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Comment by kouru225 | Hacker News Reader

So downloading the app and adding my interests my first 10 recommendations are: 1) An educational video about peertube itself by peertube 2) the same educational video about peertube by peertube with English subtitles 3) a slideshow presentation about Framadate in French by framadate 4) an educational video about the fediverse by peertube 5) another educational video about peertube by peertube but this time in French 6) a French video about the pyramids I think? 7) the same educational video about peertube by peertube with Spanish subtitles 8) an educational video about mastodon 9) an educational video about alternative medicine 10) and educational video about TILvids by TILvids

I don’t speak French fyi. Also it doesn’t change what videos I see when I filter by my interests.

Methinks this is not a viable competitor to YouTube.

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It seems like the streaming tech is solid, no issues loading and playing videos. Curation on the other hand seems to be abysmal. I even tried their cutely branded search engine SepiaSearch with similar non-relevant or not so interesting results.

I am also curious how moderation works. How do they prevent inappropriate or illegal content from being shared?

> Methinks this is not a viable competitor to YouTube.

It is not.

I'm French and I have known about the different FramaSoft software for years now. They are all terrible alternatives.

Their approach is completely wrong, they think that being "libre" (free) is enough to acquire market share, and they completely ignore the user experience, feature parity, and innovation. All of their tools are therefore terrible, to the point of being unusable.

They are a paragon of oblivious French mediocrity.

PeerTube specifically has existed for almost a decade and has never been used by anybody. It is an empty shell of a website kept alive just to burn public money.

exactly! i'm so glad i found this comment. you said it so eloquently.

tried so hard to find a video i like, but i just couldn't. can't find a single video for current events, hobbies, or even tech. the search just doesn't work.

the only justification for peertube's existence is that it's libre. but the experience is terrible!!! a frontend engineer can build a better ui over the weekend. peertube existed for a decade, but they couldn't bother to innovate on the ui/ux side all those years.

edit: it's almost 2025, they're building a mobile app, but they chose Flutter. now i understand. they should outsource the tech decision-making

This is a harsh take but makes sense to me, unfortunately. It’s been around forever and has amounted to nothing. There doesn’t seem to be any attention to acquiring users or content. Maybe there are better projects to support?

This is not limited to FramaSoft. A lot of free-software-adjacent developers/organizations suffer from this attitude.

I get exactly the same list of videos when sorting by Most Views. It seems the algo doesn’t consider interests.

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