We are continuing Building a Free Internet of the Future, a monthly series of interviews with recipients and consortium members of NGI Zero (NGI0) grants. Funded by the European Commission, NGI0 supports free software, open data, free hardware and free standards projects. It provides financial and practical support in a myriad of forms, including mentoring, testing, security testing, accessibility, dissemination and more.
I was going to say: “I’m honestly surprised you’re able to find any content at all. I want PeerTube to succeed, but I can find nothing worth watching on it.” But logging back into PeerTube, I do see a semi-prominent YouTuber I occasionally watch on there called Shifter… And there’s also The Linux Experiment. (Edit: And RMTransit.) And Flipboard discussing fediverse stuff. But it’s still not nearly enough. The only other channel I see consistently in Trending is someone called Lety Does Stuff, which from what I can gather is a generic reaction channel serving as a front for affiliate links and an NSFW Patreon. (Not sure if I can block those from appearing, since they’re spammy as hell.) For high-production video essay stuff, I already have Nebula, so I don’t mind its absence here too much.
The indie OC on PeerTube could at least be interesting from a kind of early YouTube Wild West perspective, except that it’s just so sparse. For example, there’s a quaint channel I found called Cohan Magazine that does a bunch of camping and wildlife stuff. Not my thing, but I think it adds to the indie vibe. But a lot of the OC is let’s plays, and that to me feels basically like filler content.
It just has that issue where unlike posting on Lemmy, Mastodon, etc., creating content is much harder, so it just can’t get enough momentum. Granted I think PeerTube right now might be in a better place than even a couple months ago when I last checked, but it’s definitely a slow burn.