PeerTube mobile app: discover videos while caring for your attention | Hacker News Reader

PeerTube mobile app: discover videos while caring for your attention

joinpeertube.org

458 pointstoomuchtodo156 comments

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.framasoft....

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/fr/app/peertube/id6737834858

Repo: https://framagit.org/framasoft/peertube/mobile-application

Big fan of what Framasoft is working on here. It’s a shame to see that (edit: iOS) App Store restrictions have prevented browsing any instances not on a pre-blessed list. That all but eliminates its usefulness to me as a self-hoster.

It's another (tragic) example of why the App Store cannot persist in a free market. It's sad, but Apple would prefer that you download YouTube from their store instead of a healthy alternative on your own terms. They have no qualms abusing their double-standard for publishing when it hurts the little guy, which is as monopolistic as monopoly abuse gets.

Europe got it right. Crush the App Store, and you kill every maligned incentive with it. Only through natural competition will Apple be forced to finally respect their users.

There are dozens of successful, competitive Android app stores in nearly every country where Google Play is blocked.

In countries where Google Play is allowed, Google Play has a monopoly because of Google's illegal monopolistic contracts with manufacturers.

What effect do you think sideloading and alternate app stores on the iPhone might have?

Wasn't that list optional, though?

There’s a plus sign in the top right corner where you can manually add the URL of any instance.

It’ll work as long as the instance is sufficiently recent. My instance is too old. Guess I have some motivation for upgrading my PeerTube server to latest version now :D

I missed that, you’re right! I got confused by the blog post saying they only allowed browsing an approved list - I didn’t realize sites could also be added manually.

Wait the App Store won’t let you browse instances arbitrarily? That is such an absurd degree of control and censorship. We need regulations fast for these abusive megacorps.

I like PeerTube and most of Framasoft's products but like most federated software, I think they have a branding and marketing problem that prevents them from growing any bigger. Mastodon did as well and before they revised a lot of their site, no more "toots" for example. I say this knowing that they say their goal is education not growth but you need growth to reach the people you want to educate.

Yeah, I had to go into my instance's locale files and fix them to s/post/toot/ to put it back.

Some of Mastodon's upstream decisions strike me as "we must be identical to Twitter in the insignificant ways if we want to get users".

Even heavy Mastodon users thought the "toot" thing was dumb though. It was the constant butt of jokes and a distraction. I don't think it was about Twitter.

I still don't understand the objection to it. Yes I understand the double entendre. But I'm also an adult and mature enough to move onto more important things than getting up in arms about a little fart joke.

It is not a double entendre, since there is one common meaning for "toot" and it is about bodily noises. "Toot" has not been about posting on Mastodon up until very recently.

Do they not have trumpets where you live? Did "tooting one's own horn" imply breaking wind during the annual performance review? Far and away the most common use of "toot" is playing a note on a horn.

At one point, Gargron, the main guy behind Mastodon, even mentioned using a trumpet as the basis of Mastodon's logo branding: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/962

"Toot" also has the double entendre. In all my life, I've never heard anyone outside a playground use it to describe flatulence. In my personal experience, it's almost always been about the musical notes. I'm not in a band or otherwise around musicians more than the average person, either.

Using toot in the sense of tooting your own horn is still an odd decision for posts. It implies that users' posts should be focused on bragging about themselves. At least in my opinion that make for a very annoying social media feed to read through.

It's a reference to the trumpeting sound an elephant/mastodon makes, meant as the equivalent to the 'tweet' a bird such as the one in the old Twitter logo makes.

There's nothing more to it than that: A quirky name based on the chosen logo, following the Twitter example.

I agree it wasn't the best word choice, and I can understand why it has been de-emphasised in favour of 'posts', but the reasoning behind it was logical.

Too logical, needs an explanation (that you thankfully provided). Long trip for something so trivial

Tooting one's own horn and/or expelling gas seems to describe 99% of twitter.

> users thought the "toot" thing was dumb though. It was the constant butt of jokes

Hard to resist, isn't it.

Probably closer to "We don't want to be the network where people's thoughts are called farts"

Similarly Bluesky did its best to get rid of "skeet" before blowing up haha

Is there a specific App Store rule that prevents them to let users add custom streams?

It sounds functionally the same as adding instances to a Mastodon client or RSS feeds into a Podcast app. What's the catch?

Not a single button to download the app on the landing page.

A lot of info about the company who made it, a lot of info about how bad other actors are, and a lot about requesting funding, but not a single video, neither how to explore the platform or download anything.

I guess this is not made for users...

There are buttons for the Play Store and App Store halfway down. Its under the heading: "A very first build, limited by (play & i) stores"

That's 2/3rds down a very long page. Most people won't go down that far unless they're quite interested in the material.

