I enjoy PeerTube for what it is. But we have to talk about how PeerTube is I would say the one open source app that is getting the least amount of new users
So wanted to bring up some points on how we can improve it in some ways:
- It is too complex with not enough up to date guides and videos on how to set it up for most people
- Need new open source frontend client mobile apps to make it simpler to sign up, sign in, & watch videos/channels on it
- The website for sign up is not very user-friendly and like a semi-maze for people who are new
Anything else you would like to add or say about PeerTube in general?
It’s a phenomenal project and backend will of course stay the same but it needs a better pipeline of people and creators to it
Also check out post by another person below mine about Keep Android Open
Here’s the contributing section of their git.
Thanks for the link. I’ll see how I can add on
Just a few thoughts as to why it hasn’t taken off:
Video is multiple orders of magnitude more difficult and expensive to serve than text or even audio.
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Your server needs a great upload speed which is not achievable for on-site home servers for most people in the world
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Your server has to have at least one dedicated encoding GPU (no raspberry pis or Intel nucs if you want any meaningful traffic)
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Your server has to have a ton of storage, especially if you allow 4k content to be uploaded, which while much cheaper than before, is still expensive. Here in the EU, reliable storage is around 300€/12TB for drives, which fills up very fast with 4k videos or if you try to store different resolutions to reduce transcoded loads.
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Letting random people upload video onto your instance is significantly harder to moderate than text or photos. Like think of the CSAM spam that was on Lemmy when it started in taking many new users…
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The power usage (and bill) of the server will also be much higher than without peertube because of constant transcoding
The cost, both financial and server taxation-wise is simply too great for me, and many others to setup a peertube instance.
Regardless of how easy it is for people to create on peertube, someone has to bear the cost of hosting it. That is cheap-ish for Lemmy or mastodon, but there is a reason YouTube was a loss leader for a long time for google, and many streaming services restrict 4k video.
That isn’t even getting into compensation for the content makers.
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For creators, wich want to monitize their content, PeerTube isn’t an option. The alternatives for music is Bandcamp and for all other Odysee, there they can create incomings with their content. PeerTube is nice for upload and host videos and same images in Pixelfed, both federated but only this.
They can’t monetize directly, but they can still do Patreon and sponsored ad reads. Maybe this already exists, but we could make it common to have donation wallets linked on videos, so you can still get tips too.
It’s just the ad revenue we can’t do
Tidal and Quboz as well for music. I get what you mean though I’ll give Odysee a go too
The main issue is that there are not enough users and not enough creators. Also, instance space is often limited.
I sometimes take part in a German ttrpg streaming group and I thought about convincing them to also upload to peertube but most instances that are focused on that topic simply don’t interested in hosting 300+ new videos that are each 3h+.
Apart from that platforms like twitch “guarantee” a small revenue stream and YouTube a large audience. PeerTube is harder to sell both in regards of outreach and revenue. However, I think if you are producing for the English market PeerTube can be very interesting revenue wise as some PeerTube creators report that they get more donations per viewer than on other platforms.
That is true and fully agree would be good for more of them to use Liberapay as well. I’ll add on though the pipeline to get users and creators in is difficult. Another commenter mentioned how their experience was and it is mostly similar to mine. I’m used to federation more so than others but the process makes it harder to get people in in the first place
It took a while for me to figure out how to sign up for a peertube instance and I’ve still barely been able to log into it.
I’m not a fan of how YouTube videos are mirrored on peertube. It feels like freebooting.
You get linked to a video on the fediverse and you like the video and want to know more. When you look at the description you see abundant evidence the description was copied from YouTube, but that’s fine. You decide let’s go to YouTube to give them views so they can continue making videos but there are no links to the source material.
The big problem with Peertube is that most content creators cannot monetise their videos and for that reason they do not use or report on Peertube. The most contradictory thing of all is that most “Linuxtubers” do not do so either, for the same reason.
That’s all nice and good but I think it needs mainstream creators to get on board and start publishing there. Though, since there is no financial incentive on PeerTube it won’t work.
I’m wondering would integrating with donation platforms help. Can be normal domains or some system which helps instance hosts too. I have sorta “top up and donate to content author” system in mind.
They could integrate with Liberapay if they do donation of any kind.
