1y ago

PeerTube has a federation problem

With the mass migrations of Reddit users to Lemmy/Kbin, and Twitter now speedrunning its own mass extinction, it seems me that the eventual future of social media is de-centralized. I like how Lemmy is slowing turning out, even if it still has some work to do and growing pains to fix up. It's still able to inform me of all of the current events I want and has a large enough community that it doesn't feel empty.

I think a similar path will present itself for a de-centralized video media platform like PeerTube, since YouTube will eventually piss off enough of its users to cause a similar kind of exodus. Wanting to jump in on the concept at an early stage, I signed up for a channel on spectra.video and uploaded my video collection there.

But, I don't really see the same kind of community and usefulness on PeerTube. I check out the Discover and Trending pages, and it just seems like the same set of videos, really. There's not enough content to keep PeerTube from looking like a small indie project. I can click on Recently Added and it is usually other people just dumping their channel collections, instead of recent adds of new videos. It's very easy to scroll down and find videos from months ago.

After poking around on various other PeerTube sites, I think I found the real problem with the platform: Federation.

For example, let's look at how federated Lemmy's community is:

All interconnected with hundreds and hundreds (if not thousands) of other instances. If you sign up for one Lemmy account, you have little risk in not being able to access a remote community elsewhere. It feels like a federated community, where everything is de-centralized, but communication is linked everywhere. I can even link to my own video channel from Lemmy.

Now, look at PeerTube's instance lists, based on what I've seen on the Join PeerTube site:

It's all so bare. At most, 80-90 instances for some sites. I can't see a lot of other instances' videos, and they can't see mine. Not from here or here or here or here or here or here or here or here.

It makes PeerTube a large collection of small silos, instead of a real federated community. People want to be able to sign on to an instance and find the content they want without having to jump through all of these different instances. Subscription feeds rely on having a unified list from many different instances. The technology has a lot of potential, but the PeerTube community is not nearly as organized as the rest of the Fediverse.

This sounds like a somewhat simple problem to solve, but I'm not sure what other kind of technological hurdles exist. How did the Lemmy community solve it?

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71 comments

Hi, so I run Spectra, and would like to weigh in.
I wrote this piece a few years back about the content situation on PeerTube.
TL;DR, PeerTube has a significant problem with spam. I'm not just talking about spammy comments, although it has those, too. No, I'm talking about the videos. For example: there's an option within PeerTube that, when enabled, basically just automatically subscribes to every server that subscribes to yours. I let that setting run for a while, and connected to maybe a hundred random instances over time.
It was all garbage. Either you get far-right propaganda videos, actual nazi videos, or super random weird stuff of little value. Want a video in Hindi for a restaurant with a two-second video featuring a French TV commercial transcribed from VHS? How about that, mixed with thousands of random snippets of media that you will never care about or relate to?
A lot of PeerTube admins kind of informally got together and said: you know what, this is crap, no one is ever going to enjoy this. So, we connected our communities together. We have to do our research on which servers are good, and which ones just serve up bullshit. Good community stewardship, in this case, requires us to do our homework on which servers are worth following. Instead of following as many servers as possible, we're more inclined to check and see if the place is putting out original stuff, has decent guidelines, and isn't spouting hateful crap everywhere. To build community organically, we have to do so with intention.
The reason that you're not seeing your videos in any of the places you've listed is because their servers don't follow ours. This doesn't mean that your videos cannot be seen through federation - it's just that, in any of those places, no one is subscribed to you, and that server isn't subscribed to our server. So, your channel and videos aren't likely to show up there, unless somebody actively chooses to subscribe to you.
I agree that PeerTube is seriously lacking in some kind of Community Discovery feature, and would be greatly enhanced by it.
- Hey, Sean, thanks for inviting me to your community and replying to this post. I read through your blog article, and I'm glad we seem to be aligned with our goals here.
  I'm still curious why the situation seems so different between the Lemmy and PeerTube instances. I'm not sure if the Lemmy admins are doing the same level of curation, but given the sheer amount of instances they connect to, I doubt it. So, I think they are using the same automated subscription feature you tried using. Yet, the content of even unfiltered new posts on any Lemmy instance are fairly high quality.
  Comparing the stats between Lemmy and PeerTube has rather strange differences. I would have expected PeerTube to be still fairly low population, compared to Lemmy, with its recent Reddit migrations. But, no, PeerTube actually has a comparable user count to Lemmy. Other observations:
  PeerTube has 15x more posts than Lemmy, which contributes to the video quality problem
  The top list of servers on Lemmy are mostly the ones you'd expect, and are the ones interconnected with each other. The top list of PeerTube servers are... not. Like, truly some WTF ones in there.
  As a French-developed app, PeerTube's top servers are mostly non-English. Given the obvious language barrier, that makes it difficult to interconnect without much better language filters.
  Lemmy has user voting and per-channel moderation. PeerTube has likes/dislikes, but it's not immediately visible or usable, and the channel is owned by the same person uploading videos, so it's not really moderated in the same way.
  So, I guess the approach you're taking seems to work with the tools you have available. But, I also hope the development team continues to hammer at this problem, because the PeerTube communities seem to be much more fractured.
  
  On that, we agree. While what we have been Spectra and Diode and the handful between us is...fairly decent? Discovery still absolutely sucks.
  I think one thing that works well for Lemmy is in how its communities are structured. Like this one! A bunch of servers all connect to the same space, and people passing through trade thoughts, questions, and bits of news.
  I feel like part of the problem is that PeerTube has no such communal structure. You just kind of... stumble around and try to watch videos and hope it's interesting. In fact, in the past, people shared their videos through Reddit communities like /r/PeerTubeVideos. It's like we had to bootstrap it with something else.
  Maybe we should do the same with Lemmy in the interim?
  
  It seems it has a similar struggle mastodon has. The best way to find interesting posts there are boost from your bubble and hashtags. Peertube has tags too, but it doesn’t seem it can follow/subscribe to them like mastodon can.

71 comments