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.

Some kind of Monetary-support system

The biggest thing is content and discoverability.

Any good channel recommendations?

I really liked the livestream feature that was on reddit a few years ago. Would be cool to have a fediverse version of that, where people could casually stream from their phones with just a peertube app.

I would very much appreciate the ability to explore other instances and see what channels are hosted there from my own instance, instead of having to open the new instance in a new tab, then copy and paste the link to each interesting channel into my instance to be able to subscribe to it.

I wish there was a similar feature for Lemmy as well.

What keeps you away from PeerTube?

The app not being on F-Droid. Once it’s there, I’ll at least try it out. Bonus if there’s an Android TV app too. I’ll watch stuff on PeerTube if I’m given a direct link, and I tried playing around with NewPipe but the experience feels bolted on to the rest of the app.

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.

Maybe Librepay integration of some sort could help. Maybe that platform should be a little more ambitious and offer server operators and it’s users in the fediverse better pricing.

It’s surprising that there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way in the UI to just see a list of creators/channels on a local instance. So, that’s the first thing I’d change to improve discoverability.

The way I currently find relevant content is by going to Sepia Search, putting in exact words that I think are likely to be in the title of at least one video on a channel that would likely also have a lot of other relevant content, and then going through that channel’s playlists. Those searches often lead me to single user instances with only one or two channels (e.g. a channel that has a backup of that user’s YouTube content and a channel with a backup of their Twitch or OwnCast or whatever streams). When it leads me to a generalist instance or one with a relevant subject/theme though, I’ve had little luck finding content from anyone else unless they’ve posted recently (compared to other users). Often the content that is most relevant to me is not what is newest but the archives from years ago. (New content is relevant though once I want to follow someone in particular, but it’s not what I want to see first.)

Another issue I’ve encountered is with the behavior of downloaded videos. I greatly appreciate that PeerTube provides a URL for direct download, and I prefer to watch videos in my own player downloaded in advance (so I can watch offline; pause and resume trivially after putting my computer to sleep; etc). H264 MP4 works fine for this, but the download seems to be some sort of chunked variant of it (for HLS?) which requires the player to read in the entire file to figure out the length or seek accurately. Having to wait a minute or two to be able to seek each time I open a large video file off my HDD is an irritating papercut. I suspect there’s likely a way to fix it by including an index in the file (or in a sidecar file) but I don’t know how to do it – short of re-encoding the entire video again which I’d rather not do since it both takes a long time and can result in quality loss. (EDIT ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vcodec copy -acodec copy -movflags faststart output.mp4 repacks the video quickly.) This usually doesn’t affect newly added videos (where the download link includes the pattern /download/web-videos and a warning is shown that it’s still being transcoded) but does when that’s done (the URL includes /download/streaming-playlists/hls/videos instead); so, this is something that happens as a result of PeerTube’s reprocessing.

Downloads from the instances that I’ve found to be most relevant to me are also pretty unreliable (connection is slow and drops a lot), so I use wget with automatic retries (and it sometimes still needs manual retries…) rather than downloading through my browser which tends to fail and then often annoyingly start over completely if I request a retry… It would be really nice if I could check that I’ve downloaded the file correctly and completely with a sha256 hash or something.

It’s mainly finding videos for me. I’ve been able to find a few interesting ones, but largely it’s either difficult to find, or not there at all. I myself have actually been considering making some videos to help the content drought, but then the ideas, or knowledge of what people could be receptive to doesn’t quite come.

also as a newpipe user, being able to search all of my selected instances at once, or with sepiasearch could be nice, but thats not up to peertube

Better federation. The vidiverse search is just bad, i want to watch all types of content from my account.

And more general instances; i’m on spectra.video now, but as i said the vidiverse search sucks and it’s not federated to enough instances :/

What’s peer tube?

More content. We need 100% of the Creative Commons videos on YouTube to be mirrored, to start

Getting Lemmy(and other fedi services) to fully support linking videos would help. Piefed and and other platforms support it pretty well.

for example: https://piefed.social/post/398574

direct link vs just the url. Lemmy will not work with the direct link like this nor the comments appearing in both instances.

@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.