[HN Gopher] PeerTube mobile app: discover videos while caring fo...
___________________________________________________________________
PeerTube mobile app: discover videos while caring for your
attention
Android:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.framasoft....
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/fr/app/peertube/id6737834858 Repo:
https://framagit.org/framasoft/peertube/mobile-application
Author : toomuchtodo
Score : 423 points
Date : 2024-12-11 15:09 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (joinpeertube.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (joinpeertube.org)
| facialwipe wrote:
| At first I thought this was an app to discover content on
| YouTube. Nope, it's a platform.
| thal3s wrote:
| It's the Fediverse version of YouTube using the ActivityPub
| protocol just like Mastodon and Lemmy.
| kuu wrote:
| Not a single button to download the app on the landing page.
|
| A lot of info about the company who made it, a lot of info about
| how bad other actors are, and a lot about requesting funding, but
| not a single video, neither how to explore the platform or
| download anything.
|
| I guess this is not made for users...
| weberer wrote:
| There are buttons for the Play Store and App Store halfway
| down. Its under the heading: "A very first build, limited by
| (play & i) stores"
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| That's 2/3rds down a very long page. Most people won't go
| down that far unless they're quite interested in the
| material.
| aloisdg wrote:
| You wont install an app if you are not interested in the
| material
| Goronmon wrote:
| None of the apps I've installed in the past are because I
| was invested in the developer's marketing materials.
| atomicfiredoll wrote:
| That's an assumption and not necessarily true. Some users
| may read it, some may skim, some may come to the page
| already convinced. For those latter groups, having a fast
| lane/shortcut call-to-action visible someplace like the
| top gives them a way to get started before they get
| overwhelmed/distracted and potentially leave.
| herval wrote:
| that's the kind of attitude that makes otherwise
| successful apps/content/etc created by stiff engineer
| minds to never experience any success: "they didn't want
| it anyway", when people literally didn't _understand_
| what you were trying to sell.
| wat10000 wrote:
| But not on https://joinpeertube.org/, which seems pretty
| important.
| _ache_ wrote:
| There is another one at the end.
| derekdahmer wrote:
| Even after reading this comment I went searching for the
| button and it took a while to find it.
|
| And the homepage says in bold letters "The PeerTube mobile
| app for Android & iOS is out!" but it's not a link! There's a
| link further down but it goes to this article where you then
| have to scroll.
|
| Not every site has to be super conversion optimized but it's
| just common sense to put a CTA at the head of an
| announcement. joinmastodon.org gets it!
| aloisdg wrote:
| There is one mid page and one at the bottom. Did you open the
| link?
| herval wrote:
| it's a really confusing page. I couldn't find it either...
| ncr100 wrote:
| Makes me think about dopamine, seriously.
|
| Many of the comments here on hacker News are talking about
| how like difficult it is to find a linked download to get
| the video so that you can watch the video so that you can
| go lull and share meme videos about cats playing pianos and
| what not. Dopamine junkies talk like this.
|
| So perhaps there's a need for a dopamine specialist, or a
| dopamine hit specialty in software development and product
| management?
|
| Certainly marketing exists but marketing has become such a
| fuzzy wuzzy taboo subject and I think you know we'd like to
| just inject it all straight into our veins ..
|
| .. so how about making a role in open source projects
| called the Dopamine Optimizer?
|
| That way we could celebrate the intention, making a
| delicious physically resonant software tool? Functionality
| is a joy, for sure, there's an intellectual Joy to
| programming, yes, but social acceptance and the delight
| that comes from having our brain glands squirt out dopamine
| is an underappreciated aspect of I think the work that a
| lot of us may do.
| herval wrote:
| this is basic design 101. Well designed content works
| better than badly designed content. If you want someone
| to read your page and find the button, the onus of making
| it readable is on you. And there's plenty of pretty basic
| techniques to achieve that. No need to be a "dopamine
| specialist".
| jchw wrote:
| 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.
| _ache_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| wat10000 wrote:
| This is more like complaining that the Thunderbird web site
| doesn't have links to download Thunderbird.
| jchw wrote:
| Thunderbird is a desktop app. PeerTube is software you
| install on a server.
|
| The app is just a client.
