I enjoy PeerTube for what it is. But we have to talk about how PeerTube is I would say the one open source app that is getting the least amount of new users

So wanted to bring up some points on how we can improve it in some ways:

  • It is too complex with not enough up to date guides and videos on how to set it up for most people
  • Need new open source frontend client mobile apps to make it simpler to sign up, sign in, & watch videos/channels on it
  • The website for sign up is not very user-friendly and like a semi-maze for people who are new

Anything else you would like to add or say about PeerTube in general?

It’s a phenomenal project and backend will of course stay the same but it needs a better pipeline of people and creators to it

Also check out post by another person below mine about Keep Android Open

  • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
    4·
    8 hours ago

    Just a few thoughts as to why it hasn’t taken off:

    Video is multiple orders of magnitude more difficult and expensive to serve than text or even audio.

    • Your server needs a great upload speed which is not achievable for on-site home servers for most people in the world

    • Your server has to have at least one dedicated encoding GPU (no raspberry pis or Intel nucs if you want any meaningful traffic)

    • Your server has to have a ton of storage, especially if you allow 4k content to be uploaded, which while much cheaper than before, is still expensive. Here in the EU, reliable storage is around 300€/12TB for drives, which fills up very fast with 4k videos or if you try to store different resolutions to reduce transcoded loads.

    • Letting random people upload video onto your instance is significantly harder to moderate than text or photos. Like think of the CSAM spam that was on Lemmy when it started in taking many new users…

    • The power usage (and bill) of the server will also be much higher than without peertube because of constant transcoding

    The cost, both financial and server taxation-wise is simply too great for me, and many others to setup a peertube instance.

    Regardless of how easy it is for people to create on peertube, someone has to bear the cost of hosting it. That is cheap-ish for Lemmy or mastodon, but there is a reason YouTube was a loss leader for a long time for google, and many streaming services restrict 4k video.

    That isn’t even getting into compensation for the content makers.