[jchw]

I think that's mainly because PeerTube itself is software, not a platform. It'd be like complaining "The Thunderbird website doesn't show me how to get an e-mail account."

Granted, they can and should do a bit better here by giving people who searched "PeerTube" some directions to go in (including, clearly, adding app downloads.) That said, it's somewhat understandable that it's not a focus: I reckon 9 times out of 10 when someone finds PeerTube in the wild, it's from a PeerTube instance itself. Besides that, having a specific place to go defeats the purpose of federation somewhat.

[wat10000]

This is more like complaining that the Thunderbird web site doesn’t have links to download Thunderbird.

[jchw]

Thunderbird is a desktop app. PeerTube is software you install on a server.

The app is just a client.

[wat10000]

I don’t understand. Thunderbird makes a client and has a prominent download link for it. Peertube makes a client and has no download link.

[jchw]

Thunderbird is a client, and that's all it is. PeerTube is a lot of things, and that makes it hard to have a single coherent landing page. I still agree with putting the damn button on there realistically (please note that I already agree to that in my first comment, and no, I didn't edit it in after the fact), but if anything I think they need more than one landing page in either case.

[immibis]

That's why software loses to platforms. Platforms are convenient, and software isn't. Businesses know this, but open source developers don't really, and they don't have money to commit to running platforms anyway. You couldn't make a new email today with any degree of popularity - and many attempts were made, from XMPP to Matrix to the Fediverse.

[jchw]

The thing that leads to confusion is thinking about things in terms of winning or losing, but open source devs rarely actually care about what's most successful in the market. At best, success in the market is merely a means to an end for open source developers. The real goal of most open source developers is merely to produce the software.

For some things, this actually is okay. Like for example, market-wise, Discord has dominated online chat. Does anyone still using XMPP or IRC care? Nope, because as long as there are networks to chat on and more than one person the network works. At worst, the main pain felt by market dominance is that the rooms may be smaller than they could be since people are less wont to join. But in practice, the quantity often isn't that big of a problem. I had some of my best conversations and met people I still know today in an IRC chat that never had more than 50 users online at any time and was inactive most hours of most days.

The market can do whatever it wants as far as I am concerned.

[immibis]

I thought the point of free software was to change the world somehow, not merely to prevent writing software from becoming illegal.

[jchw]

Free Software as a movement started by Richard Stallman and the FSF has inherent political and ideological goals.

Open Source was coined to contrast with this, and this term was endorsed by a lot of people working on open source software at that time, including Linus Torvalds.

So, the goal of open source software is not to change the world. The goal of open source software is to produce software that is open source. (The goals of "free software" are out of scope.)

[immibis]

That's a worthless goal if not in service to something else.

[jchw]

Most things are worthless if not in service of something else. If you follow this line of thinking all the way to the end, then you just come to the useless conclusion that all life and everything we do is meaningless.

edit: This is not a very good response, it leaves too much unsaid. I'm basically just trying to conclude that most open source developers out there, at the very least, the long tail of them, are just writing code and working on things chiefly because they want to do so, with no particular expectations of anything in return. That doesn't mean they have zero goals or aspirations, but they are not the primary reason to do the work. And even without starting with such a goal, it doesn't mean nothing can be achieved, as one can see from projects like Linux, Krita, OBS and so forth. Clearly people don't write software in a vacuum for literally no reason at all, but OTOH whereas commercial software almost certainly has the explicit goal of "succeeding in the marketplace", there is no real inherent goal for open source software, and many people work on it without a stronger reason than "Because I want to."

[_ache_]

Like, "joinpeertube" ? The first result if I type "Peertube" on Google (I'm french, it may be different in USA).

https://joinpeertube.org/en_US

[jchw]

Checking again, I've made a realization: that's the same landing page. Which does actually have the operative information on it, but it's acting half as a landing page for what PeerTube is and half as a call-to-action for where to go. I think this is a bit disorienting: the two different purposes should be split into different pages and possibly even different websites in my opinion. It'd be ideal if what you got as a user was a couple sentences explaining what PeerTube is and then just an interface to find an instance.

I also think a big CTA for "Download App" would be a good addition to the credit of the root comment of this thread.

[tpoacher]

The top of the page has "What is Peertube • Browse Content • Upload video"

I mean, it could be a bit more visible, I guess, but it's not exactly invisible.

I get the point that maybe have browse content as the main page ... but given that the point of peertube is the network not the videoclient, the current page also makes sense to me.