of these have YouTube-like front-ends to discover new videos or look at a subscription feed. The PeerTube page does.
Video is video. Posts are posts. Not everybody likes mixing the two.
I watch videos from my TV far more often than I watch from a computer or phone, and I’m sure other people do, too. So, we’ll eventually get to the point of a PeerTube TV app on Roku or Android, which would need to have the ability to log into a PeerTube instance to access their subscription feed.
That’s neat, but it’s missing a good front-page view like this.
Mastodon can do that. On mastodon channels are groups that boost posts, which means they can be followed. Mastodon handles lemmy similarly.
Yes, but that’s even hard on youtube, because you have to scroll down. It’s easy to do though, despite quite hidden. If you aren’t logged in and press comment or subscribe peertube asks you for you fediverse handle and redirects you to your fediverse instance (on mastodon: corresponding post for comment; follow popup with the group/user for subscribe). In that regard it works a lot better than lemmy.
Which gets us back to this, because mastodon embeds the video into the post (the webinterface at least). Clicking on comment does exactly this, but it’s definitely not intuitive and it’s still the player from that peertube instance. I don’t know if it works with anything other than mastodon. It certainly doesn’t work with lemmy right now.
Here a screenshot of it, because I can’t give a link. Mastodon will immediately redirect you to peertube if you aren’t logged in.
The mobile version of this is kind of clunky, but PeerTube seems to mirror the functionality with the desktop version of YouTube.
Why can’t that be exposed on the main login page? The general public are used to OAuth logins, where you can pick to use a Facebook, Google, Apple, GitHub account to use, instead of creating a new one. Just expose that kind of UI to the main login pages, everywhere.
A common UI trap is to only have one way to do something and use that as justification that the feature was implemented.
Which is a shame, but there are few bug reports in GitHub about it at least.