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PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

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Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#91

Post by sleepybrett »

mywittyname wrote: post #57
infamia wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can publish to both and even better your own domain that simply points to your video hosting provider. Long term you want to own your distribution channel as much as possible, while using YouTube as your lead generation tool to drive true believers to your site and premium distribution channel not owned by YouTube. Otherwise, you will always be subject to platform risk via YouTube's whims which has destroyed many…

Realistically, how many viewers will be retained should YT shut the OP down? Right now, that number rounds to 0. Practically speaking, YT is free internet video streaming for long-form videos on the US market. Nobody is going to go to OP's personal site to watch videos. They are going to fire up YT and eat what the algorithm feeds them. The reason PeerTube and Nebula are important is it provides the potential for a t…

Nebula is invite only, as far as I can tell, for creators.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#92

Post by j45 »

djaro wrote: post #41

As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization. I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch. This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram. Even a decent 20-minute video can easily take 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor. I have a pretty small…

Having your own distribution has it's benefits as a fall back or alternatives, in addition to publishing elsewhere like youtube.

The cost of creating and editing videos going to come way down, there's already ways to do it in the past few years.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#93

Post by Jtarii »

flaburgan wrote: post #78
jesse_dot_id wrote: post #18

I like the idea of all of these federated services but why does the UX always feel like an afterthought when it is the most important factor for adoption?

Do you have precise suggestion of what to improve? I'm genuinely interested.

Is it possible to just vaguely gesture at everything?

The spacing of every component feels wrong, the font choices are off, the text is too small, there is way too much white space, the "other video" section looks like its just jammed off to the side. The overall feel of the website is very amateurish.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#94

Post by Auracle »

slg wrote: post #71
djaro wrote: post #41

As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization. I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch. This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram. Even a decent 20-minute video can easily take 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor. I have a pretty small…

You say your target is $500-$1000 per video and let's assume you do videos weekly. That would mean your optimistic goal is $4500 a month. Let's say you create a voluntary donation subscription at $5 per month for people willing to support your work. That means you would need 900 true fans, patrons, or whatever other label you want to give them to hit your $4500 goal. That's a 0.9% conversion rate from subscribers to…

Voluntary donations are practically impossible. Sure, you get the odd straggler, but it’s so, so rare.

I have the most popular NSFW LoRA (actually a LoKR but whatever) for at least one major text to image model on CivitAI.

Once it blew up I made a Patreon, maybe 6 months ago? I get $50 a month from it. I doubt that even covers my electricity costs for training.

Podcasts and videos do have the advantage of being able to ask for people to donate with every podcast/video, but people just aren’t inclined to give their money away when they don’t have to. It’s a rare trait.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#95

Post by treesknees »

ndriscoll wrote: post #54
djaro wrote: post #41

As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization. I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch. This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram. Even a decent 20-minute video can easily take 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor. I have a pretty small…

It doesn't have to be for your use-case. e.g. KDE has their own instance, as does Blender. It would perhaps be a good fit for MIT to host their OCW videos, or for Khan Academy to host their material, or people sharing conference talks, or governments, or quick home DIY videos, or vlogs and idle musings, or hobbyists showing/discussing their thing they like, etc. Videos that are meant to help people to better themselv…

There are many people who believe everything must be a grind to get rich. I wish more people stepped back and did things online because they were fun or educational, not because it was monetized.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#96

Post by kulahan »

infamia wrote: post #48
djaro wrote: post #41

As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization. I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch. This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram. Even a decent 20-minute video can easily take 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor. I have a pretty small…

You can publish to both and even better your own domain that simply points to your video hosting provider. Long term you want to own your distribution channel as much as possible, while using YouTube as your lead generation tool to drive true believers to your site and premium distribution channel not owned by YouTube. Otherwise, you will always be subject to platform risk via YouTube's whims which has destroyed many…

People don’t really want another step in the already arduous process of making videos - especially when the return on investment will be $0. This website will die off in a couple years and everyone who wastes time on it will be worse off for it.

You need to build a product so good that my statement above sounds INSANE. Not just “I think he’s wrong” but “dude absolutely no way. Everyone will want this. Are you stupid?”

And this is not that product.

Edit: yeah. I was curious so I went searching for ASMR videos. The default search brought some (terrible-looking) ones up, but half of them were in French? I sorted by views instead, and even though I literally only searched for “ASMR”, there were no longer any ASMR videos near the top of the results. For something trying to compete with YouTube, this is a very mid experience. Nobody is going to waste time migrating.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#98

Post by jesse_dot_id »

flaburgan wrote: post #78
jesse_dot_id wrote: post #18

I like the idea of all of these federated services but why does the UX always feel like an afterthought when it is the most important factor for adoption?

Do you have precise suggestion of what to improve? I'm genuinely interested.

Yeah, it's pretty simple. When I go to YouTube.com, I have access to all of the videos on that platform, sorted based on what I'm subscribed to and other things like what I watch. The first thing I see are videos. I'm off to the races.

When I go to https://joinpeertube.org, I'm met with a double hero section that tells me about PeerTube, which is ultimately meaningless to 99% of the population.

When I get to actual content on that page, it's not an aggregate of all of the most popular videos across the federation, it's a description of the types of videos you can find on federated sites with links to the sites and not video embeds. You're telling me on the front page that I have to do legwork to find the videos I want to watch. You're already not competitive. You already lose.

Creators go where users go. If you don't build the platform to attract users, you will not get the volume of content that is required to hold people's attention. There's a reason why people come to YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News, Reels, etc. There are almost no clicks between the user and the content, and the content is plentiful.

Every time I try to use PeerTube, I have to try to find where to find the videos. As someone who's been chronically online since 1995, it's not that big of a deal. I can find them eventually. But that UX sucks, even for me, so it's probably utterly untenable for the vast majority of casual users.

You are trying to compete with slot machines by inventing a machine that makes the user read a bunch of stuff between each pull of the lever. It's not super difficult to see why that is a competitive disadvantage.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#99

Post by kulahan »

WarmWash wrote: post #36
CM30 wrote: post #15

It's a promising system, and I'd probably use it over a non-federated video hosting system if I wanted to run a video hosting site of some kind. Yet it's currently hard to find a real usecase for it, since neither the content you want nor audience is there on PeerTube at the moment. If you're interested in open source software or data privacy you might find something here or there, but topics like gaming, music, spor…

Creators get 60% of youtube's ad revenue from youtube. What does Peertube pay? There is your answer. If people want good stuff, there needs to be money flowing to the source of it. The internet desperately needs to shed this "everything good is totally free" mindset, because what it actually manifests as is "I love taking without the requirement of giving".

I’d prefer 60% of millions and millions of viewers over 200% of the 8 people on peertube. Percentages aren’t that important here.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#100

Post by djaro »

satvikpendem wrote: post #84
djaro wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just a great example of people who aren't in content creation fundamentally not understanding the ecosystem. This isn't about "over-produced thumbnail-bait". This is about all high-quality media. You mention Rick Beato. Do you really think Rick Beato sits down behind his laptop to edit his own videos? He has nearly 6 million subscribers and produces around 10 long-form videos per month. He has at the very lea…

Indeed. Even streamers who just speak to the camera and play video games have a team of multiple people behind them, which some streamers discuss the economics of openly.

I think the problem is that the "act" of a lot of streamers and content creators is that they are relatable, in the sense that, part of watching a video game streamer is the appeal of, he's just a guy like me playing games in his bedroom. The problem is that this is all an act, or kayfabe as they would call it in wrestling. But it's an act so good that unlike wrestling, which everyone knows is fake, most people that are not at least adjacent to the content industry genuinely have no idea.
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