You wont install an app if you are not interested in the material

None of the apps I've installed in the past are because I was invested in the developer's marketing materials.

That's an assumption and not necessarily true. Some users may read it, some may skim, some may come to the page already convinced. For those latter groups, having a fast lane/shortcut call-to-action visible someplace like the top gives them a way to get started before they get overwhelmed/distracted and potentially leave.

that's the kind of attitude that makes otherwise successful apps/content/etc created by stiff engineer minds to never experience any success: "they didn't want it anyway", when people literally didn't _understand_ what you were trying to sell.

But not on https://joinpeertube.org/, which seems pretty important.

There is another one at the end.

Even after reading this comment I went searching for the button and it took a while to find it.

And the homepage says in bold letters “The PeerTube mobile app for Android & iOS is out!” but it’s not a link! There’s a link further down but it goes to this article where you then have to scroll.

Not every site has to be super conversion optimized but it’s just common sense to put a CTA at the head of an announcement. joinmastodon.org gets it!

There is one mid page and one at the bottom. Did you open the link?

it's a really confusing page. I couldn't find it either...

Makes me think about dopamine, seriously.

Many of the comments here on hacker News are talking about how like difficult it is to find a linked download to get the video so that you can watch the video so that you can go lull and share meme videos about cats playing pianos and what not. Dopamine junkies talk like this.

So perhaps there's a need for a dopamine specialist, or a dopamine hit specialty in software development and product management?

Certainly marketing exists but marketing has become such a fuzzy wuzzy taboo subject and I think you know we'd like to just inject it all straight into our veins ..

.. so how about making a role in open source projects called the Dopamine Optimizer?

That way we could celebrate the intention, making a delicious physically resonant software tool? Functionality is a joy, for sure, there's an intellectual Joy to programming, yes, but social acceptance and the delight that comes from having our brain glands squirt out dopamine is an underappreciated aspect of I think the work that a lot of us may do.

this is basic design 101. Well designed content works better than badly designed content. If you want someone to read your page and find the button, the onus of making it readable is on you. And there's plenty of pretty basic techniques to achieve that. No need to be a "dopamine specialist".

I think that's mainly because PeerTube itself is software, not a platform. It'd be like complaining "The Thunderbird website doesn't show me how to get an e-mail account."

Granted, they can and should do a bit better here by giving people who searched "PeerTube" some directions to go in (including, clearly, adding app downloads.) That said, it's somewhat understandable that it's not a focus: I reckon 9 times out of 10 when someone finds PeerTube in the wild, it's from a PeerTube instance itself. Besides that, having a specific place to go defeats the purpose of federation somewhat.

Like, "joinpeertube" ? The first result if I type "Peertube" on Google (I'm french, it may be different in USA).

https://joinpeertube.org/en_US

Checking again, I've made a realization: that's the same landing page. Which does actually have the operative information on it, but it's acting half as a landing page for what PeerTube is and half as a call-to-action for where to go. I think this is a bit disorienting: the two different purposes should be split into different pages and possibly even different websites in my opinion. It'd be ideal if what you got as a user was a couple sentences explaining what PeerTube is and then just an interface to find an instance.

I also think a big CTA for "Download App" would be a good addition to the credit of the root comment of this thread.

The top of the page has "What is Peertube • Browse Content • Upload video"

I mean, it could be a bit more visible, I guess, but it's not exactly invisible.

I get the point that maybe have browse content as the main page ... but given that the point of peertube is the network not the videoclient, the current page also makes sense to me.

This is more like complaining that the Thunderbird web site doesn’t have links to download Thunderbird.

Thunderbird is a desktop app. PeerTube is software you install on a server.

The app is just a client.

I don’t understand. Thunderbird makes a client and has a prominent download link for it. Peertube makes a client and has no download link.

Thunderbird is a client, and that's all it is. PeerTube is a lot of things, and that makes it hard to have a single coherent landing page. I still agree with putting the damn button on there realistically (please note that I already agree to that in my first comment, and no, I didn't edit it in after the fact), but if anything I think they need more than one landing page in either case.

That's why software loses to platforms. Platforms are convenient, and software isn't. Businesses know this, but open source developers don't really, and they don't have money to commit to running platforms anyway. You couldn't make a new email today with any degree of popularity - and many attempts were made, from XMPP to Matrix to the Fediverse.

The thing that leads to confusion is thinking about things in terms of winning or losing, but open source devs rarely actually care about what's most successful in the market. At best, success in the market is merely a means to an end for open source developers. The real goal of most open source developers is merely to produce the software.

