I had a similar experience. I like the idea of PeerTube, but not the execution. It needs significant improvements to make it more friendly for viewers to use as a video portal, rather than relying on subscribers and platforms like Mastodon to fill that gap.
Hey, Sean, thanks for inviting me to your community and replying to this post. I read through your blog article, and I'm glad we seem to be aligned with our goals here.
I'm still curious why the situation seems so different between the Lemmy and PeerTube instances. I'm not sure if the Lemmy admins are doing the same level of curation, but given the sheer amount of instances they connect to, I doubt it. So, I think they are using the same automated subscription feature you tried using. Yet, the content of even unfiltered new posts on any Lemmy instance are fairly high quality.
Comparing the stats between Lemmy and PeerTube has rather strange differences. I would have expected PeerTube to be still fairly low population, compared to Lemmy, with its recent Reddit migrations. But, no, PeerTube actually has a comparable user count to Lemmy. Other observations:
- PeerTube has 15x more posts than Lemmy, which contributes to the video quality problem
- The top list of servers on Lemmy are mostly the ones you'd expect, and are the ones interconnected with each other. The top list of PeerTube servers are... not. Like, truly some WTF ones in there.
- As a French-developed app, PeerTube's top servers are mostly non-English. Given the obvious language barrier, that makes it difficult to interconnect without much better language filters.
- Lemmy has user voting and per-channel moderation. PeerTube has likes/dislikes, but it's not immediately visible or usable, and the channel is owned by the same person uploading videos, so it's not really moderated in the same way.
So, I guess the approach you're taking seems to work with the tools you have available. But, I also hope the development team continues to hammer at this problem, because the PeerTube communities seem to be much more fractured.
YouTube pays its creators in peanuts. That's why almost every YouTube video has a sponsor, or is thanking its Patreons, or both.
I have a full-paying job, so I don't bother with monetization. I feel like monetization is a boat anchor designed to shackle creators with arcane unspoken rules and unfair copyright claims. (My Babylon 5 video is still technically marked as ineligible because I criticized TNT when talking about Crusade.) I specifically signed up for Google AdSense to turn off ads on my YouTube videos.
I think what PeerTube is doing by having a Support section is good enough. Donate to your instance or donate to your creators directly. It's a helluva lot more money than YouTube would be paying.
PeerTube has a federation problem
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:
- Spectra.video
- TILvids (basically non-existent)
- Neat.tube
- Video.blender.org
- BassPistol
- Diode.zone
- FTV
- PeerTube.io
- Review.PeerTube.biz
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?
DaVinci has its quirks and one or two things I wished it had. But, it is far more feature-rich than 95% of the population needs. And for the other 5%, there's plenty of plugins.
One, it was intentional, because I wasn't sure if there was going to be some lag trying to download the posts there. Two, the example link here doesn't work because the videos are actually on [email protected]
Very cool. Population of videos takes a while, but at least the ability is there. I still wonder how practical it is.
This is not unique to Reddit, either.
I started diving into YouTube advertising a few months ago, just as a tool for promoting a video of mine that I felt should have gotten more attention than the sub-thousand views it was stuck with. For the record, I don't try to force advertising on people that don't want it, and I was glad to achieve my 2k subscriber count to qualify for AdSense, just so that I can turn ads OFF on my videos. I have a stable full-time job and I feel like it's better to make my videos ad-free then to get whatever small amount of money YouTube is going to pay me for my hobby. If you want to use uBlock Origin to block YouTube ads, including my own, that's fine by me.
Anyway, my experience with Google Ads has been enlightening. First off, just to get clicks of any good quality is already expensive. I tried to be as inclusive as I could, but I have been fighting Average View Duration all the time. I want people clicking on the video that really want to see the video, not people who are confused about why they are there, whether it's in the wrong language, wrong set of search keywords, not the right device type for long-form videos, etc. So, I end up filtering down countries to ones with at least some amount of English-speakers, and aggressively trimming down keywords to just ones that are specific enough for the video content. Even then, I wished the Average View Duration was as high as some of my more organically-grown videos.
What's worse, and this is the point that is relevant to the OP, is that I can't match up Google Ads' click rate with my channel's video analytics, even though they are the same parent company! I can sort views by country in Google Ads, and it does not show the same set on the Geography tab in YouTube's video analytics, despite a view meaning the same thing in both platforms. For a time, it was consistently 30-50% less on video analytics, which is frustrating, because it makes it hard to figure out which countries have good AVD for the video and I wasn't sure if Google was just ripping me off on advertising costs.
Funny, I check it today and the problem is much less pronounced. I honestly think that recent advertising study lit a fire under Google to get them to fix problems like these. I wasn't using TrueView ads, but this might have been a side effect of that.