[abcc8]

I'm wondering how they plan to get decent content. I just searched two of my interests, climbing and canoeing, and only a handful of uninteresting videos popped up. Are there specific topics that have engaging communities on the site?

[kevincox]

Just like YouTube most content is crap. Maybe the bigger problem is that searching on any one instance will only search a small subset of the content available.

But it is mostly a discovery problem. Once you have found a channel that you like it is easy to follow via RSS or ActivityPub. I would love to see discovery services built on top of PeerTube, it seems natural to separate the viewing infrastructure from the recommendation service.

[JoshCole]

Quality is a function of effort. Effort has a cost. The typical cost for high quality is high effort.

A content creator producing quality content has spent a lot of money in order to produce the high quality content. How much? Estimates from YouTube creators who are currently in the top creators get us numbers like $25,000-$1,000,000 per video. If they do not reliably make more than that much from trying to produce at that quality, they cannot survive while doing so.

So a larger problem than content discovery is that by default people producing quality content will die.

[tsgagnon]

Just like YouTube most content is crap.

There is a huge difference between "there is lots of crap content to wade through to get to the good content" and "I can't find content that isn't crap". My foray into Peertube over the years is that the latter is much closer than the former.

[booteille]

You can also use https://sepiasearch.org/ to find content across most instances.

[Koshkin]

> Just like YouTube most content is crap.

Well, most of everything in the Universe is “crap.” But, to each their own, and I find YouTube to be a treasure trove of educational content, among other things.

[rsynnott]

Based on the Mastodon experience (very quiet outside of small niches until mid last year) you'll probably have to wait til Youtube self-destructs.

[hgsgm]

It's different. Most people on Twitter are there to promote their ideas and themselves, not get paid. So free syndication is fine for them. Most popular/quality YouTube content is there because the creator wants to get paid, not to spread their ideas.

[rsynnott]

… I mean, I think 99.99% of people are on twitter to have fun, not promote themselves. (Also some of the remainder are on twitter specifically to moan about bad customer service; it’s surprising how many accounts you we apparently used solely for this).

Similarly, most people on YouTube are not expecting to strike it big with videos of their cat, or their hobby project, or whatever.

[skybrian]

Much of the content I watch on YouTube consists of obscure music videos where nobody is getting paid (or maybe they have a Patreon), but having someone else host your videos for free is still a pretty good deal.

[AstixAndBelix]

That's like asking how Signal plans on getting nice people to talk to. Peertube is just a self-hosted platform that allows for bandwidth-efficient video sharing, it's up to the single instance owners to care about publicizing their stuff.

[hgsgm]

Publicizing isn't the challenge. Monetizing is.

[jehb]

I understand your point, but it's worth pointing out that for many of us, "difficult to monetize" is a feature, not a bug.

[AstixAndBelix]

It's open source. You could put Google Adsense API calls in every nook and cranny of the platform if you like. Or any other ad provider, for the matter

[wkat4242]

But then what's the point anymore?

[AstixAndBelix]

The point of what? The point of PeerTube is to leverage the p2p nature of torrents to allow people to host video-sharing platforms for a fraction of the cost. If you want to monetize your instance then why not?

[wkat4242]

Ok I thought the idea was to avoid Google's espionage. Once you start monetizing you will get all that right back.

What's the point of self hosting if you still need Google?

[mariusor]

Why do you think that monetizing is more of a challenge when you own the platform that you publish on?