[Animats]

Right. They even have a nice picture of their SepiaSearch web page, with a picture of the search box. But is it a live search box? No. I have videos on PeerTube, and I never heard of SepiaSearch.

PeerTube is a good way to host videos, but nobody will discover them from PeerTube. I put technical videos there, which are referenced in other forums. They play fine. Here's one.[1] I get maybe a hundred plays. I just view PeerTube as something like imgBB, a place to host content that you can't store on a forum that doesn't handle images. Like HN.

PeerTube should be used more like WordPress - something lots of sites run for their own videos. What PeerTube does is offload playout to the browsers of others watching the same video at the same time. This allows modest streaming servers to, at least in theory, serve large numbers of users. I don't think any PeerTube video has gone viral enough to test that scaling.

Note that this is not like BitTorrent. It's just caching and streaming, not copy distribution. There's one master copy, and peers only host copies while playing.

[1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/349011f0-4029-4818-bc41-40fab2...

[Tmpod]

I was under the impression that you could permanently "seed" videos for others, even if you're not the origin instance, through WebTorrent or something along those lines. Fuzzy memory tho

[Animats]

I don't think so. There's no permanently running client program. The client side is all in the browser.