Hmm my first linux distro was Suse 5.x that came on 5 CDs (i think it was 1998) … can’t say I used it much, I had weird German ISDN Internet at the time and the PPPoverWhatever (forgot the exact name) just didn’t wanna work. Making music wasn’t really feasible at the time. It mostly lay dormant. I slowly climbed the learning curve and switched to Linux full-time in the mid-2000s, when a lot more things were possible …

Meh … I wish there was a middle ground. Non-corporate, yet effective. Unfortunately, the Fediverse is only the first.

Discovery algorithms can be great, if applied with care. And I really think ActivityPub is not very effective at showing interesting stuff, while from a user perspective it’s super intransparent. Personally I’d prefer a centralized user experience to the Fediverse fragmentation any day … I guess I’m really only here because I’m fed up with corporate bullshit.

(sorry for the late reply)

https://see.ellipsenpark.de/ --> again, single-user, single-topic, more of an archive really

I’m running my own instance, and typically post my stuff on mastodon, so I guess I have made the first step?

It’s a bit of a Catch-22 I suppose … low numbers of viewers makes it less attractive for creators, and fewer interesting creators make it less attractive for viewers.

Taking into account the other aspects that make it less attractive for viewers (fragmentation and inconvenience … having to dig through “Find the right instance for you” tutorials, no matter how well curated, can be a bit of a turn-off compared to just going to a central point and find what you’re looking for), I don’t have that much hope that it’ll reach a critical mass of both viewers and creators to catapult Peertube into large-scale relevance … as sad as I am about saying that.

“If you can find it” … that’s the crucial point I suppose … but without a discovery algorithm, interesting creators, and a VAST content archive, it can hardly be called an “alternative” for YouTube.

When I was looking into it I found the best use case was to use it as a self-hosted video archive to replace/extend my Vimeo. At least at that point, all instances that were remotely interesting were not taking any users, and the generic ones seemed to be very far away from what I’m doing content-wise.

And I guess as long as that’s the case, and you have no ways to monetize content nor any significant reach due to the federated fragmentation, I don’t think it’s an interesting software/federated platform for creators …

Hope in what sense? Hope that it’s generally possible to connect online without corporate social media? Sure …

Hope that it’ll become a replacement social media at a large scale? Probably not … I think the way push-federation is implemented makes it inconvenient and hard to grasp, and generally people seem to prefer centralized platforms for the sheer convenience of use, which is hard to beat.

So I guess it’ll remain stable in it’s own little niche … which isn’t bad I suppose …

I guess whether it’s a flaw or not depends on your expectations … definitely feels like a big drawback to me …

Hmm in theory I get that, but in practice it’s not always easy to grasp.

When Fediverse stuff comes up as an “alternative” it’s often depicted as “leave Instagram, join Pixelfed” … not “join pixelfed.social” or “join pixelfed.de” … it’s often presented as if the instance you choose doesn’t matter that much. Which, is now pretty clear to me, is not true at all. It also seems a bit at odds with the idea of decentralization because if you want your content to be seen there’s a big incentive to join an already-large instance.

Apart from that, as a practical consequence, it’s hard to understand why, when and where you see something … like, a common point of criticism about corporate social media is that algorithms boost content in often hard-to-understand ways … but in the Fediverse, it just seems a different kind of intransparency, as long as you don’t just stick to your local instance.

Hmm ok … the servers are both pretty large so I assume they should be well-federated (if that’s the right term).

But that flaw kinda means that effectively, information trickles through unpredictably and what you see is quite dependent on which instance you’re on … is that understanding correct?