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I thought the point of free software was to change the
| world somehow, not merely to prevent writing software
| from becoming illegal.
| jchw wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That's a worthless goal if not in service to something
| else.
| jchw wrote:
| 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."
| jillyboel wrote:
| It's a blogpost about the release of their app for peertube. If
| you don't know what peertube is, just check their homepage...?
| It's been around for a while.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| Even worse, there's no link to the app on the home page.
| jeffbee wrote:
| That is the fediverse disease. Boosters seem to believe that
| people care about all this inside baseball stuff, when in fact
| it is repulsive to normal people.
| catapart wrote:
| I've used PeerTube for years and it has always baffled me how
| laughably bad its user experience is. Literally so bad that
| I've never told someone about it without them immediately just
| asking me stuff instead of getting the information - or even
| better: videos that the person wanted to see - from the
| website(s).
|
| Maybe the mobile client is a step in the right direction? I can
| hope! But the fact that I have to tell people "okay, so
| sepiasearch is kind of like the youtube front page...ish?" is
| already just infinitely dumb. Make a damn client whose name
| indicates, in some way, that it's a video website. And then
| shows some damn videos on the front page. Randomize them if you
| really can't stand "algorithms", but honestly, just put some
| videos on a page with "videos" in the url (or something
| similar), and you can cut down on most of the confusion I've
| seen.
|
| Engineers get so lost up their own asses about this stuff
| because they can't see that UX is entirely divorced from
| functional processes. The user needs to do thing X, and the
| computers can only provide processes Y, Z, etc; forcing the
| user to reconcile with Y and Z just because they want X is the
| definition of "programmer design". It's refusing to engage with
| the very real ways in which users understand and interact with
| services, for whatever sake the engineers want to make up ("I
| don't like to obfuscate what is happening", "this is not
| complicated. users should be able to understand", "it would
| waste resources to provide a more streamlined experience", etc.
| These are all terrible reasons to not bridge the interaction
| gap between developers and users). Bluesky is my favorite
| example of people abstracting away the complications of this
| stuff. Yes, they had to centralize some parts to start with,
| yes they had to compromise on features - but the damn thing is
| instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with microblog social
| media. That's all peertube has had to do for years now, and
| they have just staunchly refused to do it.
|
| Like I said, hopefully the mobile app is their first steps in
| the right direction with this stuff. They've been doing the dev
| stuff - made it work, made it fast, made it good! Now they just
| need to do the user stuff - make it simple, make it familiar,
| make it accessible.
| api wrote:
| > Engineers get so lost up their own asses about this stuff
| because they can't see that UX is entirely divorced from
| functional processes.
|
| This is one of the main reasons that open source has never
| penetrated beyond engineers, IT people, and computer
| hobbyists.
|
| The problem is that when you are good at using computers it's
| not easy to see how unbelievably confusing they are to people
| who are not good at using them.
|
| The other is that there's no funding system to pay people to
| do the not-fun parts of programming or to maintain the more
| user-facing aspects of projects.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| The crazy thing is that in many cases there isn't even
| really much novel work required to end up with a user-
| friendly product. Devs can easily benefit from the vast
| amounts of time and money put into UX research by simply
| pattern-matching on the mountains of prior art now out
| there. It's not like it's still the early 80s where
| graphical UI is still in its infancy and there are no
| examples to follow.
| adra wrote:
| I mean in reality, this is an excuse. We can and do build
| good software for many and all people, but the bad ones
| make it look like every engineer is out to lunch.
| Counterpoint, it's rarely an incentive to OSS software
| (individuals) to sit down with focus groups of early
| adopters to gather valuable feedback that can help iron out
| rough spots, so maybe a classic a little of A, a little of
| B here.
| godelski wrote:
| > This is one of the main reasons that open source has
| never penetrated beyond engineers, IT people, and computer
| hobbyists.
|
| This is also the reason there's so many multimillion dollar
| businesses that are essentially front end interfaces to
| open source projects. Hell, how many for ffmpeg alone?
| > The other is that there's no funding system to pay people
| to do the not-fun parts of programming or to maintain the
| more user-facing aspects of projects.
|
| I think there are plenty of people that make things looking
| nice. I do, but I hate web. Maybe this is why TUIs are
| taking off? But there definitely is a funding problem. My
| partner is doing a PhD in economics and whenever I talk to
| any of them about open source software, and how much of the
| world is dependent upon it, they get very confused and it's
| a lot of fun to see. I highly recommend (plus, I'd love to
| see the actually thinking about these kinds of frameworks.
| Clearly us devs haven't figured it out and it's worth
| asking for outside viewpoints)
| api wrote:
| For a while at least Apple was the most valuable company
| in the world, mostly on the back of caring a lot about
| UI/UX. Under the hood it's just BSD and a bunch of
| services and libraries.
