cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/3452756
The fascinating thing about PeerTube right now is that the frontend experience actually seems to be best on other services. This is primarily because discoverability between instances is fairly poor due to both federation mechanics and due to the nature of bootstrapping social. Because Lemmy and Mastodon feature their own human driven mechanisms for content discovery this problem is largely solved so long as you are browsing through another platform (the same mechanisms do not seem to transfer well to a youtube like frontend, although nobody has tried yet). Comments made on Lemmy and Mastodon will also federate back to PeerTube so you're not segregated based on what service you follow from.
You can subscribe to channels from both Lemmy and Mastodon. Check out some popular channels:
!veronicaexplains_channel@tilvids.com
!letstalkphilosophy_channel@tilvids.com
!alliterative_channel@tilvids.com
!kde@tube.kockatoo.org
!lofiorchestra@makertube.net
!random_retro@makertube.netNOTES:
- All of the above are channels. On Lemmy you can only subscribe to channels while on Mastodon you can subscribe to both channels and users.
- Whitelist only is still fairly popular among PeerTube instances so you may not be able to access all creators from your Lemmy instance.
- Federation does not backfill so if the channels appear blank don't panic. It will fill in with future videos.
- If you follow these channels from Mastodon and then put them in a list you have a feed that is analogous to Youtube's subscribed page.
- Major advantage to following from Mastodon in these early days is it puts you in a better position to help these channels grow, If the boost button is right there things are a lot more likely to gain traction.
You're correct, and especially with that last point. It's actually BETTER for PeerTube creators if people subscribe from other platforms right now, as other platforms are more popular so federating with them increases our potential reach. PT tags turn into searchable Mastodon hashtags and I've had a lot of people find me that way.
Minor correction to the post though, in your first bullet point under "notes". It's not really up to us whether a video looks like it's coming from the channel or the user account. We can only post videos to PT channels, but each Fedi platform handles that differently.
As you said, Lemmy only allows subscriptions to channels (it looks like you can search for user accounts, and see them on Lemmy, but not subscribe).
Mastodon actually displays the video as coming from the user account, and then the channel account just boosts it. So you can sub to either (account means you'll get videos from all of that channel's accounts, channel obviously means you're just getting that channel), but you'll always see the user account name as the poster.