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

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[–] JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] bufalo1973@piefed.social 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Then the possible answer could be an easy way to have your own instance. And I mean easy as installing Firefox and configuring it. Then it would be less of a problem to have your own videos online. Maybe even from a cell phone.

[–] JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

That only solves maybe one of the listen problems. Whatever instance you have, you still have to get and serve media to other viewers and instances. The only problem that this solves is potentially CSAM spam/moderation.

Let's say it was a cell phone, it could handle maybe 2 concurrent transcoding streams before stalling out and people running into buffer times (which makes them leave).

If every person had their own tiny, low powered servers, then you could have max like 5 concurrent transcodes on any instance in all of peertube for old laptop or desktop computers. Assuming an average of people have a 100/30Mbps connection (which is true in much of the world outside of major cities, or even lower), then that would be absolutely maxing out at 10 concurrent viewers if everyone is running AV1 compatible clients (which is not the case) and more like 6 concurrent viewers per video at h.264. Those estimates are at low bitrates also, so low quality, absolutely no slowdown from your ISP, and absolutely no other general home or work-from-home use. In reality it would be closer to 3-6 concurrent viewers per instance (not even per video)

Still not even counting storage which is massive for anyone that creates more than a couple videos per year.

My point is just that it is an extremely difficult and costly problem that is not as simple as "more federation" like in text and image-based social media because of the nature of video, the internet, and viral video culture. Remember, federation replicates all viewed and subscribed content on the instance (so the home instance has to serve the data and both instances have to store it)

[–] bufalo1973@piefed.social 1 points 1 month ago

You do know Peertube is P2P, right?