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.
Easy, there's no advertising money incentives on peertube. People who put in the most effort aim for sponsorships, and sponsors aren't looking at peertube.
To succeed, peertube would need to leverage leftist mutual aid networks to get community funded videos and livestreams.
I don't think that's a bad thing. PeerTube's goal is to be a sustainable video hosting platform. It has not had a goal of popularity.
I don't think it's a bad thing, design-wise. I just think consumerist culture sucks.
I have a couple peertube instances. These are norwegian and I plan to connect them to other peertube instances with similar themes. The first one is about extinction rebellion in scandinavia and the other is about earthspace mastery (guitar, juggling and handstanding for example).
My biggest problem so far is that I have lacked the energy to stay active on them.
Yeah, running multiple instances can be quite the investment of time and energy (sometimes also money). It can initially seem easy to run an instance, especially if you're self-hosting one, and maybe have one or two more as a side-project. But, the demands that come from running multiple instances can steadily increase over time.
This is partially why I had to open up VidCommons as a joint project. Even though I still do most of the server maintenance, trying to run it all by myself was an absolute nightmare.
I use spacebear federation. So at least I don't have to think about the technical stuff. I pay 20$ a month for each instance. And if I remember correctly, I get 25gb on each.
Good analysis and possible solutions. I was working on a video about the same topic but that seems a bit superfluous now. A couple of remarks.
IMO TILvids is the instance with the best content by far (I'm sorry). The reason is that the admin or host is very active both in attracting content creators and promoting content within the Fediverse. I'm not saying that instances like diode.zone, share.tube and spectra.video are bad. Not at all but the TILvids approach could be an example for other hosts (except for the part that they are not federating with other instances). Too many admins start a PeerTube instance and don't seem to bother about it any more.
Also almost all (good) content creators on PeerTube are also on YT. This gives viewers little incentive to watch on PeerTube. If PeerTube hosts can somehow convince content creators to leave YT that would be a big win. But I'm afraid that currently only YT can make that happen since YT is it's own biggest threat.
I've also noticed some improvement in content lately. A year ago almost everything on my instance trending page was old content but now I see recent content of proper quality.
It may also be a good idea to promote other use cases that stimulate spinning up PeerTube instances, or use an existing host for that. For instance there are so many initiatives, non-profits, public institutions that want to improve the tech landscape, yet exclusively dump their video content to YT, reference it in their pages and expose you to the trackers that involves. Their strategy should be to first publish to their own PeerTube and then afterwards to alternative channels. This also protects them from their channel taken down or censored for some reason or other, assuring no links get broken and they have an archive to fall back to.
I agree. The most prominent example is the Blender Foundation that has their own instance (https://video.blender.org/videos/local). Judging by the number of views people are having a hard time finding. Small wonder since I couldn't find any link to it on the Blender Foundation website. A missed opportunity.