For some things, this actually is okay. Like for example, market-wise, Discord has dominated online chat. Does anyone still using XMPP or IRC care? Nope, because as long as there are networks to chat on and more than one person the network works. At worst, the main pain felt by market dominance is that the rooms may be smaller than they could be since people are less wont to join. But in practice, the quantity often isn't that big of a problem. I had some of my best conversations and met people I still know today in an IRC chat that never had more than 50 users online at any time and was inactive most hours of most days.

The market can do whatever it wants as far as I am concerned.

I thought the point of free software was to change the world somehow, not merely to prevent writing software from becoming illegal.

Free Software as a movement started by Richard Stallman and the FSF has inherent political and ideological goals.

Open Source was coined to contrast with this, and this term was endorsed by a lot of people working on open source software at that time, including Linus Torvalds.

So, the goal of open source software is not to change the world. The goal of open source software is to produce software that is open source. (The goals of "free software" are out of scope.)

That's a worthless goal if not in service to something else.

Most things are worthless if not in service of something else. If you follow this line of thinking all the way to the end, then you just come to the useless conclusion that all life and everything we do is meaningless.

edit: This is not a very good response, it leaves too much unsaid. I'm basically just trying to conclude that most open source developers out there, at the very least, the long tail of them, are just writing code and working on things chiefly because they want to do so, with no particular expectations of anything in return. That doesn't mean they have zero goals or aspirations, but they are not the primary reason to do the work. And even without starting with such a goal, it doesn't mean nothing can be achieved, as one can see from projects like Linux, Krita, OBS and so forth. Clearly people don't write software in a vacuum for literally no reason at all, but OTOH whereas commercial software almost certainly has the explicit goal of "succeeding in the marketplace", there is no real inherent goal for open source software, and many people work on it without a stronger reason than "Because I want to."

It's a blogpost about the release of their app for peertube. If you don't know what peertube is, just check their homepage...? It's been around for a while.

Even worse, there's no link to the app on the home page.

That is the fediverse disease. Boosters seem to believe that people care about all this inside baseball stuff, when in fact it is repulsive to normal people.

I've used PeerTube for years and it has always baffled me how laughably bad its user experience is. Literally so bad that I've never told someone about it without them immediately just asking me stuff instead of getting the information - or even better: videos that the person wanted to see - from the website(s).

Maybe the mobile client is a step in the right direction? I can hope! But the fact that I have to tell people "okay, so sepiasearch is kind of like the youtube front page...ish?" is already just infinitely dumb. Make a damn client whose name indicates, in some way, that it's a video website. And then shows some damn videos on the front page. Randomize them if you really can't stand "algorithms", but honestly, just put some videos on a page with "videos" in the url (or something similar), and you can cut down on most of the confusion I've seen.

Engineers get so lost up their own asses about this stuff because they can't see that UX is entirely divorced from functional processes. The user needs to do thing X, and the computers can only provide processes Y, Z, etc; forcing the user to reconcile with Y and Z just because they want X is the definition of "programmer design". It's refusing to engage with the very real ways in which users understand and interact with services, for whatever sake the engineers want to make up ("I don't like to obfuscate what is happening", "this is not complicated. users should be able to understand", "it would waste resources to provide a more streamlined experience", etc. These are all terrible reasons to not bridge the interaction gap between developers and users). Bluesky is my favorite example of people abstracting away the complications of this stuff. Yes, they had to centralize some parts to start with, yes they had to compromise on features - but the damn thing is instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with microblog social media. That's all peertube has had to do for years now, and they have just staunchly refused to do it.

Like I said, hopefully the mobile app is their first steps in the right direction with this stuff. They've been doing the dev stuff - made it work, made it fast, made it good! Now they just need to do the user stuff - make it simple, make it familiar, make it accessible.

> Engineers get so lost up their own asses about this stuff because they can't see that UX is entirely divorced from functional processes.

This is one of the main reasons that open source has never penetrated beyond engineers, IT people, and computer hobbyists.

The problem is that when you are good at using computers it's not easy to see how unbelievably confusing they are to people who are not good at using them.

The other is that there's no funding system to pay people to do the not-fun parts of programming or to maintain the more user-facing aspects of projects.

The crazy thing is that in many cases there isn’t even really much novel work required to end up with a user-friendly product. Devs can easily benefit from the vast amounts of time and money put into UX research by simply pattern-matching on the mountains of prior art now out there. It’s not like it’s still the early 80s where graphical UI is still in its infancy and there are no examples to follow.

I mean in reality, this is an excuse. We can and do build good software for many and all people, but the bad ones make it look like every engineer is out to lunch. Counterpoint, it's rarely an incentive to OSS software (individuals) to sit down with focus groups of early adopters to gather valuable feedback that can help iron out rough spots, so maybe a classic a little of A, a little of B here.

  > This is one of the main reasons that open source has never penetrated beyond engineers, IT people, and computer hobbyists.

