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:
- Spectra.video
- TILvids (basically non-existent)
- Neat.tube
- Video.blender.org
- BassPistol
- Diode.zone
- FTV
- PeerTube.io
- Review.PeerTube.biz
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?
I think you're totally right. The big difference is that while for a lemmy instance to show you other instances content under 'All' only one other user from your instance needs to subscribe to it and you will be exposed to it. On PeerTube if another user subscribes you will never know about that instance because the server admin needs to manually federate with that instance.
But because there is no good differentiation between 'All' and 'Local' many admins - including me - just don't federate with other instances automatically. What made it worse - I'm not sure if it got better over time - was that if you automatically federated then there would be naked people without NSFW at the top of every discovery, there would be antivax, nazis, all the fringe groups which weren't allowed on YouTube anymore. That would make it impossible to find the local videos and your instance would look like it's run by nazis and would offer bad quality porn.
I'm not sure I understand the difference between those problems on PeerTube vs. Lemmy. Lemmy NSFW instances exist, especially since the Reddit NSFW community established a foothold, and they are all properly separated into their own groups and instances. Lemmy admins maintain their own block lists (see the bottom of the instance lists linked) to get rid of the antivax/nazi nonsense, which usually isn't that large, compared to the thousand or so instances they connect to.
Heck, even Lemmy.film and others have links to the porn/NSFW instances, so somehow they are maintaining a relationship to keep things clean on the non-NSFW side.
This is just my observation, but I think it's because the communities on PeerTube decided to just give up on controlling moderation of instances (perhaps because the instances were popping up like whack a mole?)
So they opted instead to just give up on the idea of any federation on the PeerTube branch of fedi, and now we have the isolated issue of today...