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| Indeed. To this day, that's really all it is.
| godelski wrote:
| It's true. BUT I think they are currently making a fatal
| mistake. They are ever increasingly being hostile to devs
| and powerusers.
|
| I see a lot of sentiment (including around these parts)
| that one should not care about those groups because they
| are a small percentage, but you could say that about any
| group. These groups definitely give your stuff a lot more
| value. I mean what is a smart phone with no apps? That's
| the real reason they took off. Arguably the same reason
| computers did too. Unless you really think you can do
| everything in house, then you need devs and power users
| (besides that it helps with finding bugs). You don't need
| to make the platforms geared towards them, but I think
| there is a difference when you start acting hostile. I
| mean isn't the reason Silicon Valley is full of macbooks
| in the first place is because mac felt more nix like and
| we could program on them more easily than windows? Seems
| short sighted.
|
| Edit: fatal is too strong of a word. Google is doing it
| too and its monopoly behavior
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| The problem is all the competitors are also megacorps.
| Apple and Google and Microsoft are all hostile to power
| users in different ways. They can all make different
| fatal mistakes and it won't matter because there is no
| real competition to this oligopoly in tech.
| godelski wrote:
| It's why I made the edit. I still think it'll end up
| being fatal in one way or another. Maybe someone can get
| past the excessive barrier. Or maybe because well
| behaving monopolies are less likely to get forcefully
| broken up. But yeah, we're on the same page
| KoftaBob wrote:
| It's amusing that the Mastodon creator is German, and PeerTube
| French, as the user experience on Mastodon can feel strikingly
| similar to dealing with the labyrinthine bureaucracy of
| European regulations.
|
| On Mastodon, the fragmented network of servers and the need to
| grasp federation mechanics mirrors the intricate web of
| European policies, where navigating localized laws and cross-
| border harmonization can feel like wading through red tape.
|
| Both present an ostensibly open and decentralized structure,
| promising freedom and community-led participation, yet are
| riddled with complexities that bewilder newcomers.
| davepeck wrote:
| Alas, this is par for the course in the Fediverse. Mastodon is
| the only ActivityPub-using social network I'm aware of that has
| broken away from this. (Maybe Lemmy, to some degree?)
|
| Social networks that focus on people and user experience have a
| shot. My hunch is those -- like PeerTube -- that focus on
| technical, political, or philosophical motivations will always
| be niche at best.
|
| (Which is not to discourage experimentation! This seems to be a
| fantastic moment to experiment with social media design.)
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > Mastodon is the only ActivityPub-using social network I'm
| aware of that has broken away from this
|
| I tried signing up for Mastodon a couple years back, and
| failed somehow. Thankfully Threads and Bluesky are easier to
| use. Hopefully Mastodon has improved, but I'm already using
| two other competing micro-blogging platforms now.
| davepeck wrote:
| Yeah, absolutely. Despite its growth, IMHO Mastodon is
| still a usability mess in the sense that a typical user
| will find it needlessly complicated compared to _any_
| alternative that is perceived as equivalent. The confusion
| starts early, with onboarding. I think this is one of the
| reasons why, for instance, Threads became a larger social
| network in its first ~24 hours than Mastodon had in its
| entire 6-ish year run to that point.
| bagels wrote:
| I was curious what the experience was like, having never
| used Mastadon. I searched for "Mastadon Signup"
|
| First page is a bunch of rules. I don't mind moderation
| and decorum, but leading with that sends a signal to me
| that the moderation is going to be even more capricious
| than Reddit.
| archargelod wrote:
| > that sends a signal to me that the moderation is going
| to be even more capricious than Reddit
|
| That's actually where mastodon (and other fedi-platforms)
| different from a mainstream social media, because you
| have a choice:
|
| - you can choose an instance with very strict moderation
| to be in an echo chamber with like-minded individuals.
|
| - or if you choose instance with little to no moderation
| - you'll find yourself on a platform where everyone
| speaks what's really on their mind, even if it's socially
| unacceptable.
|
| Choosing instance is hard, because popular ones are
| blocking a lot of small instances (mostly because of
| spam). But simply choose a server close to your
| interests, you can transfer your account between
| instances later.
| gargron wrote:
| Do you not think that Meta onboarding its 2 billion
| Instagram userbase into Threads had something to do with
| it?
| davepeck wrote:
| Yes, of course; that was clearly the high-order bit.
|
| But even if it was dominant my hunch is it was unlikely
| the only factor: Bluesky also rapidly outgrew Mastodon,
| without a Meta-like advantage.
| openrisk wrote:
| From cloudflare 2024 stats bluesky traffic shot up during
| the US election but is now back below (aggregrate across
| all servers) mastodon traffic [1]
|
| But its true that mastodon did not have a major
| breakthrough as of late and bluesky will likely surpass
| it in the near future as some important "high information
| quality" communities (journalists, scientists etc.) seem
| to migrate there in preference.
|
| Orientation towards general (mainstream, non-tech) users,
| easy usability etc is indeed a problem for the fediverse.
| The reasons are mostly an anti-commercial ideological
| stance which on the one hand makes funding scarce. Hence
| brilliant open source products - there are many more than
| peertube - remain unpolished, not marketed at all etc.).
| On the other hand this hostile culture keeps mainstream
| actors from joining the revolution.
|
| But make no mistake this _is_ a revolution. The hyper-
| concentration in social media is an aberration that does
| not fit any other pattern in society and the economy.
