PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

It's a promising system, and I'd probably use it over a non-federated video hosting system if I wanted to run a video hosting site of some kind.

Yet it's currently hard to find a real usecase for it, since neither the content you want nor audience is there on PeerTube at the moment. If you're interested in open source software or data privacy you might find something here or there, but topics like gaming, music, sports or movies are very much underserved on the platform at the moment, and get almost no attention from viewers.

For example, I recently did a test search and found a let's play for the Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. The videos had something like 3-5 views on PeerTube, and about 10-15 times that on the creator's YouTube channel.

It's the same issue as on Mastodon and Lemmy to be honest, except exaggerated. If the majority of topics aren't well represented on these platforms, then the general public won't use them. And if the general public won't use them, then the creators that would bring the general public over won't use them either.

They need to figure out a way to encourage people outside of the 'hardcore tech nerd raised on Usenet' audience to use these platforms.

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karmakurtisaani 22 minutes ago | parent [-]

Lemmy is pretty ok actually. The lack of big user base is more of a feature than a bug.

	▲	organsnyder 16 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I've found the same with Mastadon. It has a pre-eternal-September feel to it.
	▲	al_borland 11 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Has it normalized? When I first tried Lemmy it was mostly communists talking about communism. Then after some Reddit drama it seemed to be a bunch of people complaining about Reddit. I generally like smaller sites, but those topics weren’t exactly engaging for me.

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raphinou an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am currently recording tutorial videos for an open source project. It's produced fully with Foss software (on Linux, obs, kdenlive) and about an open source project, so I wanted to host it with peertube (though YouTube might be used later on for its network effect, it was easier to publish with peertube as yt required an video of me and my ID). It's going fine until now. I don't host peertube myself though, I use an existing instance, and embed the videos in the website.

It was a really good experience, so I'll continue that way.

If you want to check out the videos: https://www.asfaload.com/videos/

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pocksuppet an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

With these kind of projects I think there are unfortunately social factors that impact their success as well as technical factors.

It's one thing to put a <video> element on a HTML page, it's quite another to make people actually watch it instead of their TikTok feed.

	▲	manusartifex123 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		yeah video social media is way ahead with algorithms and content. I still think they need to exist and keep pushing for this idea

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hungryhobbit 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Stupid question: when people inevitably use this for pirate content, and the feds try to shut the service down ... what's the plan?

	▲	dewey 16 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Someone is still hosting the content and paying for resources just like with every other service distributed or not so it doesn't really add anything new to the equation.
	▲	rpgbr 12 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The feds will go after the instance admin that is sharing pirate content.

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GodelNumbering 11 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Youtube has been incredibly frustrating for many many reasons and is evidently evil in many axes now. We really need competition in video hosting.

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matt_lo 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Random idea…

1. Chunk one inside a YT video 2. Chunk two inside a TikTok video 3. Chunk three on an X thread

And then just post the manifest somewhere that can be read by a client, that then pulls the data in (video, doc, anything)

Obv, not meant for speed or good UX, but if we’re going down the route of decentralization, we can probably leverage social platforms to host chunks of data.

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orphereus an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Does it have good content? I explored it a bit in the past, but was a bit underwhelmed with content I could find there.

Edit: in the past

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RobotToaster an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Last time I tried it the federation was whitelist based, that is you could only follow people on instances added by the admin of your instance. This made content discovery difficult.

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jesse_dot_id 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I like the idea of all of these federated services but why does the UX always feel like an afterthought when it is the most important factor for adoption?

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cosmic_cheese 38 minutes ago | parent [-]

Same reason why the Linux desktop often suffers on the UX/UX front: people naturally drawn to these projects tend to lean heavily technical, and highly technical circles have a bad habit of driving out less technical contributors through devaluation of their work and lack of agency within the project among other issues.

That sort of work also tends to be less well-compensated than that of SWEs which makes it more important to be paid for work (which most FOSS project cannot do).

	▲	StableAlkyne 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		UX work is often also a lot heavier and more subjective than the plumbing. I might open a pull request to support some new video code, and that might only require a few dozen lines over a few files. That's easy to review, and it either works or it doesn't. Worst case they say "our convention is to register codecs as a subclass of X class, but you subclassed Y class" or something equally straightforward. Let's say instead I wanted to change the workflow to register an account. Now I'm changing a bunch of JavaScript, CSS, templates, I'm adding pages, and I also need to update the backend. Even if someone is that into frontend work, it might take forever to even get reviewed by the maintainers because it's a massive PR. Plus, now we've moved into subjectivity land: "I'm used to the old workflow," (because they designed it) "The last one was really easy" (for an engineer), "I think we should focus on the backend before we work on the UI," "I don't like this font because the license isn't free as in freedom" etc. Even if you just mockup something on Figma or whatever, unless you're a maintainer it's probably going to just get ignored as a feature request. Because there's also the psychological aspect of basically being told that the UI you wrote is implicitly bad, if you're the maintainer reviewing the mockup.

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Raed667 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It is unfortunate that in french « peer » reads as « pire » which translates to « worse-tube »

	▲	dewey 13 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's developed by a french company, so that confusion can't be that critical.
	▲	gausswho 40 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Snarky lemma: In French, is the trend of things going worse to worse?

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zuzululu an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

is it bulletproof ? I don't think peertube has fixed that massive legal liability to the "seeders"

same situation that bitorrent found itself in

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thinkingtoilet an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My recent experience with PeerTube was to click on the OpenMW released video and the video didn't load. Is that a regular occurrence on PeerTube?

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ekjhgkejhgk 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Does it allow streaming?

	▲	serendipty01 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Docs: https://docs.joinpeertube.org/use/create-upload-video#publis... https://docs.joinpeertube.org/admin/configuration#live-strea...
	▲	mxuribe 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I'm not affiliated with peertube...but yes it does enable/support streaming: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube#video-streaming-even-...
	▲	polonbike 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Yes. But a click on the link will provide a more detailed answer.
	▲	EGreg 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This does: https://safebots.github.io/Safecloud I designed it in order to stream videos and get paid without worrying about getting deplatformed Two weeks ago it was covered in a respected security publication: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/06/19/safecloud-browser... It's coming out soon, but if you're adventurous, you can try it on GitHub already. Edit: I posted it on HN right now as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48763565