I had a similar experience. I like the idea of PeerTube, but not the execution. It needs significant improvements to make it more friendly for viewers to use as a video portal, rather than relying on subscribers and platforms like Mastodon to fill that gap.

Hey, Sean, thanks for inviting me to your community and replying to this post. I read through your blog article, and I’m glad we seem to be aligned with our goals here.

I’m still curious why the situation seems so different between the Lemmy and PeerTube instances. I’m not sure if the Lemmy admins are doing the same level of curation, but given the sheer amount of instances they connect to, I doubt it. So, I think they are using the same automated subscription feature you tried using. Yet, the content of even unfiltered new posts on any Lemmy instance are fairly high quality.

Comparing the stats between Lemmy and PeerTube has rather strange differences. I would have expected PeerTube to be still fairly low population, compared to Lemmy, with its recent Reddit migrations. But, no, PeerTube actually has a comparable user count to Lemmy. Other observations:

• PeerTube has 15x more posts than Lemmy, which contributes to the video quality problem
• The top list of servers on Lemmy are mostly the ones you’d expect, and are the ones interconnected with each other. The top list of PeerTube servers are… not. Like, truly some WTF ones in there.
• As a French-developed app, PeerTube’s top servers are mostly non-English. Given the obvious language barrier, that makes it difficult to interconnect without much better language filters.
• Lemmy has user voting and per-channel moderation. PeerTube has likes/dislikes, but it’s not immediately visible or usable, and the channel is owned by the same person uploading videos, so it’s not really moderated in the same way.

So, I guess the approach you’re taking seems to work with the tools you have available. But, I also hope the development team continues to hammer at this problem, because the PeerTube communities seem to be much more fractured.

YouTube pays its creators in peanuts. That’s why almost every YouTube video has a sponsor, or is thanking its Patreons, or both.

I have a full-paying job, so I don’t bother with monetization. I feel like monetization is a boat anchor designed to shackle creators with arcane unspoken rules and unfair copyright claims. (My Babylon 5 video is still technically marked as ineligible because I criticized TNT when talking about Crusade.) I specifically signed up for Google AdSense to turn off ads on my YouTube videos.

I think what PeerTube is doing by having a Support section is good enough. Donate to your instance or donate to your creators directly. It’s a helluva lot more money than YouTube would be paying.

DaVinci has its quirks and one or two things I wished it had. But, it is far more feature-rich than 95% of the population needs. And for the other 5%, there’s plenty of plugins.

One, it was intentional, because I wasn’t sure if there was going to be some lag trying to download the posts there. Two, the example link here doesn’t work because the videos are actually on !metastatistical.pt@spectra.video

Which ones? About 90% of the local videos list appear to be Linux channels.

Very cool. Population of videos takes a while, but at least the ability is there. I still wonder how practical it is.