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Comment on Is PeerTube dead or is discoverability bad?

they seem to only give accounts to creators

Yea this is a bit silly. It seems like they manually approve user accounts because they need to be careful with the uploads using up their storage. But a way better solution would be to approve users more liberally, and user accounts would be created without a channel so they cannot upload anything, and creating channels needs to be approved. That way people can freely make user accounts for browsing/following, and the admins can still restrict spam channels from being created and uploading videos.

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roofuskit@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Exactly. The way it is structured seems to forget people who watch the videos are an important part of the community.

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- Die4Ever@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  yes Youtube has maybe a billion user accounts with 0 videos, it’s the main way to use the platform
  
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andrew_s@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

they seem to only give accounts to creators

That doesn't seem unreasonable to me. I'll get in trouble for saying it, but I think that PeerTube is for video channels what Lemmy should be for communities. It should be that if you want to start or moderate a community, then you sign up to Lemmy, but if you just want to interact with one, you use a user account provided by software that's fully geared up around users (e.g. Mastodon).

Ignoring for the moment that Lemmy's federation model hasn't been widely adopted, and that comments from Mastodon that appear in Lemmy often have annoying Hashtag / Mention spam, my fantasy version of a post in a Lemmy community would look something like https://tilvids.com/w/wjTD7fp9qy4KmTkBdSoWyc, which was created by a PeerTube user, but has been commented on and voted for by users from Mastodon, Sharkey, PieFed, other PeerTube instances, and MBIN.

Amongst those subscribers, commenters, and voters should be Lemmy users, of course. In this thread, it feels like PeerTube is being criticised by people who want to use it in a way that it's not designed for, because they can't interact with it from their Lemmy account. If inter-op was better, there'd be no need to create a new account anywhere, and it would have a network effect - the channels that people are trying to discover would already have been brought in by other users, and findable through a conventional Lemmy search. Also, the votes and comments from Lemmy users that are currently going to whoever takes a PeerTube video and posts it in the likes of !videos@lemmy.world, would instead be going to original creator. This would also aid discovery (since people would be more likely to see the channel in 'all'), and might have also some incentivising influence on the creator.

Basically, I blame Lemmy.

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- Die4Ever@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Peertube is older than Lemmy though. What you suggest isn’t actually a bad idea, but if that was the goal then they shouldn’t even pretend to support user accounts only channel accounts, channel accounts wouldn’t need to be able to like/comment/subscribe either. They wouldn’t have to bother with their UI rendering likes/dislikes/comments, they wouldn’t need buttons to subscribe, and they wouldn’t need a mobile app either. It’s a good idea, just be a video backend and only support the embedded video player (as it appears on Mastodon), but it doesn’t appear like that was their goal.
  
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  - andrew_s@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    I think they still need a separate user account. For one thing, a PeerTube channel is 'attributedTo' the user account, in the same way that Lemmy communities are 'attributedTo' the moderators. A Group belongs to at least one Person, it can't belong to itself. Another is that it allows for creators to comment on videos, and either be recognised as the 'OP', or as a fellow content creator.
    
    In terms of rendering things like Likes and Dislikes, it has the info in the backend, so it may as well. They don't Announce votes like Lemmy does, you have to activitely fetch them, so the channel as it exists on PeerTube provides a definitive source. Likewise, there's all sorts of reasons why comments get out of sync, so the channel provides an authoritative place where you should be able to see them all.
    
    There is a friction though. I like the idea of a place that only open to people willing to create content, and isn't interested in signups from 'lurkers', but providing a mobile app doesn't seem compatible with that.
    
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