Thank you, everyone who contributed! And thank you, Framasoft, for providing free and open services like it to everyone!
PeerTube needs content more than it needs anything else. There’s no reason to use a mobile app if there is nothing to watch on it anyway.
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.
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
Same with Loops.
That’s unfortunate to hear, I haven’t really used loops at all but I hope they can figure it out to a point of adequacy
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.
not all of us care about profit. or at least not in the shove promotions in your face youtube status quo way.
I was a streamer for an incredibly popular game, I had millions of hours of watch time.
The total amount I made for the thousands of hours I invested is $0.00
My costs were in the thousands, when I consider the extra I paid for high-speed internet, computer upgrades, microphones, blah blah blah
People are a bunch of whining little leeching bitches.
Everyone can shut the fuck up because nobody will support a creator.
I know people use YouTube differently, but for me it always was a platform for “video sharing”. I don’t really watch YouTubers, but use it for funny videos, stuff from our publicly funded broadcast channels, music videos. So I guess I am not really using it for channels that require ads. Also I do not watch ads at all at any time due to ad block, and never would.
Yeah, if it wants to actually compete with YouTube it would have to have monetization. I’ve talked about that on Lemmy before, I agree.
But at least with a good algorithm it could be like old youtube where folks can speak to the world and share things in video format
The issue with “Algorithms” is that you need a lot of data to generate recommendations… which tends to mean centralized (or a LOT of data scraping).
Which is why stuff like Nebula and Floatplane and Ian McCollum’s latest “apolitical” side hustle all are still 100% dependent on Youtube. Hell… I actually still subscribe to Legal Eagle and NileRed on Youtube so that I know when they have a new Nebula video.
And just to be clear: None of the above (including Peertube in general) is competing with Youtube. Well, Floatplane says it is but that is because linus sebastien is a dipshit con man. But it still speaks to the fundamental issue of where Content comes from and what it takes to have the time and resources to do a “good” video.