Fediverse

Unskippable one-hour long ads. 👌

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.

Multiple audio tracks for different languages.

Automatic subtitles. I know... Not the easiest functionality to develop but I do miss it from Youtube.

Better algorithm and a better incentive to post content (im not sure what, maybe donations)

Improve cross instance search and for more creators to move from other platforms

I thought about uploading videos, but I could never figure out how.

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 and search. Make it easier for content creators and instance runners to monetize. Make it easier to script your own feed/recommendations.

All of the above is true for all software on the fediverse. But monetization especially for PeerTube. Pay to watch, donations and ads should all be options in the official implementation. Because of the high cost of running a large high bandwidth instance (if that wasn't obvious).

Seems like the only ones who really benefit from PeerTube right now are right-wing extremists. The only large Swedish instances are far-right. And they are big because of content supply and demand.

Better federation with eachother, a way for monetisation.

What's peer tube?

I tried to sign up for an account, I was going to use it to create long form content, so I picked some tags (which definitely leave out too many broad categories to be particularly useful, and is thus incredibly limiting) that seemed somewhat related to what I wanted to do.

I then looked through the instance list based on those tags, and tried to find one that fit.. and I couldn’t, because all of them had some caveat or blurb or whatever that made me go “nope, probably not here..”

The problem is that I had to click through multiple pages to hit those caveats in the instance rules/description during the signup process, and I had to do it for every one I wanted to check out. They weren’t at all listed on the main page, and they probably should be, maybe under a popup tooltip sort of button. As it stands it was a huge waste of time, and I gave up, and lost interest in having a channel. Maybe I’ll browse it if it ever picks up, but frankly the process of signing up to be a content creator is far too onerous.

Maybe that’s a problem with the instance owners and how they have things set up, maybe with the way the whole platform works, I don’t really know. It was pretty consistent though, so I assume it’s a platform problem.

Some kind of Monetary-support system

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 :/

The ability to post a video to multiple co-authors' channels.

Ads. If I could press a button and inject 30 second ads into videos that would cover the cost of the server, I'd run an instance today and start mirroring a fuckoad of content from YouTube

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

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. 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.