This is also the reason there's so many multimillion dollar businesses that are essentially front end interfaces to open source projects. Hell, how many for ffmpeg alone?

  > The other is that there's no funding system to pay people to do the not-fun parts of programming or to maintain the more user-facing aspects of projects.

I think there are plenty of people that make things looking nice. I do, but I hate web. Maybe this is why TUIs are taking off? But there definitely is a funding problem. My partner is doing a PhD in economics and whenever I talk to any of them about open source software, and how much of the world is dependent upon it, they get very confused and it's a lot of fun to see. I highly recommend (plus, I'd love to see the actually thinking about these kinds of frameworks. Clearly us devs haven't figured it out and it's worth asking for outside viewpoints)

For a while at least Apple was the most valuable company in the world, mostly on the back of caring a lot about UI/UX. Under the hood it’s just BSD and a bunch of services and libraries.

Indeed. To this day, that's really all it is.

It's true. BUT I think they are currently making a fatal mistake. They are ever increasingly being hostile to devs and powerusers.

I see a lot of sentiment (including around these parts) that one should not care about those groups because they are a small percentage, but you could say that about any group. These groups definitely give your stuff a lot more value. I mean what is a smart phone with no apps? That's the real reason they took off. Arguably the same reason computers did too. Unless you really think you can do everything in house, then you need devs and power users (besides that it helps with finding bugs). You don't need to make the platforms geared towards them, but I think there is a difference when you start acting hostile. I mean isn't the reason Silicon Valley is full of macbooks in the first place is because mac felt more nix like and we could program on them more easily than windows? Seems short sighted.

Edit: fatal is too strong of a word. Google is doing it too and its monopoly behavior

The problem is all the competitors are also megacorps. Apple and Google and Microsoft are all hostile to power users in different ways. They can all make different fatal mistakes and it won’t matter because there is no real competition to this oligopoly in tech.

It’s why I made the edit. I still think it’ll end up being fatal in one way or another. Maybe someone can get past the excessive barrier. Or maybe because well behaving monopolies are less likely to get forcefully broken up. But yeah, we’re on the same page

It's amusing that the Mastodon creator is German, and PeerTube French, as the user experience on Mastodon can feel strikingly similar to dealing with the labyrinthine bureaucracy of European regulations.

On Mastodon, the fragmented network of servers and the need to grasp federation mechanics mirrors the intricate web of European policies, where navigating localized laws and cross-border harmonization can feel like wading through red tape.

Both present an ostensibly open and decentralized structure, promising freedom and community-led participation, yet are riddled with complexities that bewilder newcomers.

Alas, this is par for the course in the Fediverse. Mastodon is the only ActivityPub-using social network I'm aware of that has broken away from this. (Maybe Lemmy, to some degree?)

Social networks that focus on people and user experience have a shot. My hunch is those -- like PeerTube -- that focus on technical, political, or philosophical motivations will always be niche at best.

(Which is not to discourage experimentation! This seems to be a fantastic moment to experiment with social media design.)

> Mastodon is the only ActivityPub-using social network I'm aware of that has broken away from this

I tried signing up for Mastodon a couple years back, and failed somehow. Thankfully Threads and Bluesky are easier to use. Hopefully Mastodon has improved, but I'm already using two other competing micro-blogging platforms now.

Yeah, absolutely. Despite its growth, IMHO Mastodon is still a usability mess in the sense that a typical user will find it needlessly complicated compared to any alternative that is perceived as equivalent. The confusion starts early, with onboarding. I think this is one of the reasons why, for instance, Threads became a larger social network in its first ~24 hours than Mastodon had in its entire 6-ish year run to that point.

I was curious what the experience was like, having never used Mastadon. I searched for "Mastadon Signup"

First page is a bunch of rules. I don't mind moderation and decorum, but leading with that sends a signal to me that the moderation is going to be even more capricious than Reddit.

> that sends a signal to me that the moderation is going to be even more capricious than Reddit

That's actually where mastodon (and other fedi-platforms) different from a mainstream social media, because you have a choice:

- you can choose an instance with very strict moderation to be in an echo chamber with like-minded individuals.

- or if you choose instance with little to no moderation - you'll find yourself on a platform where everyone speaks what's really on their mind, even if it's socially unacceptable.

Choosing instance is hard, because popular ones are blocking a lot of small instances (mostly because of spam). But simply choose a server close to your interests, you can transfer your account between instances later.

> you can choose an instance

I'm out

Do you not think that Meta onboarding its 2 billion Instagram userbase into Threads had something to do with it?

Yes, of course; that was clearly the high-order bit.

But even if it was dominant my hunch is it was unlikely the only factor: Bluesky also rapidly outgrew Mastodon, without a Meta-like advantage.

