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Is there any actual good content on PeerTube?

I feel like it would be best to proxy YouTube, or subscribe to paid indie channels like nebula, but without a user base and without ad revenue or subscription revenue I don’t know how quality content can come to PeerTube. Maybe I’m just missing the content but when I’ve checked it’s all very low quality, just random unedited webcam vblogs mostly.

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  • I'm old enough to remember a time before YouTube. When YouTube started, it wasn't about making money. There were no ads. No subscriptions. No sponsors. In the early days of YouTube it was just backyard videos. But it didn't take long for the connect to start getting good because it was the first of its kind, and everyone started using it. The problem now is, to convince people to use something else that, essentially does the same thing, but doesn't make people money. Good luck with that.

    Money corrupted YouTube. And now, the idea that people can be "content creators" for a living means that there will likely never be a mainstream, ad free, subscription free video platform, where people just make videos in their spare time. Peer tube is cool, but your not going to see high quality, curated content like you get on YouTube. An I think that's probably a good thing.

  • I've found better stuff by asking around for good channels, or learning that folks I follow have made a peertube channel, than I have by trying to use the interface. The discovery isn't especially good.

    There are only a couple decent channels I've watched but I get the honest impression there are more, they're just burried in stuff. Also depends what you're looking for. There are far more Foss youtubers who mirror over there and make decently high quality stuff than is available for a a lot of other genres of video

    There definitely isn't much, but I think there's potentially more than is immediately obvious

  • Am I allowed to throw my hat in the ring? I'm definitely No expert and I'm constantly learning, but I have vods of my live streams, gaming and tech, and I'm running Fireside Fedi a show about talking with different folks around the Fediverse. Let me know if I can post the link. I don't want to self promote of that's not what folks are looking for here.

    Aldo I would say that we're still very early in the Fediverse life cycle. Majority of these folks aren't paid or are a shoestring budget and solo with tiny teams. So if we want to see this experiment survive we have to do more than what we've done in the past.

    Talk to content creators you enjoy. Let them know you'd like to see their content on the Fediverse. Especially if you're a patreon member. Create content yourself. The Fediverse will succeed or fail based on our actions.

    The internet wasn't born in a day and a LOT of projects failed, because everyone took the easy centralized way. This time we have to fight for it to remove their claws.

  • without ad revenue or subscription revenue I don’t know how quality content can come to PeerTube.

    I saw a video where a YouTube channel broke down their income (I'll try and find it but there are probably similar ones out there) and the amount coming directly from ads was quite small. Other sources of money include:

    • Sponsorship
    • YouTube's built in subscription
    • External subscriptions like Patreon
    • Merchandise
    • Physical media deals

    Like Spotify, the cut from streaming isn't great but those on it can leverage their profile in other ways.

    The Fediverse still has a bit of a problem with monetisation but Ghost is working on joining and that is the equivalent of Substack with different subscription levels and I think most Fediverse services could do something similar. So Peertube could build in a "subscribe" button so people who enjoy your content could sign up to throw you a buck a month. Obviously a similar system could be added to the instance so you could donate to them, as hosting video is expensive.

    I do wonder if we need a FediPay/PayFed service that other services could just plug in, so you'd have a central account across your Fediverse identities - subscribing on Pixelfed could get you subscriber exclusive Peertube content.

    • Would be interesting if Liberapay could somehow be built into PeerTube. So you simply click the “Support” button and it asks how much and then another click. Done. The rest is handled by Liberapay, which have been set up earlier.

    • Although, looking around, this channel has a "support" button with PayPal and Patreon links. It's a little crude but works.

      For ease of use, it probably has to be a bit slicker and "one-click" but it's a start.

  • There's some good channels on TILVids and Kolektiva.media, and if you're looking for something specific, Sepiasearch is able to search across all peertube instances.

  • I haven't looked around in five years, but there was some interesting tech tinkering stuff on that diode instance. I'm assume people reuploading their own YouTube channels doesn't count, but there were some quality ones there even back then.

  • I'm currently on nebula, 7.2€ a month seems fair. A lot of their videos are high quality. AND THE BITRATE. Oh don't get me started.. It's way higher than whatever YouTube offers

68 comments