PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

I am currently recording tutorial videos for an open source project. It's produced fully with Foss software (on Linux, obs, kdenlive) and about an open source project, so I wanted to host it with peertube (though YouTube might be used later on for its network effect, it was easier to publish with peertube as yt required an video of me and my ID). It's going fine until now. I don't host peertube myself though, I use an existing instance, and embed the videos in the website.

It was a really good experience, so I'll continue that way.

If you want to check out the videos: https://www.asfaload.com/videos/

It's a promising system, and I'd probably use it over a non-federated video hosting system if I wanted to run a video hosting site of some kind.

Yet it's currently hard to find a real usecase for it, since neither the content you want nor audience is there on PeerTube at the moment. If you're interested in open source software or data privacy you might find something here or there, but topics like gaming, music, sports or movies are very much underserved on the platform at the moment, and get almost no attention from viewers.

For example, I recently did a test search and found a let's play for the Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. The videos had something like 3-5 views on PeerTube, and about 10-15 times that on the creator's YouTube channel.

It's the same issue as on Mastodon and Lemmy to be honest, except exaggerated. If the majority of topics aren't well represented on these platforms, then the general public won't use them. And if the general public won't use them, then the creators that would bring the general public over won't use them either.

They need to figure out a way to encourage people outside of the 'hardcore tech nerd raised on Usenet' audience to use these platforms.

With these kind of projects I think there are unfortunately social factors as well as technical factors.

It's one thing to put a <video> element on a HTML page, it's quite another to make people actually watch it instead of their TikTok feed.

Does it have good content? I explored it a bit in the past, but was a bit underwhelmed with content I could find there.

Edit: in the past

Last time I tried it the federation was whitelist based, that is you could only follow people on instances added by the admin of your instance. This made content discovery difficult.

My recent experience with PeerTube was to click on the OpenMW released video and the video didn't load. Is that a regular occurrence on PeerTube?

Does it allow streaming?