The fascinating thing about PeerTube right now is that the frontend experience actually seems to be best on other services. This is primarily because discoverability between instances is fairly poor due to both federation mechanics and due to the nature of bootstrapping social. Because Lemmy and Mastodon feature their own human driven mechanisms for content discovery this problem is largely solved so long as you are browsing through another platform (the same mechanisms do not seem to transfer well to a youtube like frontend, although nobody has tried yet). Comments made on Lemmy and Mastodon will also federate back to PeerTube so you’re not segregated based on what service you follow from.

Check out some popular channels:
!veronicaexplains_channel@tilvids.com
!letstalkphilosophy_channel@tilvids.com
!alliterative_channel@tilvids.com
!kde@tube.kockatoo.org
!lofiorchestra@makertube.net
!random_retro@makertube.net

Tips:

  • All of the above are channels. On Lemmy you can only subscribe to channels while on Mastodon you can subscribe to both channels and users. This is important as some videos get federated under the channels and some under the users. I believe this is up to the individual creator.
  • Whitelist only is still fairly popular among PeerTube instances so you may not be able to access all creators from your Lemmy instance.
  • Federation does not backfill so if the channels appear blank don’t panic. It will fill in with future videos.
  • If you follow these channels from Mastodon and then put them in a list you have a feed that is analogous to Youtube’s subscribed page.
  • Major advantage to following from Mastodon in these early days is it puts you in a better position to help these channels grow, If the boost button is right there things are a lot more likely to gain traction.
  • thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Like any other type of Fedi profile, it’ll be blank with no content shown on Mastodon (or Lemmy) until it’s federated with your instance. Which means someone there needs to be subscribed. Once that happens new videos will show up in feeds and on the account/channel page as expected.

    As far as actually watching the videos goes, seems like it depends on your client. I know the Mastodon web interface gives you the embedded video to watch without leaving the platform, but can’t speak for the various mobile apps.