Comment by CM30
3 hours ago
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.
Creators get 60% of youtube's ad revenue from youtube.
What does Peertube pay?
There is your answer. If people want good stuff, there needs to be money flowing to the source of it. The internet desperately needs to shed this "everything good is totally free" mindset, because what it actually manifests as is "I love taking without the requirement of giving".
Online video sharing doesn't have to exclusively mean professional "creators" who make content with hollywood-like budgets and expect massive returns. There are 100+ million accounts regularly uploading on Youtube and only around 2-3 million of them are in the partner program. The overwhelming majority get nothing.
The problem is that all of those accounts that don't earn money don't earn money because they get no views, because they make videos no one wants to watch. I don't know the exact statistics but a simple Google search says that 3% of videos on YouTube get 95% of the views. Remove the top 3% of creators, you remove 95% of views.
The top channels get all the views because they're the only ones making videos people want to watch, and they're monetized because making such content is really, really expensive.
The problem is that beyond creators with "hollywood-like budgets", even just making 1 good video a week is a full-time job. Most creators are not looking to get rich or get massive returns, they just want to survive and pay rent. Which means any channel of any value has to be able to generate at least few thousand dollars month.
I’d prefer 60% of millions and millions of viewers over 200% of the 8 people on peertube. Percentages aren’t that important here.
The matter of compensation or donation can be handled completely separately. Creators can be supported on other platforms like Liberapay, Patreon, Kofi, and many creators are supported that way.
If we are talking about clickbait and making money from getting unwanted ads in people's faces, no thank you we don't need more of that.
About as likely as opening a grocery store where people can pay through voluntary donations.
I'm a professional YouTuber. The problem with a "donation" system is that, unlike something like tweets or even blog posts which are either free or low-cost to produce, high-quality video is really. expensive. to produce. And people just will not pay if they don't have to.
A good 20-minute video can easily cost 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor to produce. That is, a whole week of labor. And that's not counting expensive equipment, software, licenses, etc.
I cannot run a business on people deciding to give me money for nothing out of the goodness of their heart. And I am still a one-person business, imagine having 5 full time employees. Even YouTubers with millions of subscribers and mature audiences with disposable income often struggle to clear like $5K/month on Patreon. Which, for a multi-person business, is simply not enough. Meanwhile, that same creator might be pulling $20K/month through ads and a similar amount through sponsorships.
YouTube is more similar to Netflix and HBO than Twitter or Reddit. Yes, in theory anyone can upload to YouTube, but the majority of content that is actually watched is at this point produced by full-time creators, some of which are solo self-employed while others are at this point running whole media production companies. And those are the people you need to make a service succeed.
No one donates money. It doesn't happen. Conversion rates across the board are around 1%. And then of those donations, most are the lowest tier/lowest increment.
It's the most annoying and persistent counterpoint brought up in these discussions, but it has no grounding in reality. The most popular contingent of viewers are ad-supported, close behind are ad-blocking, then the last 5% are your subscribers and donators.
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that works for people you regularly watch, but what about the people that put out the rare random great video. or a video on a topic when you're trying to fix something. People dont subscribe to those patreons, and thus those kind of creators rely on ad revenue.
Not really sure how people need to be explained this, but for whatever reason, this most basic of information is seemingly skipped over. Even if peertube wants to pay 65%, that's just a bigger percentage of nothing.
FOSS server software shouldn't be seen as a platform. It should be seen as software that can be used to create a platform. Federation makes it technically a platform but just barely. Mastodon is barely a platform - mastodon.social is, and kolektiva is a different one.
PeerTube is software you could use to make a video streaming website like Nebula.
To me the ideal use of PeerTube would be if studios adopted it as their publishing platform. Publish to their instance, syndicated globally. But, they are so hardcore on licensing that they will never adopt a platform that doesn't have complete control over where their media is distributed. The lack of a method for monetizing videos on PeerTube is also like the black mark for a video platform. But, the maintainers of PeerTube are ideologically opposed to monetization lest the toxin of advertisements taint the platform.
The legal landscape of media publishing is filled with antiquated deals from broadcast days for regional control. That has changed marginally with the adoption of streaming.
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/1586#issuecomm...
Lemmy is pretty ok actually. The lack of big user base is more of a feature than a bug.
I've found the same with Mastadon. It has a pre-eternal-September feel to it.
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.
I got banned from some community for pointing out how shitty Soviet Union was in WW2, but learned to avoid that instance from that. It's a "federation", so you get all kinds.
There's discussion on all topics these days.
Every instance is its own thing. You probably need to filter out hexbear/lemmygrad
That was one of the first instances lemmy.world. You can ignore that one because it's very drama-filled. Other Lemmy servers are more chill.
I’ve been a regular lemmy user for a few years now and it’s gotten better. The communists (and fascist) platforms have been de-federated from the major platforms. It’s still full of Reddit complaining from ex redditors. I don’t think that will change.
My login server is lemmy.world, so if you sign up with something else ymmv.
I agree this is a real issue, however hopefully a solution is that creators will upload their videos to both sites (ie YouTube is their primary but also upload to peertube at the same time) which is pretty easy to do and eventually a site like peer tube might reach that critical mass with enough content