I've been wanting to talk about this for a bit, but I've been so busy with life crap that I've hardly had any time for myself.

So, it's been about two and a half months since I quit #Youtube for the #boycott that started August 13th (Youtube has unsurprisingly continued to deteriorate since then), and I've been trying my best to use #PeerTube as a replacement. Today, I'd like to share other observations I've made.

Initially, I stayed on instances like Makertube and Spectra.video, but found their content output highly wanting. So, I bookmarked one of the most federated instances I could find, GayTubeFR. GayTubeFR is currently federated with over 1,400 servers, so you'd think they'd have plenty uploaded there, right?

Well, I decided to manually count the amount of videos uploaded in a single 24 hour period (in English) on a Friday and it's not looking good. Despite being federated with over 1,400 instances, there were only 135 videos uploaded in a single day, less than 10% of the total federation count. What else was concerning was that the majority of videos were bulk/spam/mirror uploads by the same few channels instead of it being all unique channels, so the amount of instances that actually upload daily is definitely below that 10%. Isn't that fucked? The idea that the vast majority of entire INSTANCES don't have a single upload per day? If each instance federated with GayTubeFR uploaded at least ONE video a day, then there'd be at least be 1,400+ videos daily, but we're not even close to that.

There have been many days where I just straight up could not find something I was interested in over that 24-hour period. The conclusion I've come to is that PeerTube's activity is abysmal and honestly nowhere close to being a replacement for Youtube, and it makes me sad to say that.

The quality of a lot of the content is also lacking, which makes it even harder to find something genuinely engaging.

I've said it before, but I think the best course of action to remedy this is to contact #Youtubers and suggest to them to use PeerTube as a backup to avoid Youtube's censorship. Because the only reason Youtube is as cracked as it is is because of the creators, NOT the platform. I don't miss Youtube; I miss the creators I used to watch and their personalities. Even if it's not fully moving them out of Youtube's system, it's a step in the right direction.

#ShortEssay #PeerTubeMeta #Criticism