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?

  • commander@lemmings.worldEnglish
    19·
    13 hours ago

    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@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      5 hours ago

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

      • Kichae@lemmy.caEnglish
        3·
        1 hour ago

        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.

        • commander@lemmings.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 hour ago

          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?