From cloudflare 2024 stats bluesky traffic shot up during the US election but is now back below (aggregrate across all servers) mastodon traffic [1]

But its true that mastodon did not have a major breakthrough as of late and bluesky will likely surpass it in the near future as some important "high information quality" communities (journalists, scientists etc.) seem to migrate there in preference.

Orientation towards general (mainstream, non-tech) users, easy usability etc is indeed a problem for the fediverse. The reasons are mostly an anti-commercial ideological stance which on the one hand makes funding scarce. Hence brilliant open source products - there are many more than peertube - remain unpolished, not marketed at all etc.). On the other hand this hostile culture keeps mainstream actors from joining the revolution.

But make no mistake this is a revolution. The hyper-concentration in social media is an aberration that does not fit any other pattern in society and the economy. Some more pragmatism from the decentralization pioneers will accelerate the inevitable.

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/radar-2024-year-in-review-intern...

Arguably, Bluesky being spun off from Twitter and having Jack Dorsey as one of the founding members is a somewhat Meta-like advantage, in a sense of immediate legitimacy in the press and networking opportunities/connections in Silicon Valley. Mastodon had to start absolutely from scratch. I had zero connections to anyone important when I launched it. Bluesky also raised over $8M in venture capital funding, while Mastodon was being developed on a $0/mo budget for the first year of its existence, and something like $5000/mo for the next 5. Our current annual budget of around $500K still pales in comparison to the money Bluesky has at their disposal right now to spend on e.g. marketing. They also have the advantage of not really trying to do decentralization. That being said, venture capital money isn't free, while Mastodon's funding comes from the community with no strings attached, so in the long term, I believe in our approach.

To add some color to my comments: I also believe in your approach and I admire the work you and your team have done.

To sum up my entirely unoriginal opinions:

1. Mastodon has far better usability than any other Fediverse software I'm aware of

2. Despite this, usability is still a material coefficient of drag on Mastodon's growth

To be clear, I don't believe Mastodon has to or even should aspire to match the growth of other more centralized networks; only that usability is a drag on what would otherwise be natural growth for Mastodon itself.

I know you and your team spend a considerable amount of time and energy on usability, so I hope I'm not saying anything you don't already know infinitely better than I.

How did you fail?

I'm not the person you're asking to, but I failed at the "choose a server" part. I started having a bunch of questions over the choice of server and then gave up from analysis paralysis.

What are the implications of choosing one server over the other? Does this affect search and discoverability in between servers? If I really like Baking and really like Fencing as well, should I join the "Matodon Baking" server, the "Fencing fans" server of a neutral one? If I choose the Fencing server, will the people on the Baking server start seeing me as some sort of outsider since I'm not originally from the Baking server? Will they even be able to organically find me? How does the algorithm evaluate these choices? Can I restrict/split my posts between Baking, Fencing and general? And so on...

> What are the implications of choosing one server over the other?

Unless you choose a political or spam-friendly server - it doesn't matter.

> Does this affect search and discoverability in between servers?

A little.

> If I really like Baking and really like Fencing as well, should I join the "Mastodon Baking" server, the "Fencing fans" server of a neutral one?

Shouldn't matter.

> Will the people on the Baking server start seeing me as some sort of outsider.

Never seen anything like this, but I can imagine if you choose a server associated with 'A' and leave a comment in a server where people hate 'A', they might have a prejudice against you, so it's better to choose a very neutral, general server.

> Can I restrict/split my posts between Baking, Fencing and general?

Use tags.

> How does the algorithm evaluate these choices?

There's no algorithm, you follow people you like and block people you don't like.

> > Does this affect search and discoverability in between servers?

> A little.

Can you please elaborate on that?

Thanks for the answers!

On mastodon you have three timelines/feeds: local, federated and global.

Local is for posts local to your instance. Federated is local + posts from other instances, from people that are followed by somebody on your instance. Global is for any posts from anyone.

For example: if you join art instance your local feed will be very artsy and federated feed will be slightly artsy.

It matters little, because most people use and subscribe to hashtags to discover posts. Federated feed is too random, especially in big instances.

Relevant blogpost:

- https://blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2022-11-03_what-i-know-abou...

Thanks a lot for the link! That solves my questions!

Maybe I'll join.... (but still: which server!?)

Just pick one. It's not a permanent choice, you can transfer your account between instances.

I would suggest to pick one of the larger instances – they are stable and have been for a while. For example, I'm on mstnd.social. You can also go with the official mastadon.social, probably the simplest. hachyderm.io is also a popular one, especially with programmers.