| Some more pragmatism from the decentralization pioneers
| will accelerate the inevitable.
|
| [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/radar-2024-year-in-
| review-intern...
| gargron wrote:
| Arguably, Bluesky being spun off from Twitter and having
| Jack Dorsey as one of the founding members is a somewhat
| Meta-like advantage, in a sense of immediate legitimacy
| in the press and networking opportunities/connections in
| Silicon Valley. Mastodon had to start absolutely from
| scratch. I had zero connections to anyone important when
| I launched it. Bluesky also raised over $8M in venture
| capital funding, while Mastodon was being developed on a
| $0/mo budget for the first year of its existence, and
| something like $5000/mo for the next 5. Our current
| annual budget of around $500K still pales in comparison
| to the money Bluesky has at their disposal right now to
| spend on e.g. marketing. They also have the advantage of
| not really trying to do decentralization. That being
| said, venture capital money isn't free, while Mastodon's
| funding comes from the community with no strings
| attached, so in the long term, I believe in our approach.
| davepeck wrote:
| To add some color to my comments: I also believe in your
| approach and I admire the work you and your team have
| done.
|
| To sum up my entirely unoriginal opinions:
|
| 1. Mastodon has far better usability than any other
| Fediverse software I'm aware of
|
| 2. Despite this, usability is still a _material_
| coefficient of drag on Mastodon 's growth
|
| To be clear, I don't believe Mastodon has to or even
| _should_ aspire to match the growth of other more
| centralized networks; only that usability is a drag on
| what would otherwise be natural growth for Mastodon
| itself.
|
| I know you and your team spend a considerable amount of
| time and energy on usability, so I hope I'm not saying
| anything you don't already know infinitely better than I.
| shafyy wrote:
| How did you fail?
| dyingkneepad wrote:
| I'm not the person you're asking to, but I failed at the
| "choose a server" part. I started having a bunch of
| questions over the choice of server and then gave up from
| analysis paralysis.
|
| What are the implications of choosing one server over the
| other? Does this affect search and discoverability in
| between servers? If I really like Baking and really like
| Fencing as well, should I join the "Matodon Baking"
| server, the "Fencing fans" server of a neutral one? If I
| choose the Fencing server, will the people on the Baking
| server start seeing me as some sort of outsider since I'm
| not originally from the Baking server? Will they even be
| able to organically find me? How does the algorithm
| evaluate these choices? Can I restrict/split my posts
| between Baking, Fencing and general? And so on...
| archargelod wrote:
| > What are the implications of choosing one server over
| the other?
|
| Unless you choose a political or spam-friendly server -
| it doesn't matter.
|
| > Does this affect search and discoverability in between
| servers?
|
| A little.
|
| > If I really like Baking and really like Fencing as
| well, should I join the "Mastodon Baking" server, the
| "Fencing fans" server of a neutral one?
|
| Shouldn't matter.
|
| > Will the people on the Baking server start seeing me as
| some sort of outsider.
|
| Never seen anything like this, but I can imagine if you
| choose a server associated with 'A' and leave a comment
| in a server where people hate 'A', they might have a
| prejudice against you, so it's better to choose a very
| neutral, general server.
|
| > Can I restrict/split my posts between Baking, Fencing
| and general?
|
| Use tags.
|
| > How does the algorithm evaluate these choices?
|
| There's no algorithm, you follow people you like and
| block people you don't like.
| dyingkneepad wrote:
| > > Does this affect search and discoverability in
| between servers?
|
| > A little.
|
| Can you please elaborate on that?
|
| Thanks for the answers!
| gargron wrote:
| Mastodon has changed quite significantly since a few years
| back. We take product design seriously and spend a sizeable
| amount of our resources on improving usability and reducing
| friction. If you could, please try again, and let me know
| how it goes this time. If you are an Android user, I
| strongly recommend our official app, as in my (obviously
| biased) opinion it is the best social media app right now
| and the user experience I am most proud of.
| Animats wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I don't think so. There's no permanently running client
| program. The client side is all in the browser.
| meiraleal wrote:
| > I guess this is not made for users
|
| The finesse of HN. If you don't do marketing like we preach,
| you hate users.
| GTP wrote:
| The announcement has links, maybe they will add those to the
| homepage later.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Maybe a small lack of energy, peertube was quite user friendly,
| so I don't think they messed up blindly.
| BadHumans wrote:
| I like PeerTube and most of Framasoft's products but like most
| federated software, I think they have a branding and marketing
| problem that prevents them from growing any bigger. Mastodon did
| as well and before they revised a lot of their site, no more
| "toots" for example. I say this knowing that they say their goal
| is education not growth but you need growth to reach the people
| you want to educate.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Yeah, I had to go into my instance's locale files and fix them
| to s/post/toot/ to put it back.
