It’s not that I “don’t understand federation basics”. It’s that PeerTube is absolutely, utterly devoid of content, and what less-than-bare-minimum content is there feels near-impossible to find. My standards for “enough content” aren’t YouTube’s lifetime worth of content uploaded every 12 hours; they’re “$30 annually for Nebula”.

The one or two extant channels I may want to watch consistently are on YouTube, so I already have to either 1) have a better experience watching those on PeerTube or 2) sacrifice on principle to watch them there. It’s going to have to be (2), but unlike YouTube, I can’t just jump off over to PeerTube and search for those channels. Instead, they need to be federated with the instance I’m on, which is a total crapshoot in PeerTube.

PeerTube’s niche audience doesn’t just make it subject to very little content; it also means the type of content is much more constrained. For example, those two-ish channels both center largely around digital privacy and FOSS. The content can pretty much be divided into: 1) random shit stolen from YouTube, 2) extremely amateurish videos, 3) person gives a rant about politics 4) actually decently produced videos but on a topic that’s at an extreme of (i) absurdly niche or (ii) generic enough to be found anywhere, and 5) (exceedingly rarely) real quality because the uploader is mirroring from their YouTube channel.

PeerTube instances seem to often just go down out of nowhere. One time I registered to one to give PeerTube another chance, and I chose it after very carefully considering federation. I came back two months later, and what looked like a good, healthy instance had totally vanished. Instances are also hard to find, having random, messy names like “tube.ebin.club” or “diode.zone”.

Comments are practically non-existent. YouTube is what happens when comments are too existent, but I appreciate being able to ignore bigger channels while going into the comments of small channels and seeing people meaningfully discussing the video.

There seems to be almost zero curation for language, so plenty of videos I come across could just be in Finnish or whatever.

PeerTube taken overall feels less like a place I’d want to sit down and stay for an hour a day and more like early YouTube where I’d want to watch a one-off video once a week. I searched for “vegan” for something generic and easy, and after a few of the 930 results, I found this video from a dead channel. Nothing crazy, but also something that’s not “clickbait title with one word in caps under a thumbnail where a red arrow points from white and red text to some image with no context”. It’s very cozy, but the channel has been dead for three years, so what’s there is what’s there.