Search.

If I go to youtube, and I search for content, it's either there, or it's not.

If I go to peertube, I need to then exit the site, search on AN UNRELATED 3RD PARTY SITE, and then I can get results from more than the local instance.

If I go to an instance that's nothing but stamp collecting, the trending videos are going to be about stamp collecting. That doesn't mean all of peertube is talking about stamp collecting. I'm just on the wrong instance, and the site itself is fractured and borderline useless.

Now you can include a feature to tell peertube that you DO want to see trending, local only, as a stamp collector, on a stamp collecting instance, that would be really useful! But also, if I don't give a fuck about stamps, as mkst people don't, the default should be peertube wide trending across ALL instances. I mean, if I don't care about stamps I'm on the wrong instance to begin with, but that's besides the point.

I feel like peertube should be each instance is a different type of content. Want to watch guys go fishing? There's an instance just for that. With multiple different channels, each from different people, each covering different fishing topics. But your whole life isn't just one topic. So you go to a different instance, one for automobiles, and you follow the channels that post videos about your car. Then you go to a cooking instance, and find a channel that's just a guy showing you how to bake pies and cakes while running from the police.

Your searches, will 99% of the time not find the most relevant results if we seperate the content based on instance. So the search as is, is really limited and fragmented to have to go to another site, search, find the video, come back to peertube, log in, go to the video directly, and THEN subscribe to the content.

See how jarring that is, compared to youtube? Search, click, play/subscribe. All in 10 seconds.

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.

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

I tried it, but gave up months ago. Decentralization is what we're all about, but without a centralized index of what's available, finding videos on PeerTube is more work than watching them is worth.

The biggest thing is content and discoverability.

Any good channel recommendations?

It would be nice if there was an easy and straightforward way for instances to create their own shared indexes. There's a feature for this in PeerTube, which I guess is supposed to act like instance following + a shared search catalogue. It would be handy to know how to easily make sort of the federation equivalent of a webring.

The devs are also working on a mobile app, which I think is something the platform is sorely missing.

Maybe Librepay integration of some sort could help. Maybe that platform should be a little more ambitious and offer server operators and it's users in the fediverse better pricing.

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

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.

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

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 :/

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

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.

A good app that feels native

A short video feature that let me browse like tiktok tbh. I know people think short videos are bad but blender tutorials, recipe videos, leftist information are great on tiktok because theyre forced to get straight to the point without fluff like youtube videos that purposely extend the video so you watch more ads.

Better federation with eachother, a way for monetisation.

Multiple audio tracks for different languages.

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

Import/export subscriptions

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.

• Featured creators on homepage (by admin)
• opt-out federation
• discovery algorithm that doesn't suggest 3 year old videos as "trending"
• A mobile app that works

Unskippable one-hour long ads. 👌

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