|
| Some of Mastodon's upstream decisions strike me as "we must be
| identical to Twitter in the insignificant ways if we want to
| get users".
| guerrilla wrote:
| Even heavy Mastodon users thought the "toot" thing was dumb
| though. It was the constant butt of jokes and a distraction.
| I don't think it was about Twitter.
| treyd wrote:
| I still don't understand the objection to it. Yes I
| understand the double entendre. But I'm also an adult and
| mature enough to move onto more important things than
| getting up in arms about a little fart joke.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| It is not a double entendre, since there is one common
| meaning for "toot" and it is about bodily noises. "Toot"
| has not been about posting on Mastodon up until very
| recently.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Do they not have trumpets where you live? Did "tooting
| one's own horn" imply breaking wind during the annual
| performance review? Far and away the most common use of
| "toot" is playing a note on a horn.
|
| At one point, Gargron, the main guy behind Mastodon, even
| mentioned using a trumpet as the basis of Mastodon's logo
| branding: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/962
|
| "Toot" _also_ has the double entendre. In all my life, I
| 've never heard anyone outside a playground use it to
| describe flatulence. In my personal experience, it's
| almost always been about the musical notes. I'm not in a
| band or otherwise around musicians more than the average
| person, either.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Using toot in the sense of tooting your own horn is still
| an odd decision for posts. It implies that users' posts
| should be focused on bragging about themselves. At least
| in my opinion that make for a very annoying social media
| feed to read through.
| _djo_ wrote:
| It's a reference to the trumpeting sound an
| elephant/mastodon makes, meant as the equivalent to the
| 'tweet' a bird such as the one in the old Twitter logo
| makes.
|
| There's nothing more to it than that: A quirky name based
| on the chosen logo, following the Twitter example.
|
| I agree it wasn't the best word choice, and I can
| understand why it has been de-emphasised in favour of
| 'posts', but the reasoning behind it was logical.
| corobo wrote:
| Probably closer to "We don't want to be the network where
| people's thoughts are called farts"
|
| Similarly Bluesky did its best to get rid of "skeet" before
| blowing up haha
| weberer wrote:
| Does anyone have any good recommendations of English language
| tech channels on Peertube? Most of the recommendations I'm
| getting by default look to be in French.
| loonshi wrote:
| https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/videos/recently-added
| ncr100 wrote:
| Thank you, really good content. Pleased to see that.
| kouru225 wrote:
| Man this guys media takes
| corobo wrote:
| If we're talking about the app: if you go to settings (top
| right hamburger, then cog icon) you can set your language
| preferences
|
| I almost tripped over "welp this is all in French, I got
| nothing to watch" too
| aloisdg wrote:
| Awesome. I am glad to see PeerTube growing. One of the most
| serious alternative to the centralized YouTube hegemony.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| I hate YouTube's algorithm. It keeps showing me the same videos
| over and over.
| _ache_ wrote:
| May I recommend tournesol.app ?
|
| It's again a French speaking initiative (but from a French-
| Switzerland research collaboration) about creating a
| recommendation algorithm with a lot of good properties and
| that scale (check the research paper on arxiv.org :
| 2107.07334).
|
| It's also a plugin to help then have more data and to be
| useful for the users (by having an other recommendation
| algorithm on youtube), a win-win collaboration.
| yorwba wrote:
| Linkified:
|
| https://tournesol.app/
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.07334
| grahamj wrote:
| I love this! My only wish is that it was integrated into
| FreeTube, since I won't use Google properties directly.
| aloisdg wrote:
| Too YouTube centric
| redserk wrote:
| And the algorithm seems to prioritize videos that have
| extraordinarily lame and over-processed preview images and
| comically dramatic titles.
|
| I personally like the boring deep-dive technical videos. The
| people uploading these videos don't seem to give a damn about
| the latest hip SEO buzzwords to use (and, frankly, good) but
| I have to go out of my way to hunt them down.
|
| YouTube really, really likes shoving Mr. Beast, LTT, and
| other channels at me, but I couldn't be any less interested,
| and filter them out with an add-on.
|
| I can't wait for a replacement platform for the boring
| technical content. Until that platform exists, I recommend
| looking at DeArrow. It at least fixes titles and preview
| images.
| sitkack wrote:
| > filter them out with an add-on
|
| Please do inform
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Sorry, my fault. I'm one to rewatch videos a lot
| elvircrn wrote:
| I have a chrome extension that I made for myself which
| removes recommended videos based on:
|
| * channel/video title * duration * keywords * channel
| size/video views
|
| Then, I have a video queue where I add videos that I find
| interesting.
|
| Ever since I started using it, I started getting almost
| exclusively videos that I enjoy consuming, since YouTube
| seems to quickly adapt to my clicking patterns.