Mastodon has changed quite significantly since a few years back. We take product design seriously and spend a sizeable amount of our resources on improving usability and reducing friction. If you could, please try again, and let me know how it goes this time. If you are an Android user, I strongly recommend our official app, as in my (obviously biased) opinion it is the best social media app right now and the user experience I am most proud of.

Right. They even have a nice picture of their SepiaSearch web page, with a picture of the search box. But is it a live search box? No. I have videos on PeerTube, and I never heard of SepiaSearch.

PeerTube is a good way to host videos, but nobody will discover them from PeerTube. I put technical videos there, which are referenced in other forums. They play fine. Here's one.[1] I get maybe a hundred plays. I just view PeerTube as something like imgBB, a place to host content that you can't store on a forum that doesn't handle images. Like HN.

PeerTube should be used more like WordPress - something lots of sites run for their own videos. What PeerTube does is offload playout to the browsers of others watching the same video at the same time. This allows modest streaming servers to, at least in theory, serve large numbers of users. I don't think any PeerTube video has gone viral enough to test that scaling.

Note that this is not like BitTorrent. It's just caching and streaming, not copy distribution. There's one master copy, and peers only host copies while playing.

[1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/349011f0-4029-4818-bc41-40fab2...

I was under the impression that you could permanently "seed" videos for others, even if you're not the origin instance, through WebTorrent or something along those lines. Fuzzy memory tho

I don't think so. There's no permanently running client program. The client side is all in the browser.

> I guess this is not made for users

The finesse of HN. If you don't do marketing like we preach, you hate users.

The announcement has links, maybe they will add those to the homepage later.

Maybe a small lack of energy, peertube was quite user friendly, so I don't think they messed up blindly.

I have some feedback if anyone from PeerTube is reading. The https://joinpeertube.org/instances page should have some more useful sorting for the instances it shows. (not to mention the ability to sort by something useful)

E.g. in my page as I see it, there's a random channel with 20 videos appearing as the second instance result, and then the 6th result is Freediverse.com with 741 subscriptions and 465,094 videos. Surely the latter should be on top.

Does anyone have any good recommendations of English language tech channels on Peertube? Most of the recommendations I'm getting by default look to be in French.

https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/videos/recently-added

Thank you, really good content. Pleased to see that.

Man this guys media takes

If we're talking about the app: if you go to settings (top right hamburger, then cog icon) you can set your language preferences

I almost tripped over "welp this is all in French, I got nothing to watch" too

Awesome. I am glad to see PeerTube growing. One of the most serious alternative to the centralized YouTube hegemony.

I hate YouTube's algorithm. It keeps showing me the same videos over and over.

May I recommend tournesol.app ?

It's again a French speaking initiative (but from a French-Switzerland research collaboration) about creating a recommendation algorithm with a lot of good properties and that scale (check the research paper on arxiv.org : 2107.07334).

It's also a plugin to help then have more data and to be useful for the users (by having an other recommendation algorithm on youtube), a win-win collaboration.

Linkified:

https://tournesol.app/

https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.07334

I love this! My only wish is that it was integrated into FreeTube, since I won't use Google properties directly.

Too YouTube centric

And the algorithm seems to prioritize videos that have extraordinarily lame and over-processed preview images and comically dramatic titles.

I personally like the boring deep-dive technical videos. The people uploading these videos don't seem to give a damn about the latest hip SEO buzzwords to use (and, frankly, good) but I have to go out of my way to hunt them down.

YouTube really, really likes shoving Mr. Beast, LTT, and other channels at me, but I couldn't be any less interested, and filter them out with an add-on.

I can't wait for a replacement platform for the boring technical content. Until that platform exists, I recommend looking at DeArrow. It at least fixes titles and preview images.

> filter them out with an add-on

Please do inform

Sorry, my fault. I'm one to rewatch videos a lot

I have a chrome extension that I made for myself which removes recommended videos based on:

* channel/video title * duration * keywords * channel size/video views

Then, I have a video queue where I add videos that I find interesting.

Ever since I started using it, I started getting almost exclusively videos that I enjoy consuming, since YouTube seems to quickly adapt to my clicking patterns.

Great idea! I wish I could filter all videos that start with "I "

I reject all cookies from YouTube and browse without an account. It’s fantastic. There’s no history, which they try to make you feel bad about and paint as a negative, but knowing what the front-page is I’m glad I don’t have to see any of that trash. Every time I open a video, the recommendations are related to that specific video and not past history. For the channels I care about, I subscribe via RSS. Highly recommended.

Doesn't that mean you only get recommended the most popular stuff? If your taste is completely mainstream then I suppose it's fine, but it means it won't find anything for you related to even a mildly niche interest.

> Doesn't that mean you only get recommended the most popular stuff?

