PeerTube is fantastic with its decentralized model that prioritizes user privacy and control. However, it still struggles to gain widespread popularity.
What do you think could be done to enhance PeerTube’s appeal and functionality, possibly even becoming a serious alternative to YouTube?
What I’m about to say is probably dumb but… I think it wouldn’t be really possible for PeerTube to become a serious alternative to YouTube, because of decentralization.
Like, sure, that may be a good thing in certain cases - we’re literally on Lemmy - but I want to be able to access content from most PeerTube instances using one singular instance, which isn’t really possible with PeerTube. As a result, the majority of instances feel dead.
I think the only actual way of making a serious alternative to YouTube is to make an open-source and centralized alternative to YouTube (if that doesn’t already exist), but I might be missing something.
Isn’t the entire point of federation to be able to do what you’re describing?
Because videos are heavy and can be lost during federation, a PeerTube instance can only federate with another few instances and not with the entire network iirc, so the content is widely dispersed among PeerTube instances, which means that each instance has very little content.
This is why I think the solution would be to have a centralized open-source platform for this. Because there’s no federation, people are encouraged to go to the main instance, meaning that it will be more alive.