You uh… don’t need to tell people stuff like that.

I mean… I have seen some REALLY REALLY stupid drivers so I could totally see multiple people thinking they found a short cut or not realizing the road they are supposed to be on is 20 feet to the left and there is a reason their phone is losing its shit all while their suspension is getting destroyed.

But yeah. It is the standard tesla corp MO. They detect a dangerous situation and disable all the “self driving”. Obviously because it is up to the driver to handle it and not because they want the legal protection to say it wasn’t their fault.

Yes. Discoverability is the real key. Which also is not at all addressed on peertube and, as I mentioned above, mostly still comes from youtube for the creators who have branched out to other platforms.

A Michael Reeves can get away with just having a kofi and making massive bank because of how big he has gotten… from youtube. Whereas even a Not An Engineer has a channel that lives or dies by collabs and shoutouts from other youtubers (I do suspect he has an independent source of income though).

Also… you put even Not An Engineer on your peertube instance and he is going to consume a disproportionate amount of bandwidth. Let alone a Michael Reeves who would crash the entire fediverse during his annual video.

What you are describing is “if you build it, they will come”. Which is patently false. Ad revenue gets worse and worse every year but it usually is essential to even offsetting parts and labor for a video for smaller creators. I think it was Gamers Nexus that discussed the different tiers of monetization in the context of the honey scandal, but the basic idea is that ads are what let you know if a channel has any legs and referral links are what keep you alive until you are big enough for a sponsor to care.

Which… is also the issue. The kind of sponsors who would fund a peertube video (and just look around at how fediverse folk view ANY form of monetization of the content they consume…) are going to be more bluechew than not, if you catch my drift. And they aren’t going to pay much.

Which gets back to: Peertube as a concept is great for official tutorials and MAYBE blog posts by “nobodies”. Why would anyone go out of their way to join in decentralized hosting of that? And while it is conceptually a great way to “can’t stop the signal” an important video… it either rapidly becomes liveleaks or we see the same thing that happened with Lemmy where the instance owners get a phone call from their local FBI equivalent and rapidly say “I don’t want that smoke”.

But Peertube as something people would even want to browse or create Content for? I have yet to see any path toward that that isn’t “Well, people really love the ideologies of FOSS so they’ll do it out of the goodness of their heart”

And good for you.

But it is the fundamental issue with art. Art needs funding whether that is a patron or a tip jar or whatever. Canvas and paint costs money. Being able to spend an extra afternoon looking at a landscape costs money. Having time to edit and revise your script costs money. And so forth.

And same for youtube. It is the difference between being able to “get it right” versus just using the footage you have and “making it work”. Hell, I love videos that explain how to do basic repairs that I should have learned long ago. And having the money to set up a free standing pipe or cut a bathtub spout in half works a lot better than trying to hold a camera to record yourself replacing a dishwasher airgap and not actually capturing where the clips were.

The issue with “Algorithms” is that you need a lot of data to generate recommendations… which tends to mean centralized (or a LOT of data scraping).

Which is why stuff like Nebula and Floatplane and Ian McCollum’s latest “apolitical” side hustle all are still 100% dependent on Youtube. Hell… I actually still subscribe to Legal Eagle and NileRed on Youtube so that I know when they have a new Nebula video.

And just to be clear: None of the above (including Peertube in general) is competing with Youtube. Well, Floatplane says it is but that is because linus sebastien is a dipshit con man. But it still speaks to the fundamental issue of where Content comes from and what it takes to have the time and resources to do a “good” video.

The problem is that it is just a fundamentally un-profitable platform for creators. Ads don’t work (… period but also) because of the decentralized nature of it. Any instance/frontend that added ads would be shunned in favor of those who don’t. And any video hosted only on a single “instance” would rapidly cost way too much if it ever became moderately popular.

Which means there is no reason for Content Creators to… care. So the best it can ever get is “early youtube”. And people SAY they want early youtube videos but everyone is deeply spoiled by the difference between a video that was made in a week of after work tweaking versus weeks of full time planning and editing.

Which is why peertube in general is one of the “fediverse” products that… I feel really weird about. I forget if Floatplane/Weapons of Guntube/whatever use it or something they rolled themselves, but this really feels like the kind of software project that has the end state of getting “adopted” by a corporation and the major devs hired on as consultants.

Like, twitter (mastodon), reddit (lemmy), and even instagram (??) make sense to me and are very conducive to self hosting since… they are message boards and that is how we used to roll. But video is expensive and hard AND needs incentives to create “good” content for it.