I saw a few videos shared on PeerTube recently, and created an account on an instance. However, unlike Mastodon and Lemmy I’m struggling to discover channels to subscribe to. When I use the search functions on my instance, most results are either interesting channels which haven’t been updated in years, or random foreign language TV shows and episodes.

Just for example, if I’m trying to find videos on “Gaming” on one of the largest instances, the most recent video is over 1 year ago: https://tilvids.com/search?categoryOneOf=7

Is discoverability on PeerTube bad, or are there barely any active channels?

Edit: BTW one very active creator on PeerTube is https://tilvids.com/c/thelinuxexperiment_channel/videos and his videos are excellent. But can there really only be a handful of active creators to follow on the whole platform?

  • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    16 hours ago

    I’m not entirely sure what you’re saying. Google owns youtube. If you’re saying people search google, and then click the youtube link results, I mean, yeah, people do that. But it’s not a necessity. I can go to youtube, and search straight from youtube. I CAN search from google, but it’s not a requirement like it is with peertube.

    • notfromhere@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      16 hours ago

      PeerTube doesn’t have search at all? Yea that is kind of nuts. I’ve had bad search experience across Lemmy and Mastodon as well. I wonder how much is due to decentralized nature of the servers, the federation aspect, or just poor search functionality.

      • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        15 hours ago

        Peertube has a search, but by default it only searches it’s own instance. Instance owners can choose to federate with other instances, but thats a choice they need to enable.

        You can use outside searches to search all of peertube, but it’s not a given that you can on peertube directly.

        • Meldrik@lemmy.wtfEnglish
          6·
          14 hours ago

          Instance owners can enable Sepia Search (Global Search Index) on their instances.

          • mesamune@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            3 hours ago

            To instance owners (like myself) looking to be added:

            This has helped with my channels discoverability. Im still not seeing my videos on the search, even directly searching for the title of the videos, but im hoping that changes when the index gets updated.

        • notfromhere@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          15 hours ago

          I’m not opposed to a microservice that indexes the fediverse for creating a robust search index. Without it, you’d have to nearly search each server on each service.