this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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Peertube

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A free software to take back control of your videos

Peertube is an open, federated alternative to Youtube without advertising or tracking. On this site, you can find a good Peertube instance, with good rules, good moderation and most importantly a friendly community.

https://joinpeertube.org/

founded 4 years ago
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Why is the PeerTube app situation still terrible? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml to c/peertube@lemmy.ml
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The way I see it, the mobile app ecosystem for PeerTube has yet to take off, in spite of the fact that it has a seemingly decent API. More people appear to be using the platform than ever before, which is great, but we still seem to be lacking a general ecosystem that Mastodon or even Lemmy has.

To my knowledge, these are the only apps I've ever found that work with PeerTube:

  • Thorium: Supports video playback and sign-in, doesn't support comments or replies or seemingly any social features?
  • P2Play: Seems to support commenting, but abandoned 3 years ago or so.
  • NewPipe: Actually pretty good as a player, but not really designed around the social API at all. Makes sense, given the app is more of a "download and play videos without an account" type of video app.
  • FediLab: Supposedly supports PeerTube, actually seems like a featureful client, but I've always kind of felt iffy about whether a general multi-platform app could make for a good experience.

It just feels as though we're lacking a quality mobile client for PeerTube, and I think it's a missed opportunity. Do we currently now of any other efforts out there to build for the platform?

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[–] thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee 7 points 11 months ago

It doesn't directly answer this need, but I think the reality is most viewers aren't on PeerTube at all, they're on Mastodon. And they're using whatever Mastodon client to watch PeerTube videos. Some clients support direct viewing and others will just show up as a link taking them into the browser.

A dedicated app would be a gamechanger for a very very small number of people, but until that number grows and while everyone is just using other platforms to watch videos, I can understand why nobody's gone to the effort.