No, the only recommendations are the ones on the side of the video and they’re varied in popularity and age (from just posted to a decade ago). They seem to be related to the same subject or type of creator of the current video. They’re very hit or miss in terms of what I’d like, and that’s fine with me. Believe me, the recommendations have nothing to do with what’s popular on the homepage, and I know that because I remember well when they didn’t hide it; the homepage was absolute garbage and mostly shit from my country.

One thing I forgot to mention is that I also use iCloud Private Relay, which may further affect it. That in particular isn’t always good as sometimes YouTube refuses to play the video and asks me to sign in to prove I’m not a bot. Fortunately that has happened fewer times than I thought it would. When it does I either temporarily switch browsers or just close YouTube and go do something else.

And the search is atrocious. It used to show you videos that related to your search terms. Now it's like

[relevant]

[infinitesimally small divider ]

[irrelevant trash]

[infinitesimally small divider ]

[kind of relevant?]

[irrelevant but you watched it three months ago!]

[...]

I used to love YouTube's algorithm: suggestions outside of my subscriptions but exactly on the spot. I used to took time to curate.

However since few months, all recommendations became off track. Then I started to realize these recommendations were related to the life of people I know. At least most of them, some subjects are private and personal, so this is really unsettling and I can't say if the algorithm is halucinating or not (I want to know if people tells me, not like this...). I have the impression that this is a Plato's cave illuminate with the private lives of those around me.

Technically, my understand is this:

* YT suggests channels closed to my interrests

* YT picks videos with thumbnails very closed to this "life of others" feed = the thumbnail leaks more than the video title.

I ended up to send a feedback to YT, no response, but most of these recommendations disapeared, and then it went back here and there, so I don't use the recommendation page anymore. YT music has more or less the same issue with automatic playlist.

The analytical part of me wonders why YT subscribes me to these "feeds", how these "feeds" are fed (maybe it goes beyond Alphabet / Google), but that's strange and disturbing enough.

Note: perhaps the fact I use ublock, blokadda, Firefox, etc... most probably makes my profile focussed on technical stuff, which makes other recommendations more visible.

So downloading the app and adding my interests my first 10 recommendations are: 1) An educational video about peertube itself by peertube 2) the same educational video about peertube by peertube with English subtitles 3) a slideshow presentation about Framadate in French by framadate 4) an educational video about the fediverse by peertube 5) another educational video about peertube by peertube but this time in French 6) a French video about the pyramids I think? 7) the same educational video about peertube by peertube with Spanish subtitles 8) an educational video about mastodon 9) an educational video about alternative medicine 10) and educational video about TILvids by TILvids

I don’t speak French fyi. Also it doesn’t change what videos I see when I filter by my interests.

Methinks this is not a viable competitor to YouTube.

It seems like the streaming tech is solid, no issues loading and playing videos. Curation on the other hand seems to be abysmal. I even tried their cutely branded search engine SepiaSearch with similar non-relevant or not so interesting results.

I am also curious how moderation works. How do they prevent inappropriate or illegal content from being shared?

I get exactly the same list of videos when sorting by Most Views. It seems the algo doesn’t consider interests.

> Methinks this is not a viable competitor to YouTube.

It is not.

I'm French and I have known about the different FramaSoft software for years now. They are all terrible alternatives.

Their approach is completely wrong, they think that being "libre" (free) is enough to acquire market share, and they completely ignore the user experience, feature parity, and innovation. All of their tools are therefore terrible, to the point of being unusable.

They are a paragon of oblivious French mediocrity.

PeerTube specifically has existed for almost a decade and has never been used by anybody. It is an empty shell of a website kept alive just to burn public money.

This is a harsh take but makes sense to me, unfortunately. It’s been around forever and has amounted to nothing. There doesn’t seem to be any attention to acquiring users or content. Maybe there are better projects to support?

exactly! i'm so glad i found this comment. you said it so eloquently.

tried so hard to find a video i like, but i just couldn't. can't find a single video for current events, hobbies, or even tech. the search just doesn't work.

the only justification for peertube's existence is that it's libre. but the experience is terrible!!! a frontend engineer can build a better ui over the weekend. peertube existed for a decade, but they couldn't bother to innovate on the ui/ux side all those years.

edit: it's almost 2025, they're building a mobile app, but they chose Flutter. now i understand. they should outsource the tech decision-making

This is not limited to FramaSoft. A lot of free-software-adjacent developers/organizations suffer from this attitude.

I created a Peertube client for android a few years ago. It was removed by Google in September and is still pending appeal: https://github.com/sschueller/peertube-android/issues/302

I hope this version doesn't receive the same fate as mine did.

There are many more options than the Play store for Android. F-droid, Obtainium, etc. Could you list in some of those?

EDIT: Oh, you do, nice!

The US needs to clamp down on the App Store monopolies to stop this abuse

What monopolies? There's various other options you can use on Android.