| grahamj wrote:
| Great idea! I wish I could filter all videos that start
| with "I "
| latexr wrote:
| I reject all cookies from YouTube and browse without an
| account. It's fantastic. There's no history, which they try
| to make you feel bad about and paint as a negative, but
| knowing what the front-page is I'm glad I don't have to see
| any of that trash. Every time I open a video, the
| recommendations are related to that specific video and not
| past history. For the channels I care about, I subscribe via
| RSS. Highly recommended.
| Timwi wrote:
| Doesn't that mean you only get recommended the most popular
| stuff? If your taste is completely mainstream then I
| suppose it's fine, but it means it won't find anything for
| you related to even a mildly niche interest.
| latexr wrote:
| > Doesn't that mean you only get recommended the most
| popular stuff?
|
| No, the only recommendations are the ones on the side of
| the video and they're varied in popularity and age (from
| just posted to a decade ago). They seem to be related to
| the same subject or type of creator of the current video.
| They're _very_ hit or miss in terms of what I'd like, and
| that's fine with me. Believe me, the recommendations have
| nothing to do with what's popular on the homepage, and I
| know that because I remember well when they didn't hide
| it; the homepage was absolute garbage and mostly shit
| from my country.
|
| One thing I forgot to mention is that I also use iCloud
| Private Relay, which may further affect it. That in
| particular isn't always good as sometimes YouTube refuses
| to play the video and asks me to sign in to prove I'm not
| a bot. Fortunately that has happened fewer times than I
| thought it would. When it does I either temporarily
| switch browsers or just close YouTube and go do something
| else.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| And the search is atrocious. It used to show you videos that
| related to your search terms. Now it's like
|
| [relevant]
|
| [relevant]
|
| [infinitesimally small divider ]
|
| [irrelevant trash]
|
| [irrelevant trash]
|
| [irrelevant trash]
|
| [irrelevant trash]
|
| [irrelevant trash]
|
| [infinitesimally small divider ]
|
| [kind of relevant?]
|
| [irrelevant but you watched it three months ago!]
|
| [...]
| dalf wrote:
| I used to love YouTube's algorithm: suggestions outside of my
| subscriptions but exactly on the spot. I used to took time to
| curate.
|
| However since few months, all recommendations became off
| track. Then I started to realize these recommendations were
| related to the life of people I know. At least most of them,
| some subjects are private and personal, so this is really
| unsettling and I can't say if the algorithm is halucinating
| or not (I want to know if people tells me, not like this...).
| I have the impression that this is a Plato's cave illuminate
| with the private lives of those around me.
|
| Technically, my understand is this:
|
| * YT suggests channels closed to my interrests
|
| * YT picks videos with thumbnails very closed to this "life
| of others" feed = the thumbnail leaks more than the video
| title.
|
| I ended up to send a feedback to YT, no response, but most of
| these recommendations disapeared, and then it went back here
| and there, so I don't use the recommendation page anymore. YT
| music has more or less the same issue with automatic
| playlist.
|
| The analytical part of me wonders why YT subscribes me to
| these "feeds", how these "feeds" are fed (maybe it goes
| beyond Alphabet / Google), but that's strange and disturbing
| enough.
|
| Note: perhaps the fact I use ublock, blokadda, Firefox,
| etc... most probably makes my profile focussed on technical
| stuff, which makes other recommendations more visible.
| subract wrote:
| Big fan of what Framasoft is working on here. It's a shame to see
| that (edit: iOS) App Store restrictions have prevented browsing
| any instances not on a pre-blessed list. That all but eliminates
| its usefulness to me as a self-hoster.
| talldayo wrote:
| It's another (tragic) example of why the App Store cannot
| persist in a free market. It's sad, but Apple would prefer that
| you download YouTube from their store instead of a healthy
| alternative on your own terms. They have no qualms abusing
| their double-standard for publishing when it hurts the little
| guy, which is as monopolistic as monopoly abuse gets.
|
| Europe got it right. Crush the App Store, and you kill every
| maligned incentive with it. Only through natural competition
| will Apple be forced to finally respect their users.
| musicale wrote:
| There are dozens of successful, competitive Android app
| stores in nearly every country where Google Play is blocked.
| immibis wrote:
| In countries where Google Play is allowed, Google Play has
| a monopoly because of Google's illegal monopolistic
| contracts with manufacturers.
| mihular wrote:
| Wasn't that list optional, though?
| codetrotter wrote:
| There's a plus sign in the top right corner where you can
| manually add the URL of any instance.
|
| It'll work as long as the instance is sufficiently recent. My
| instance is too old. Guess I have some motivation for upgrading
| my PeerTube server to latest version now :D
| subract wrote:
| I missed that, you're right! I got confused by the blog post
| saying they only allowed browsing an approved list - I didn't
| realize sites could also be added manually.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Wait the App Store won't let you browse instances arbitrarily?
