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?

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[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 36 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I say this everytime someone talks about peertube. You should not need to leave the website to use the website. If I search "crazy guy uses rake to play football", and it's not in the results page, I'm not going to go to ANOTHER website, to search THIS website, for a guy who doesn't understand how to play sports.

[–] Cris_Color@lemmy.world 4 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

Yeah, I agree.

When it comes to building a fediverse service there's a really delicate balance to find with making it unambiguous you're engaging with multiple services, vs creating a singular and cohesive enough user experience, and it seems like the peertube devs just learn reaaally far towards the former at the expense of the latter.

Its a bit frustrating.

Edit: I learned from another user on this thread that sepia search can be enabled by an instance as their search functionality. That definitely helps

[–] notfromhere@lemmy.ml -1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

You say that yet Google search / Internet search is very much a big thing. For the record, I agree with you.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Google search started out when the internet was a collection of unrelated websites and you needed a search engine to discover any of them. If Youtube's search was so useless that you had to leave Youtube, open up Google, search for the content you wanted to see there, and then ended back up on Youtube, you'd be pretty pissed.

[–] notfromhere@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

But it’s not PeerTube, it’s ABC’s PeerTube and BCD’s PeerTube and CDE’s PeerTube, etc.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

The question that basically everyone is going to ask is "so?"

[–] notfromhere@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 hours ago

Username checks out

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.ml 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.world 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.wtf 6 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] mesamunefire@lemmy.world 2 points 12 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.

[–] Cris_Color@lemmy.world 2 points 20 hours ago

I didn't know that, that definitely helps

[–] notfromhere@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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.