Cross-posted from “If you could improve PeerTube, what would you improve?” by @asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev in !asklemmy@lemmy.world
What keeps you away from PeerTube? What features does PeerTube lack? If you were the developer of PeerTube, how would you improve it?
So many things:
- A closed caption system like youtube. I’m deaf so 90% of peertube videos are just unwatchable to me.
- A working mobile app.
- An easy guide to instances that is clear on which instances are mainly local vids and which basically federate with everything. Ideally, a couple, lemmy.world, lemm.ee style peertube instances that are general purpose and kind of have everything I can direct people who want to join too.
- A non-personalised algorithm. Ie. recommend similar high rated videos.
You are probably already aware but YouTube’s closed captions are very inaccurate. I’m sure it’s better than nothing though.
Yes it very much depends the video. But on slow paced standard english they tend to be okay, which is most the content I end up watching anyways.
I think it’s mainly the content. We need some good content, creative people and interesting videos on the platform. Yeah and maybe discoverability. People also need to get those videos displayed/recommended to them. Other than that, a good app is always nice. That’s already been worked on. But regarding the technology, I think Peertube works quite nicely these days. And it has a good amount of features as well.
The question is how to get the creators there. A lot of people are on YouTube because of the ad revenue, but with no ads on PeerTube there’s no revenue to share. A lot of other for-profit companies have tried to lure these creators away with little success, so I’m not sure how a non-profit service is supposed to attract people who have turned content creation into a career.
For long-form video creators a Patreon like subscription service might work, but I very much agree with you that this is the main issue. Peertube works fine from the technical side of things.
There is a PeerTube plugin for premium subscriptions that does exactly this: https://github.com/kontrollanten/peertube-plugin-premium-users
Not bad, but it is a bit limiting with Stripe only and the Stripe ToS forbidding a lot of common usecases.
Search.
If I go to youtube, and I search for content, it’s either there, or it’s not.
If I go to peertube, I need to then exit the site, search on AN UNRELATED 3RD PARTY SITE, and then I can get results from more than the local instance.
If I go to an instance that’s nothing but stamp collecting, the trending videos are going to be about stamp collecting. That doesn’t mean all of peertube is talking about stamp collecting. I’m just on the wrong instance, and the site itself is fractured and borderline useless.
Now you can include a feature to tell peertube that you DO want to see trending, local only, as a stamp collector, on a stamp collecting instance, that would be really useful! But also, if I don’t give a fuck about stamps, as mkst people don’t, the default should be peertube wide trending across ALL instances. I mean, if I don’t care about stamps I’m on the wrong instance to begin with, but that’s besides the point.
I feel like peertube should be each instance is a different type of content. Want to watch guys go fishing? There’s an instance just for that. With multiple different channels, each from different people, each covering different fishing topics. But your whole life isn’t just one topic. So you go to a different instance, one for automobiles, and you follow the channels that post videos about your car. Then you go to a cooking instance, and find a channel that’s just a guy showing you how to bake pies and cakes while running from the police.
Your searches, will 99% of the time not find the most relevant results if we seperate the content based on instance. So the search as is, is really limited and fragmented to have to go to another site, search, find the video, come back to peertube, log in, go to the video directly, and THEN subscribe to the content.
See how jarring that is, compared to youtube? Search, click, play/subscribe. All in 10 seconds.
I want the ability to have everything behind a login. I don’t want people not signed in watching videos and wasting bandwidth.
You can. You can set a video as “internal only”. So only users registered on the server, can watch it.
Yes but they won’t federate out which defeats the point of peertube.
True, but I wouldn’t want to have a wallen garden, like Instagram or Twitter, where it forces you to create a user.
It would be instance by instance policy. I think there are many cases where an instance should only be available to users behind a login while still federating with its network.
Improve cross instance search and for more creators to move from other platforms
It would be nice if there was an easy and straightforward way for instances to create their own shared indexes. There’s a feature for this in PeerTube, which I guess is supposed to act like instance following + a shared search catalogue. It would be handy to know how to easily make sort of the federation equivalent of a webring.
The devs are also working on a mobile app, which I think is something the platform is sorely missing.
A custom bubble time-line like Akkoma has would be nice for Peertube indeed.
@asudox I love the idea of peertube. I have a couple of accounts. It used to be easier to load new content by URL when it supporfted input from YouTube, but YT has gone out of their way to maintain their virtual monoply. In order for such a service to be more useful than just sharing videos with your immediate friends and family you need a way for creaters to make money, which i think is going to be easier on #NOSTR . I think a better question is how do we make nostr useful for more than just bitcoinbois.
How does nostr make it easier to monetize video plays?
@jagged_circle sorry the entire decentralized NOSTR interface is based on the lightning network. So while most clients support “likes” what it more prevalent is “Zaps” a Zap is a micropayment of bitcoin over the lightning network (one zap is equal to one Satoshi equivalent to 100 millionth of a bitcoin). This incentivizes both the infrastructure and the content. Make something people like, get paid without a central corporation exploiting.
Automatic subtitles. I know… Not the easiest functionality to develop but I do miss it from Youtube.
VLC is adding AI generated subtitles, I wonder if it would be possible to co-opt that?
That would be nice.