| That is such an absurd degree of control and censorship. We
| need regulations fast for these abusive megacorps.
| thal3s wrote:
| Contrast this with another story on the first page this morning:
| "Google are deliberately breaking YouTube when it detects you're
| running Firefox" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42388983).
|
| Open-source content on the Fediverse will become more critical as
| corporate oligarchs continue to exert their influence.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's just a 6 month old reddit post by a random dude. If
| they're blocking firefox, they're doing it very badly, because
| I just spent all morning watching football highlight videos
| running firefox on linux, adblocked, sponsorblocked
| (https://sponsor.ajay.app/), forging my referer, blocking
| cookies, with userscripts to unlock private and age-restricted
| videos, without being logged in.
|
| With my setup, youtube can be broken for months on end. It's
| running like silk right now.
| sitkack wrote:
| Do you have a guide you could link to?
| benatkin wrote:
| How important is WebTorrent for PeerTube and how important is
| WebRTC for WebTorrent? I get a feeling that if this takes off
| browser vendors might try to change how WebRTC works to shut it
| down. That would be another reason to support more open browsers
| and more open operating systems. This app would help in that
| scenario as well, as would a desktop app.
| palata wrote:
| I am not convinced that it would be possible. But anyway I
| don't think they even care because virtually nobody uses
| peertube.
| boramalper wrote:
| PeerTube has removed WebTorrent in 2022:
|
| https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/5465
| ukuina wrote:
| This page desperately needs a TL;DR and links to the apps above
| the fold.
| ncr100 wrote:
| One could make joinpeertube2.org if you wanted to...freedoms
| and all that. Hmm...
|
| WAIT Peer Tube is trademarked.
|
| So any add-on or fan domain name would have to disambiguate
| itself from joinpeertube to something which is clearly
| unaffiliated. I'm thinking, MacRumors or other sorts of mostly
| obvious dances around the trademark word.
|
| Amusingly I I generated several hypothetical domain names via
| Chat GPT (another sidetrack: "Chad gpt" ...lol maybe for April
| Fools) after explaining the situation and you know it cautioned
| me of course do some follow-up checks but I think these are
| funny And somewhat interesting:
|
| TubeWithPeers.com PeerTubeGuide.com PeerVideoCommunity.com
| ExplorePeerTube.com UsingPeerTube.com MyPeerTubeTools.com
|
| So I think it is possible to invent a domain name which could
| just cut to the chase and function as a faster better stronger
| version of https://joinpeertube.org.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| How does PeerTube handle moderation? CSAM, racism, antisemitism,
| etc
| jeffbee wrote:
| It doesn't. It also has no defenses against DoS attacks,
| intentional or inadvertent. It is the perfect software for
| people with no experience distributing videos.
| pkkkzip wrote:
| this would be a major hinderance to widespread adoption. DoS
| attacks aside the fact that it has no legal liability offset
| for video hoster (which anybody watching the video ends up
| sort of like bitorrent)
| emaro wrote:
| PeerTube is federated and moderation is each server's own
| responsibility.
| stiltzkin wrote:
| It works like forums, you need to look for an instance with the
| culture and moderation of your liking.
| yreg wrote:
| Is there a specific App Store rule that prevents them to let
| users add custom streams?
|
| It sounds functionally the same as adding instances to a Mastodon
| client or RSS feeds into a Podcast app. What's the catch?
| tosser2084 wrote:
| no way to use from desktop? Absurd.
| do_not_redeem wrote:
| HN users are the most demanding group of people I've ever
| encountered in my short time on this blue sphere.
|
| Use a browser.
| echelon wrote:
| To be fair, most people will just bounce. Feedback can be an
| opportunity to improve.
|
| It would be nice if the feedback remembered that there are
| humans on the other side of the line, but sometimes you take
| what you can get.
| Zak wrote:
| Peertube has existed as web-based software for years; this post
| is about the addition of a mobile app. The linked project page
| has a search from the big "browse content" link at the top and
| a list of servers running Peertube, such as https://fedi.video.
|
| For onboarding a general audience, this project page is not
| ideal.
| sitkack wrote:
| All the words on the site should be explained IN A VIDEO. Every
| page should HAVE VIDEO ON IT.
| skratlo wrote:
| This will never take off with that awful logo and mascot, and
| general silliness. With the "developed by Framasoft", like who
| the f* cares. It's noise, it looks awful, it repels potential
| users. Get some serious marketing person in.
| tpoacher wrote:
| I have some feedback if anyone from PeerTube is reading. The
| https://joinpeertube.org/instances page should have some more
| useful sorting for the instances it shows. (not to mention the
| ability to sort by something useful)
|
| E.g. in my page as I see it, there's a random channel with 20
| videos appearing as the second instance result, and then the 6th
| result is Freediverse.com with 741 subscriptions and 465,094
| videos. Surely the latter should be on top.
