In 2018, a platform was launched to build an open, decentralized web for videos. In 2021, the network is still struggling to grow. I take a look into some of the problems with content discovery, along with some small suggestions for instance admins.
In 2018, a platform was launched to build an open, decentralized web for videos. In 2021, the network is still struggling to grow. I take a look into some of the problems with content discovery, along with some small suggestions for instance admins.
Good analysis and possible solutions. I was working on a video about the same topic but that seems a bit superfluous now. A couple of remarks.
IMO TILvids is the instance with the best content by far (I’m sorry). The reason is that the admin or host is very active both in attracting content creators and promoting content within the Fediverse. I’m not saying that instances like diode.zone, share.tube and spectra.video are bad. Not at all but the TILvids approach could be an example for other hosts (except for the part that they are not federating with other instances). Too many admins start a PeerTube instance and don’t seem to bother about it any more.
Also almost all (good) content creators on PeerTube are also on YT. This gives viewers little incentive to watch on PeerTube. If PeerTube hosts can somehow convince content creators to leave YT that would be a big win. But I’m afraid that currently only YT can make that happen since YT is it’s own biggest threat.
I’ve also noticed some improvement in content lately. A year ago almost everything on my instance trending page was old content but now I see recent content of proper quality.
It may also be a good idea to promote other use cases that stimulate spinning up PeerTube instances, or use an existing host for that. For instance there are so many initiatives, non-profits, public institutions that want to improve the tech landscape, yet exclusively dump their video content to YT, reference it in their pages and expose you to the trackers that involves. Their strategy should be to first publish to their own PeerTube and then afterwards to alternative channels. This also protects them from their channel taken down or censored for some reason or other, assuring no links get broken and they have an archive to fall back to.
I agree. The most prominent example is the Blender Foundation that has their own instance (https://video.blender.org/videos/local). Judging by the number of views people are having a hard time finding. Small wonder since I couldn’t find any link to it on the Blender Foundation website. A missed opportunity.