There’s nothing to watch. The feed is full of TV-ish garbage on political topics, and I cannot even block it from appearing.

I’ve looked into it a few times and never saw anything interesting.

I’m irritated with how obtuse Peertube is to use. I’ve tried a couple of times, since content creators like Veronica Explains are there, and because I know it is developed in France, it is open and decentralized, but ffs, I can’t figure out how to reliably follow anyone, find content, or even have an account. I’m not willing to set up my own instance just to do any of that either.

Peertube seems like something I should be using regularly instead of youtube, but I have not been able to wrap my head around how to use it effectively, so I gave up.

Can’t figure out how it works and I really tried. On a few occasions I spent about an hour looking for channels or videos I found interesting. In all that time I found 1 video. I keep on checking back once in a while to see if its better now, but so far no luck.

I would like to use it more, frankly. It’s been a few months since I last tried, but the main issue I have had with Peertube in the past is discoverability of creators and videos from outside of my instance.

I joined Makertube and was streaming amateur DJ sets for a while, ad I did see some cool videos and followed some people just browsing on the videos page, but ultimately it felt like I couldn’t easily see stuff from outside of Makertube at that time, so it felt really isolated. It’s hard to tell whether there just isn’t enough stuff there yet, or whatever it is just too difficult to discover!

I also had some major technical errors with crashing when I was trying to stream for >45 minutes at a time, which obviously wasn’t the fault of Makertube or Peertube, but honestly did but a damper on my desire to keep trying. I figured I would come back to it later, but I haven’t yet.

Overall I think that Peertube is very cool tech and very promising, but (for better or worse) it’s just not quite as good at putting videos or streams that I want to watch in front of me as Youtube is.

Peertube, while great in concept, doesn’t do anything better than YouTube but asks you to give up a lot of comfort and familiarity as a user. By and large, most people don’t care about decentralization, and if search doesn’t work well and you aren’t getting good recommendations, it’s a strictly worse experience for them.

Users will go where the content is shared, so the real question should be “Why haven’t content creators left YouTube yet?” and the answer is quite simple, they married their livelihoods to the trapped userbase and switching platforms, even to another walled garden, would be financially detrimental. Uploading to another platform is extra work that they don’t want to do and actively harms their bottom line.

Nothing interesting and I have a few hundred subscriptions of many different YouTube’s who defenetly won’t move. The last time I looked, the top video of all times had a few k views and everything at the top just didn’t spike my interest.

no content, can’t make account. Its like the instances dont even want users. Tried 2, first didnt even send confirmation message and never heard from second. Both probably wanted me to write an essay about why i want to use peertube.

I had some content of my own that i would have liked to upload, as i would much rather have it be there than in youtube. But it seems it isnt wanted.

I was looking to see what ‘peer tube’ was in the post but it wasn’t explained. This one is for the savvy insiders who are hip to the scene.

Ubiquity. YouTube may not have a monopoly in the strictest definition, but it might as well in practice. Honestly, YouTubes competition is not similar platforms, but Online Streaming services. Nebula comes to mind, though I think there’s a couple of others where it’s creator driven. (As opposed to Television streaming services/cable)

Not sure how it’s working right now, but it’s the combination of having your IP exposed and lack of moderation. Like constantly being on a bittorrent public tracker, right? It’s fine, but not great.

Next to the lack of content argument, I simply don’t get how it works. It’s federated, but feels much different from lemmy or Mastodon. I would say the instance feel ‘less connected’ as there is no good way to explore instances, at least in my experience. You can’t make an account and when you can it’s only valid for that one instance. Content exploration is a nightmare and a lot of content is in french, which I’m not great at. The (iOS) app is hardst working and the website(s) are confusing. I tried peertube for a while but i was mostly stuck on one instance with only one or two channels that made content that I found remotely interesting… I am really hoping it takes off at some point, but I think a lot of development still has to be done to make it usable for the casual user

lack of videos

In an immediate sense for me, the content I want to see. I’ve found virtually nothing on PeerTube that’s worth my time watching, whereas YouTube has all sorts of interesting stuff.

But that really just leads to a deeper question of why that content isn’t there.

Google’s got the economics set up so that they can pay content creators. PeerTube doesn’t. That means that people who want to do this for a living are going to be on YouTube.

Not all of the content I want to see falls into that camp, but certainly some of it does.

Then there’s network effect, which benefits an incumbent. PeerTube has a limited userbase. Even for people who are putting up content without intention of making money, they probably want to reach a large number of users relative to the effort they put in.

I think that the big factor is going to be the economic side. Google’s got a setup where they can make money for their own infrastructure and pay content creators. PeerTube doesn’t, and I don’t really see a way that that changes.

Ultimately, it’s the lack of any real reason to use it.

As a user, there’s no content on any PeerTube instances that I’m particularly interested in. Or if there is, I have no realistic way of locating it because the search/discovery features are effectively non-functional; unless you’re really into 3-hour videos titled “A Deep Dive into Every Reason why Richard Stallman was Right”, the recommendations are otherwise useless. There’s also no features that interest me that aren’t also available on any other platform I consume video from.

As a small creator (under 500 followers across 3 platforms), there’s no audience to show my content to on PeerTube, and no real way to gain an audience. There’s effectively zero exposure opportunities on PeerTube, and unless you already have a large audience that you can convince to move to a new platform, then nobody’s going to see your content. Even though I’m not making videos for any monetary gain and doing it purely because it’s fun for me, a big part of that fun comes from the engagement I get to have with the community. And if that community isn’t going to be active on PeerTube, then neither will I; this was the reason I stopped posting to Loops.

If I were a larger creator, or somebody whose income relied on video creation, then I would have even less inclination to use PeerTube because the monetization capabilities are basically nonexistent. Yes, you can add a KoFi link to your channel details, but you can also draw a QR code to your KoFi link on a cardboard sign and stand by the traffic lights for all that’s worth; in fact, I think that would actually still give you MORE exposure than PeerTube would, and you don’t even have to make videos to do that.

While I generally agree with the ideology behind PeerTube and want to see it succeed, it’s just not in any practical state for me, no matter which angle I look at it from.