cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/5294605
Youtube, for so many years, was just too good. Yes, they changed the 5 star rating system to likes and dislikes and a few years later disabled dislikes altogether, but their algorithm mostly digs up interesting content and it just works for creators and viewers.
This might change soon. Their new strategy to disallow ad-blockers will frustrate a certain kind of viewer. Those who dislike surveillance and like open-source tech, those who use uBlock Origin and know why.
Just like a few years ago mastodon suddenly reached a certain kind of popularity, because twitter had their first big fuckup, maybe Peertube is next. It certainly is the most polished decentralized solution that doesn’t use a blockchain. Creators or fans could easily host their own videos, fans can watch it, without ads.
I feel like all of these fediverse platforms are going to suffer from the same issue.
I searched up peertube and clicked on the peertube link. No where was there a “recommend videos” feed or “upload videos” or “create account” and the first link to a peertube platform is a cliche “rebellion” something or other.
These things will never see mass adoption if they aren’t approachable to the casual browser. It sucks, but the average user would rather give their data to Google or watch 25sec of ads before each video then try to figure out fediverse. Especially since when you do figure it out, there isn’t any good content yet.
I didn’t mean that the average user will migrate to peertube. I meant that tech savvy people who share peertube’s values might join.
Lemmy isn’t easy to use either.
Just to name a few I think have nice videos right on their start page.
You can only make it so easy… If you want a centralistic platform with algorithmic recommendations, use YouTube… Emancipating oneself is work. But I’d agree onboarding for new users could and should be easier.
You don’t need a centralized platform to have recommendations.
You just let users choose some tags and go from there. Each server will surface different videos, but if they all pull from everyone they’re federated with it would be a lot more accessible pretty quickly. And let users opt in/out of watch history tracking to feed their suggestions.
It won’t have the potential YouTube does, but YouTube’s so compromised on intent that it could easily be better in practice if content availability were the same (which is obviously way off).
I’m not sure if Peertube perhaps already does that. There are tags to a video and it shows related videos. But I don’t know how it calculates that.
I don’t think Peertube stores interests of the users, yet. That would be a possible solution. But it also requires the user to put something in or some tracking of their activities.
Edit: Misunderstood you, corrected my comment.
That’s fine, though.
You just explicitly make it opt in and make it clear what you’re storing and why.
If you have a bunch of people guess how many M&M’s are in a jar you can average the guesses and you’ll come very close to the correct amount. A recommendation system can be very democratic in that way. When reddit still had their public API I would take advantage of this fact and use it to decide if something was a “deal” or not on PC parts. I was tracking the prices of computer ram at the time as an experiment. It worked very well. If they are federated properly, then their content can be filtered and appear on an instances front page.
I think it needs a site like the old link aggregators, that scrapes videos across a ton of different PeerTube instances and turns them into a nice searchable frontend, as well as showing a variety of different vids on the landing page.
I replicated your experiment. Top link seaching for peertube is https://peertube.tv/videos/
There are at least videos listed. But they are 80% by the same channel and mostly about cars/EVs with a few other tech things. Immediately i think “this is for a certain type of person” and that aint me.
They really need to mix up their front page to show some sort of diversity. Should not repeat the same creator over and over again. Surely there are 10-15 people on all of pt that could be highlighted.