How does PeerTube handle moderation? CSAM, racism, antisemitism, etc

It doesn't. It also has no defenses against DoS attacks, intentional or inadvertent. It is the perfect software for people with no experience distributing videos.

this would be a major hinderance to widespread adoption. DoS attacks aside the fact that it has no legal liability offset for video hoster (which anybody watching the video ends up sort of like bitorrent)

PeerTube is federated and moderation is each server's own responsibility.

It works like forums, you need to look for an instance with the culture and moderation of your liking.

Using Revanced YouTube greatly improved yt experience, and for some reason yt is suggesting a lot of small channel with great videos

>and for some reason yt is suggesting a lot of small channel with great videos

It's been this way for half a year now, at least for me (YMMV). Some absolute gems I've found this way. The YouTube algorithm isn't really as bad as many people think...

Why why, It's all gone now

How important is WebTorrent for PeerTube and how important is WebRTC for WebTorrent? I get a feeling that if this takes off browser vendors might try to change how WebRTC works to shut it down. That would be another reason to support more open browsers and more open operating systems. This app would help in that scenario as well, as would a desktop app.

I am not convinced that it would be possible. But anyway I don't think they even care because virtually nobody uses peertube.

PeerTube has removed WebTorrent in 2022:

https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/5465

Serious question, why would I use this? I searched for a topic I'm interested in, in English, and got barely related results in various languages (Swedish, Spanish).

On YouTube, the first result for the same search is an amazing playlist, in English, on the exact topic I searched for.

Tried to type in something as simple as "funny videos" but got zero relevant funny cats or dogs. I wonder if they need an initiative to build content pipelines to bring move r some video.

I wonder how a new platform can seed content to compete with YouTube

no way to use from desktop? Absurd.

HN users are the most demanding group of people I've ever encountered in my short time on this blue sphere.

Use a browser.

To be fair, most people will just bounce. Feedback can be an opportunity to improve.

It would be nice if the feedback remembered that there are humans on the other side of the line, but sometimes you take what you can get.

Peertube has existed as web-based software for years; this post is about the addition of a mobile app. The linked project page has a search from the big "browse content" link at the top and a list of servers running Peertube, such as https://fedi.video.

For onboarding a general audience, this project page is not ideal.

Obligatory mention of grayjay: https://grayjay.app/

This page desperately needs a TL;DR and links to the apps above the fold.

One could make joinpeertube2.org if you wanted to...freedoms and all that. Hmm...

WAIT Peer Tube is trademarked.

So any add-on or fan domain name would have to disambiguate itself from joinpeertube to something which is clearly unaffiliated. I'm thinking, MacRumors or other sorts of mostly obvious dances around the trademark word.

Amusingly I I generated several hypothetical domain names via Chat GPT (another sidetrack: "Chad gpt" ...lol maybe for April Fools) after explaining the situation and you know it cautioned me of course do some follow-up checks but I think these are funny And somewhat interesting:

TubeWithPeers.com PeerTubeGuide.com PeerVideoCommunity.com ExplorePeerTube.com UsingPeerTube.com MyPeerTubeTools.com

So I think it is possible to invent a domain name which could just cut to the chase and function as a faster better stronger version of https://joinpeertube.org.

Contrast this with another story on the first page this morning: "Google are deliberately breaking YouTube when it detects you're running Firefox" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42388983).

Open-source content on the Fediverse will become more critical as corporate oligarchs continue to exert their influence.

That's just a 6 month old reddit post by a random dude. If they're blocking firefox, they're doing it very badly, because I just spent all morning watching football highlight videos running firefox on linux, adblocked, sponsorblocked (https://sponsor.ajay.app/), forging my referer, blocking cookies, with userscripts to unlock private and age-restricted videos, without being logged in.

With my setup, youtube can be broken for months on end. It's running like silk right now.

Do you have a guide you could link to?

> We cannot stress enough how their stores are not ready for independent solidarity-oriented networks. For exemple, a small "support us" donation link in our website footer or even on one of the allowed platforms triggered a "nope" from Apple.

Ugh, wow.

Where's all the porn?

Peertube is fine.

It just needs more AI, the solution for all software and platform problems du jour

At first I thought this was an app to discover content on YouTube. Nope, it’s a platform.

It's the Fediverse version of YouTube using the ActivityPub protocol just like Mastodon and Lemmy.

Another Utube?

Deleting YouTube and replacing it with this. I hope it pans out!

This will never take off with that awful logo and mascot, and general silliness. With the "developed by Framasoft", like who the f* cares. It's noise, it looks awful, it repels potential users. Get some serious marketing person in.

All the words on the site should be explained IN A VIDEO. Every page should HAVE VIDEO ON IT.

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