cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/5294605
Youtube, for so many years, was just too good. Yes, they changed the 5 star rating system to likes and dislikes and a few years later disabled dislikes altogether, but their algorithm mostly digs up interesting content and it just works for creators and viewers.
This might change soon. Their new strategy to disallow ad-blockers will frustrate a certain kind of viewer. Those who dislike surveillance and like open-source tech, those who use uBlock Origin and know why.
Just like a few years ago mastodon suddenly reached a certain kind of popularity, because twitter had their first big fuckup, maybe Peertube is next. It certainly is the most polished decentralized solution that doesn’t use a blockchain. Creators or fans could easily host their own videos, fans can watch it, without ads.
peertube is never gonna be a replacement for youtube, it’s good as a “upload random stuff you made” platform but modern youtube is so detached from that
I guess it depends on what you use it for.
I have two use cases, personally.
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How to videos for stuff I don’t know how to do. Like, fix a leaky spigot or something like that.
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Following content creators.
I could see PeerTube being fine for #1, but I don’t see it ever being positioned as a viable option for those who want to generate reasonable profit for their content. Would be happy to be proven wrong though.
I think PeerTube could possibly work for streamer VOD channels, since a lot of them probably keep them locally for archival/backup purposes, anyway. I’ve seen people mention thar PT uses BitTorrent for streaming videos to other users – I think that could work for this particular purpose
Mastodon might never replace twitter but it’s still a cool platform with a similar use case.
I feel like all of these fediverse platforms are going to suffer from the same issue.
I searched up peertube and clicked on the peertube link. No where was there a “recommend videos” feed or “upload videos” or “create account” and the first link to a peertube platform is a cliche “rebellion” something or other.
These things will never see mass adoption if they aren’t approachable to the casual browser. It sucks, but the average user would rather give their data to Google or watch 25sec of ads before each video then try to figure out fediverse. Especially since when you do figure it out, there isn’t any good content yet.
- diode.zone
- tilvids.com
- conf.tube
- cliptube.org
- media.privacyinternational.org
- makertube.net
- video.blender.org
- vidcommons.org
- share.tube
Just to name a few I think have nice videos right on their start page.
You can only make it so easy… If you want a centralistic platform with algorithmic recommendations, use YouTube… Emancipating oneself is work. But I’d agree onboarding for new users could and should be easier.
If you have a bunch of people guess how many M&M’s are in a jar you can average the guesses and you’ll come very close to the correct amount. A recommendation system can be very democratic in that way. When reddit still had their public API I would take advantage of this fact and use it to decide if something was a “deal” or not on PC parts. I was tracking the prices of computer ram at the time as an experiment. It worked very well. If they are federated properly, then their content can be filtered and appear on an instances front page.
You don’t need a centralized platform to have recommendations.
You just let users choose some tags and go from there. Each server will surface different videos, but if they all pull from everyone they’re federated with it would be a lot more accessible pretty quickly. And let users opt in/out of watch history tracking to feed their suggestions.
It won’t have the potential YouTube does, but YouTube’s so compromised on intent that it could easily be better in practice if content availability were the same (which is obviously way off).
I’m not sure if Peertube perhaps already does that. There are tags to a video and it shows related videos. But I don’t know how it calculates that.
I don’t think Peertube stores interests of the users, yet. That would be a possible solution. But it also requires the user to put something in or some tracking of their activity.
Edit: Misunderstood you, corrected my comment.
I replicated your experiment. Top link seaching for peertube is https://peertube.tv/videos/
There are at least videos listed. But they are 80% by the same channel and mostly about cars/EVs with a few other tech things. Immediately i think “this is for a certain type of person” and that aint me.
They really need to mix up their front page to show some sort of diversity. Should not repeat the same creator over and over again. Surely there are 10-15 people on all of pt that could be highlighted.
Not until they make it possible for creators to make money. At least with a patreon type system on peertube itself
That’s without doubt the worst feature of YouTube.
The amount of algorithm spam is unfathomable. A web search of “how do I …?” went from one line responses to ten minute videos with an automated voice.
There last ten years of internet have been a mistake.
I use YouTube for blender tutorials and find new tutorials that are straight to the point all the time so I’m not sure what you mean.
Also if anything that’s a reason for making monetization via a system like patreon even more important instead of an ad based monetization.
Funny you should mention Blender, there is an official Blender channel on Peertube
Peertube needs to really federate if it wants a fighting chance. Having to rely on Sepia Search to find videos just won’t cut it for most people.
It also needs some big content producers using it in order to anchor it. And that requires it to enable an intuitive business model for those producers.
Patreon integration, payment processor integration, and ads management. And that last one is kind of anathema to a lot of people and projects on the Fediverse.
It already has “Patreon” integration, with Liberapay, which is better because there are lower overall transaction fees (Lp itself imposes none).
Patreon would be probably relatively easy from that I think, as that’s just one more platform that works in almost the same way.
The near stranglehold YT has had on online video could not last forever. I think they’ll be the 800 pound gorilla for years to come, but I hope many smaller guys pick up speed as YT continues to throw its weight around. And I believe YT will continue to shit on users and eventually pay a high price for that.
How long until YT is totally paywalled?
How long until YT is totally paywalled?
Probably never. I doubt they could offset ad revenue with subscription fees.
