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:

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?

  • Sean Tilley@lemmy.mlMEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Hi, so I run Spectra, and would like to weigh in.

    I wrote this piece a few years back about the content situation on PeerTube.

    TL;DR, PeerTube has a significant problem with spam. I’m not just talking about spammy comments, although it has those, too. No, I’m talking about the videos. For example: there’s an option within PeerTube that, when enabled, basically just automatically subscribes to every server that subscribes to yours. I let that setting run for a while, and connected to maybe a hundred random instances over time.

    It was all garbage. Either you get far-right propaganda videos, actual nazi videos, or super random weird stuff of little value. Want a video in Hindi for a restaurant with a two-second video featuring a French TV commercial transcribed from VHS? How about that, mixed with thousands of random snippets of media that you will never care about or relate to?

    A lot of PeerTube admins kind of informally got together and said: you know what, this is crap, no one is ever going to enjoy this. So, we connected our communities together. We have to do our research on which servers are good, and which ones just serve up bullshit. Good community stewardship, in this case, requires us to do our homework on which servers are worth following. Instead of following as many servers as possible, we’re more inclined to check and see if the place is putting out original stuff, has decent guidelines, and isn’t spouting hateful crap everywhere. To build community organically, we have to do so with intention.

    The reason that you’re not seeing your videos in any of the places you’ve listed is because their servers don’t follow ours. This doesn’t mean that your videos cannot be seen through federation - it’s just that, in any of those places, no one is subscribed to you, and that server isn’t subscribed to our server. So, your channel and videos aren’t likely to show up there, unless somebody actively chooses to subscribe to you.

    I agree that PeerTube is seriously lacking in some kind of Community Discovery feature, and would be greatly enhanced by it.