What I’m about to say is probably dumb but… I think it wouldn’t be really possible for PeerTube to become a serious alternative to YouTube, because of decentralization.

Like, sure, that may be a good thing in certain cases - we’re literally on Lemmy - but I want to be able to access content from most PeerTube instances using one singular instance, which isn’t really possible with PeerTube. As a result, the majority of instances feel dead.

I think what we need is an open-source and centralized alternative to YouTube (if that doesn’t already exist), but I might be missing something.

It goes like this.

The world has been getting more and more uptight these past few decades. Things have to be THIS way, not THAT way. And corporate greed is what gets to decide what THIS way even is. So you HAVE TO watch your videos on youtube. Why? Because that’s what everybody does.

Then youtube starts making their own platform shit…but it still has the content and the userbase that nobody leaves. And everybody ignores the obvious. They want the glitz and razzle dazzle of a fun exciting new time, to the point everybody forgets the fundamental rules of life. We’re letting google dictate the internet, we’re letting amazon dictate shopping, we’re letting spotify dictate how we listen to music. All while ignoring the fundamental rules for living. And that rule is very very simple.

All you need to sell a product is a good quality product, at a reasonable price.

But corporations don’t want to supply that, and so they’ve trained us to instead be distracted with apps, and AI, and all these bells and whistles to day to day life that are quite frankly not needed. In the 1980s you could roll your car window down without the car being on. There was a little crank, and you just roll the window down by turning the crank. Then you had to have the car be on, so the motors could roll it down for you. Now we’re at a point where you’re encouraged to get on the cars app, and pay for features and subscriptions to do basic functions like heat the car seats, or use the radio.

And when it comes to video, google has trained people that youtube exists, and nothing else does. Well, the price of using youtube is free. So you’re not going to compete with youtube on price. So then you need to have a quality product. And in this case, the product are the videos. Top tier quality videos, that people want to watch, from creators that people have a fanbase for.

I haven’t watched anything on peertube yet, because I don’t see any creators I watch also using peertube. I’ll give you an example. If MXRPlays were to make Peertube their exclusive home, I would watch it in a second. Even if they made it their secondary home I would watch on peertube, just so that they could have some control over their own livelyhoods. They’re CONSTANTLY getting demonitized on youtube for showing something that’s just barely breaking a rule, or in some cases completely fictional and never happened. For example, one time they got a strike on their channel for “Showing or encouraging violence towards children”. They went back and watched the published video from their own hard drive (since the published one was deleted), and they never saw any child anywhere in their video. They never saw any violence in the video. They never saw anything that they could say was anything close to that. And youtube constantly goes after them. It seems like every 2 months they have a hiatus because youtube has another strike against them.

Or maybe Game Grumps. They don’t have any issues with youtube as far as I know…but if they were to just migrate all their content over to peertube, hundreds of thousands of people would also migrate with them.

I don’t know if Markiplier or JackSepticeye are still big names on youtube, but I imagine they would each bring a big audience. So that’s it. That’s the way you make peertube popular. You consistantly put out popular content, preferably exclusively, but at this point even non-exclusively would be good too if they mentioned it on their platforms.

Have more content, and make it easier to join and post content.

people see “alternative” and think “competition,” when they should consider it as “coexistance.” so either some youtubers would have to also upload to peertube as an additional option in case of site maintenance and other such trouble, or people on peertube could upload to youtube a week or so later and as part of their end credits/description/whatever, say that viewers can see this content one week early on peertube. It wouldn’t be THE fix for peertube, but more like the first step in a series of ever-increasing tweaks that could lead to this theoretical fix.

Of course, this is based on old practices such as “In theaters Friday, but you can see Thursday at Midnight” and other such strange ad campaigns, so the idea may not be entirely transferable. But that shouldn’t mean someone shouldn’t at least try that and see what happens.

Money for creators

What kinda of users do you want? Creators or eyeballs? The joinpeertube website doesn’t seem to cator to users wanting to just watch videos.

There’s a webpage for that https://ideas.joinpeertube.org/ Top 5 are:

1. Share channel administration between several users (103 votes)
2. “Audio only” video quality (91 votes)
3. Mobile phone client (91 votes)
4. Allow third parties to contribute bandwidth (89 votes)
5. Support multilingual videos (67 votes)

Feel free to vote or add more ideas.

Piracy.

Personally I have a very small yt channel that I haven’t uploaded to for months. I’m making stuff again, and my plan is to start uploading things to peertube early and then to yt, and I will tell people in my videos that they can find my videos early there.

I doubt I’ll make a huge difference from me personally, but I’m sure if more creators did this it would start to. There needs to be a bridge between the platforms.

The thing is, they’d have to do it for the sake of creating an alternative space, and not for like patreon benefits or something. I guess the peertube videos could be unlisted and there be links from patreon, and then they go public after the yt one does? I don’t even know if peertube has this functionality.

But again, this would have to be done because the creator believes in federation as a long term solution. It certainly would benefit creators personally to have a backup they’re more in charge of. The difficulty is they don’t seem to know it’s a viable option.

More peers.

Along with the other things posted here, it would be nice if peertube had a landing page or even if there was a “watch peertube now” button that led to a page showcasing current popular videos or something.

I clicked your link to peertube.org, then had to “Ask Sepia, our iconic cuttlefish” for a search term to get a list of videos, which after scrolling for a bit moved into lists and channels. A click of the “show more videos” button opened a new tab, and upon clicking a video to watch yet another tab opened to what seems like a fediverse instance for peertube?

For it to be a viable alternative, it needs to capture the way people watch and engage with youtube. If I am watching a video on youtube, there are suggestions for similar content below. If I go to the home page and scroll, either the most popular content will show if I am not signed in, or if I am, content related to videos I watch will be shown.

If I click to watch a video, it will open in the same window.

This is the sort of usability that will entice those new users to make the leap.

Content. I’m there for the content, not the platform.

Who is on PeerTube that we should be watching?

How often are watch-worthy videos on PeerTube posted on Lemmy?

Data streaming costs have to be better addressed. How does the bill get paid? It’s really that simply.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but since a lot of creators rely on youtube’s monetization, it might be necessary for peertube to impement some form of monetization too.

Make it easier to find an instance to sign up for?