I saw a few videos shared on PeerTube recently, and created an account on an instance. However, unlike Mastodon and Lemmy I'm struggling to discover channels to subscribe to. When I use the search functions on my instance, most results are either interesting channels which haven't been updated in years, or random foreign language TV shows and episodes.

Just for example, if I'm trying to find videos on "Gaming" on one of the largest instances, the most recent video is over 1 year ago: https://tilvids.com/search?categoryOneOf=7

Is discoverability on PeerTube bad, or are there barely any active channels?

Edit: BTW one very active creator on PeerTube is https://tilvids.com/c/thelinuxexperiment_channel/videos and his videos are excellent. But can there really only be a handful of active creators to follow on the whole platform?

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Both.

Peertube made this asinine decision to make federating opt-in, so most instances are just places where the owner can jerk themselves off for excluding everything.

[–] TeddE 11 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Seems difficult to build it as a social media if it's inherently unsocial.

[–] Lost_My_Mind 4 points 2 days ago

Who said YOU could say words???

revokes your right to comment

We'll be having none of that interaction, and social stuff here!!!!

.......why isn't peertube taking off???

(/joke)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago (2 children)

It's not unsocial. It's just not mirroring multi-gigabyte files by default. It's perfectly social if you use the website.

Everyone has to stop conflating the technology with the network. Lemmy is a website engine. PeerTube is a website engine. The ability to mirror content is not inherent to running a Lemmy- or PeerTube-based website. The network is not the primary object here.

It is a construct that arrises from content-mirroring.

Remember, federation is copying, not creating some kind of remote view. If you're federating videos, you're letting other websites consume terabytes of your storage space amd bandwidth.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Remember, federation is *copying*, not creating some kind of remote view. If you're federating videos, you're letting other websites consume terabytes of your storage space amd bandwidth.

That is not true, at all.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

It's literally what federation is. It's why discovery doesn't work the way people expect.

Do you mean to say that PeerTube at least embeds videos? Because that's news to me, and welcomed news at that

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Yes, video is streamed directly from its home server. There is a an option to mirror videos, so that your server will work as a seed, helping with bandwidth.

Images on Lemmy is also loaded from its home server, but there is a cache.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Remember, federation is copying, not creating some kind of remote view.

Is this true? It's my understanding that, lemmy for example, has the protocol in place for servers to communicate their content with each other, but each server's content is hosted separately.

Are you saying all federated services copy each other's data instead of only linking to it?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Images* are linked, text is copied

See: https://szmer.info/post/5936505 https://lemmy.world/post/25244041

*thumbnails are also copied

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago (1 children)

That seems... like a poor choice.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

We use it in our company because we don't want to upload videos only we use to Google.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

So it's more useful as a video player than a YouTube replacement?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Well, it is used mainly to share videos so we don't have to send them or save them directly to file server. I'd say it has many of the features YT has, so I would say it is possible to replace YT with it, but the problem with videos - as opposed to images or text - is that they take fuckton of space.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Yes and no.

By default anyone can follow your instance.

If you want your instance to follow others, you either have to type them in manually or use “auto-follow”, which needs to be enabled manually.