The fascinating thing about PeerTube right now is that the frontend experience actually seems to be best on other services. This is primarily because discoverability between instances is fairly poor due to both federation mechanics and due to the nature of bootstrapping social. Because Lemmy and Mastodon feature their own human driven mechanisms for content discovery this problem is largely solved so long as you are browsing through another platform (the same mechanisms do not seem to transfer well to a youtube like frontend, although nobody has tried yet). Comments made on Lemmy and Mastodon will also federate back to PeerTube so you’re not segregated based on what service you follow from.
Check out some popular channels:
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
Tips:
- All of the above are channels. On Lemmy you can only subscribe to channels while on Mastodon you can subscribe to both channels and users. This is important as some videos get federated under the channels and some under the users. I believe this is up to the individual creator.
- Whitelist only is still fairly popular among PeerTube instances so you may not be able to access all creators from your Lemmy instance.
- Federation does not backfill so if the channels appear blank don’t panic. It will fill in with future videos.
- If you follow these channels from Mastodon and then put them in a list you have a feed that is analogous to Youtube’s subscribed page.
- Major advantage to following from Mastodon in these early days is it puts you in a better position to help these channels grow, If the boost button is right there things are a lot more likely to gain traction.
I’m using a lemmy app on my phone. When I click the above links I get a ‘format error’. If I put the addresses into search I just get this post and a few similar posts, not any peertube content.
Unfortunately a lot of mobile apps are still struggling with Lemmy URLs, not sure why. But these are working from lemmy.ml, just checked on desktop. Maybe you can log in to the mobile browser version and get them to work that way?
I do wish app developers would make this one a priority!
My particular one is Liftoff. Issue filed!
Ah yes I’m on Liftoff too, I know the dev had to take some time out due to having newborn twins, which, to be fair IS probably a higher priority than fixing bugs with links. But it would still be nice! 😆