| minroot wrote:
| Using Revanced YouTube greatly improved yt experience, and for
| some reason yt is suggesting a lot of small channel with great
| videos
| 71bw wrote:
| >and for some reason yt is suggesting a lot of small channel
| with great videos
|
| It's been this way for half a year now, at least for me (YMMV).
| Some absolute gems I've found this way. The YouTube algorithm
| isn't really as bad as many people think...
| kouru225 wrote:
| So downloading the app and adding my interests my first 10
| recommendations are: 1) An educational video about peertube
| itself by peertube 2) the same educational video about peertube
| by peertube with English subtitles 3) a slideshow presentation
| about Framadate in French by framadate 4) an educational video
| about the fediverse by peertube 5) another educational video
| about peertube by peertube but this time in French 6) a French
| video about the pyramids I think? 7) the same educational video
| about peertube by peertube with Spanish subtitles 8) an
| educational video about mastodon 9) an educational video about
| alternative medicine 10) and educational video about TILvids by
| TILvids
|
| I don't speak French fyi. Also it doesn't change what videos I
| see when I filter by my interests.
|
| Methinks this is not a viable competitor to YouTube.
| m348e912 wrote:
| It seems like the streaming tech is solid, no issues loading
| and playing videos. Curation on the other hand seems to be
| abysmal. I even tried their cutely branded search engine
| SepiaSearch with similar non-relevant or not so interesting
| results.
|
| I am also curious how moderation works. How do they prevent
| inappropriate or illegal content from being shared?
| quinncom wrote:
| I get exactly the same list of videos when sorting by Most
| Views. It seems the algo doesn't consider interests.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > Methinks this is not a viable competitor to YouTube.
|
| It is not.
|
| I'm French and I have known about the different FramaSoft
| software for years now. They are all terrible alternatives.
|
| Their approach is completely wrong, they think that being
| "libre" (free) is enough to acquire market share, and they
| completely ignore the user experience, feature parity, and
| innovation. All of their tools are therefore terrible, to the
| point of being unusable.
|
| They are a paragon of oblivious French mediocrity.
|
| PeerTube specifically has existed for almost a decade and has
| never been used by anybody. It is an empty shell of a website
| kept alive just to burn public money.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| This is a harsh take but makes sense to me, unfortunately.
| It's been around forever and has amounted to nothing. There
| doesn't seem to be any attention to acquiring users or
| content. Maybe there are better projects to support?
| seanvelasco wrote:
| exactly! i'm so glad i found this comment. you said it so
| eloquently.
|
| tried so hard to find a video i like, but i just couldn't.
| can't find a single video for current events, hobbies, or
| even tech. the search just doesn't work.
|
| the only justification for peertube's existence is that it's
| _libre_. but the experience is terrible!!! a frontend
| engineer can build a better ui over the weekend. peertube
| existed for a decade, but they couldn 't bother to innovate
| on the ui/ux side all those years.
|
| edit: it's almost 2025, they're building a mobile app, but
| they chose Flutter. now i understand. they should outsource
| the tech decision-making
| sschueller wrote:
| I created a Peertube client for android a few years ago. It was
| removed by Google in September and is still pending appeal:
| https://github.com/sschueller/peertube-android/issues/302
|
| I hope this version doesn't receive the same fate as mine did.
| stavros wrote:
| There are many more options than the Play store for Android.
| F-droid, Obtainium, etc. Could you list in some of those?
|
| EDIT: Oh, you do, nice!
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| The US needs to clamp down on the App Store monopolies to stop
| this abuse
| 71bw wrote:
| What monopolies? There's various other options you can use on
| Android.
| eafkuor wrote:
| Serious question, why would I use this? I searched for a topic
| I'm interested in, in English, and got barely related results in
| various languages (Swedish, Spanish).
|
| On YouTube, the first result for the same search is an amazing
| playlist, in English, on the exact topic I searched for.
| vfclists wrote:
| Peertube is fine.
|
| It just needs more AI, the solution for all software and platform
| problems _du jour_
| stevage wrote:
| > We cannot stress enough how their stores are not ready for
| independent solidarity-oriented networks. For exemple, a small
| "support us" donation link in our website footer or even on one
| of the allowed platforms triggered a "nope" from Apple.
|
| Ugh, wow.
| danlitt wrote:
| Deleting YouTube and replacing it with this. I hope it pans out!
| scirob wrote:
| Tried to type in something as simple as "funny videos" but got
| zero relevant funny cats or dogs. I wonder if they need an
| initiative to build content pipelines to bring move r some video.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| I wonder how a new platform can seed content to compete with
| YouTube
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Where's all the porn?
| petabyt wrote:
| Obligatory mention of grayjay: https://grayjay.app/
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