Comment by ndriscoll
3 hours ago
This is like complaining that when you go to nginx.org, you aren't shown a bunch of websites or a search box to discover anything, so this web thing is garbage UX compared to the Facebook app. There's no "the federation". There are various sites that run peertube, some of which are federated with each other. Others have nothing to do with each other. Some are probably completely private.
An example of federation might be that a bunch of universities run their own instances where they post colloquia, and they federate with each other to make it easy to subscribe to departments in your field from another university, or to comment on their videos. IMO state universities should be posting their material online like this, and on a platform that does not require the public to watch ads (something fundamentally against the mission of an educational institution), or agree to some random company's terms.
That's fine if that's your goal, but don't expect anyone to adopt it then. 99% of people aren't flocking to video platforms for ideological nor technical reasons.
I agree with you, but I was speaking to PeerTube's own claim that it is an alternative to YouTube, rather than the narrow use case you're describing. For the vast majority of the people on the planet, it is not an alternative to YouTube because it's very difficult to discover content. When I go to YouTube, I can find videos immediately. If I want to find videos via PeerTube, it's a journey. It's the same journey that has shifted the majority of Internet users away from forums to aggregators. PeerTube feels like a bygone way to do things.