[kuu]

Not a single button to download the app on the landing page.

A lot of info about the company who made it, a lot of info about how bad other actors are, and a lot about requesting funding, but not a single video, neither how to explore the platform or download anything.

I guess this is not made for users...

[davepeck]

Alas, this is par for the course in the Fediverse. Mastodon is the only ActivityPub-using social network I'm aware of that has broken away from this. (Maybe Lemmy, to some degree?)

Social networks that focus on people and user experience have a shot. My hunch is those -- like PeerTube -- that focus on technical, political, or philosophical motivations will always be niche at best.

(Which is not to discourage experimentation! This seems to be a fantastic moment to experiment with social media design.)

[jonny_eh]

> Mastodon is the only ActivityPub-using social network I'm aware of that has broken away from this

I tried signing up for Mastodon a couple years back, and failed somehow. Thankfully Threads and Bluesky are easier to use. Hopefully Mastodon has improved, but I'm already using two other competing micro-blogging platforms now.

[weberer]

There are buttons for the Play Store and App Store halfway down. Its under the heading: "A very first build, limited by (play & i) stores"

[derekdahmer]

Even after reading this comment I went searching for the button and it took a while to find it.

And the homepage says in bold letters “The PeerTube mobile app for Android & iOS is out!” but it’s not a link! There’s a link further down but it goes to this article where you then have to scroll.

Not every site has to be super conversion optimized but it’s just common sense to put a CTA at the head of an announcement. joinmastodon.org gets it!

[theandrewbailey]

That's 2/3rds down a very long page. Most people won't go down that far unless they're quite interested in the material.

[wat10000]

But not on https://joinpeertube.org/, which seems pretty important.

[_ache_]

There is another one at the end.

[Animats]

Right. They even have a nice picture of their SepiaSearch web page, with a picture of the search box. But is it a live search box? No. I have videos on PeerTube, and I never heard of SepiaSearch.

PeerTube is a good way to host videos, but nobody will discover them from PeerTube. I put technical videos there, which are referenced in other forums. They play fine. Here's one.[1] I get maybe a hundred plays. I just view PeerTube as something like imgBB, a place to host content that you can't store on a forum that doesn't handle images. Like HN.

PeerTube should be used more like WordPress - something lots of sites run for their own videos. What PeerTube does is offload playout to the browsers of others watching the same video at the same time. This allows modest streaming servers to, at least in theory, serve large numbers of users. I don't think any PeerTube video has gone viral enough to test that scaling.

Note that this is not like BitTorrent. It's just caching and streaming, not copy distribution. There's one master copy, and peers only host copies while playing.

[1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/349011f0-4029-4818-bc41-40fab2...

[Tmpod]

I was under the impression that you could permanently "seed" videos for others, even if you're not the origin instance, through WebTorrent or something along those lines. Fuzzy memory tho

[KoftaBob]

It's amusing that the Mastodon creator is German, and PeerTube French, as the user experience on Mastodon can feel strikingly similar to dealing with the labyrinthine bureaucracy of European regulations.

On Mastodon, the fragmented network of servers and the need to grasp federation mechanics mirrors the intricate web of European policies, where navigating localized laws and cross-border harmonization can feel like wading through red tape.

Both present an ostensibly open and decentralized structure, promising freedom and community-led participation, yet are riddled with complexities that bewilder newcomers.

[catapart]

I've used PeerTube for years and it has always baffled me how laughably bad its user experience is. Literally so bad that I've never told someone about it without them immediately just asking me stuff instead of getting the information - or even better: videos that the person wanted to see - from the website(s).

Maybe the mobile client is a step in the right direction? I can hope! But the fact that I have to tell people "okay, so sepiasearch is kind of like the youtube front page...ish?" is already just infinitely dumb. Make a damn client whose name indicates, in some way, that it's a video website. And then shows some damn videos on the front page. Randomize them if you really can't stand "algorithms", but honestly, just put some videos on a page with "videos" in the url (or something similar), and you can cut down on most of the confusion I've seen.

Engineers get so lost up their own asses about this stuff because they can't see that UX is entirely divorced from functional processes. The user needs to do thing X, and the computers can only provide processes Y, Z, etc; forcing the user to reconcile with Y and Z just because they want X is the definition of "programmer design". It's refusing to engage with the very real ways in which users understand and interact with services, for whatever sake the engineers want to make up ("I don't like to obfuscate what is happening", "this is not complicated. users should be able to understand", "it would waste resources to provide a more streamlined experience", etc. These are all terrible reasons to not bridge the interaction gap between developers and users). Bluesky is my favorite example of people abstracting away the complications of this stuff. Yes, they had to centralize some parts to start with, yes they had to compromise on features - but the damn thing is instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with microblog social media. That's all peertube has had to do for years now, and they have just staunchly refused to do it.

Like I said, hopefully the mobile app is their first steps in the right direction with this stuff. They've been doing the dev stuff - made it work, made it fast, made it good! Now they just need to do the user stuff - make it simple, make it familiar, make it accessible.

[api]

> Engineers get so lost up their own asses about this stuff because they can't see that UX is entirely divorced from functional processes.

This is one of the main reasons that open source has never penetrated beyond engineers, IT people, and computer hobbyists.

The problem is that when you are good at using computers it's not easy to see how unbelievably confusing they are to people who are not good at using them.

The other is that there's no funding system to pay people to do the not-fun parts of programming or to maintain the more user-facing aspects of projects.

[jeffbee]

That is the fediverse disease. Boosters seem to believe that people care about all this inside baseball stuff, when in fact it is repulsive to normal people.

[aloisdg]

There is one mid page and one at the bottom. Did you open the link?

[herval]

it's a really confusing page. I couldn't find it either...

[GTP]

The announcement has links, maybe they will add those to the homepage later.

[jchw]

I think that's mainly because PeerTube itself is software, not a platform. It'd be like complaining "The Thunderbird website doesn't show me how to get an e-mail account."

Granted, they can and should do a bit better here by giving people who searched "PeerTube" some directions to go in (including, clearly, adding app downloads.) That said, it's somewhat understandable that it's not a focus: I reckon 9 times out of 10 when someone finds PeerTube in the wild, it's from a PeerTube instance itself. Besides that, having a specific place to go defeats the purpose of federation somewhat.

[wat10000]

This is more like complaining that the Thunderbird web site doesn’t have links to download Thunderbird.

[immibis]

That's why software loses to platforms. Platforms are convenient, and software isn't. Businesses know this, but open source developers don't really, and they don't have money to commit to running platforms anyway. You couldn't make a new email today with any degree of popularity - and many attempts were made, from XMPP to Matrix to the Fediverse.

[_ache_]

Like, "joinpeertube" ? The first result if I type "Peertube" on Google (I'm french, it may be different in USA).

https://joinpeertube.org/en_US

[agumonkey]

Maybe a small lack of energy, peertube was quite user friendly, so I don't think they messed up blindly.

[jillyboel]

It's a blogpost about the release of their app for peertube. If you don't know what peertube is, just check their homepage...? It's been around for a while.

[engineer_22]

Even worse, there's no link to the app on the home page.

[meiraleal]

> I guess this is not made for users

The finesse of HN. If you don't do marketing like we preach, you hate users.