The fascinating thing about PeerTube right now is that the frontend experience actually seems to be best on other services. This is primarily because discoverability between instances is fairly poor due to both federation mechanics and due to the nature of bootstrapping social. Because Lemmy and Mastodon feature their own human driven mechanisms for content discovery this problem is largely solved so long as you are browsing through another platform (the same mechanisms do not seem to transfer well to a youtube like frontend, although nobody has tried yet). Comments made on Lemmy and Mastodon will also federate back to PeerTube so you're not segregated based on what service you follow from.
Check out some popular channels:
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Tips:
- All of the above are channels. On Lemmy you can only subscribe to channels while on Mastodon you can subscribe to both channels and users. This is important as some videos get federated under the channels and some under the users. I believe this is up to the individual creator.
- Whitelist only is still fairly popular among PeerTube instances so you may not be able to access all creators from your Lemmy instance.
- Federation does not backfill so if the channels appear blank don't panic. It will fill in with future videos.
- If you follow these channels from Mastodon and then put them in a list you have a feed that is analogous to Youtube's subscribed page.
- Major advantage to following from Mastodon in these early days is it puts you in a better position to help these channels grow, If the boost button is right there things are a lot more likely to gain traction.
I really don't see any reason the two can't simply work better in tandem. Video hosting is definitely a whole different beast technically and I don't mind the idea of having a fairly dedicated and experienced team in the form of framasoft. Particularly because Lemmy has it's own set of scaling issues that probably need to be worked on. That said I think that the problem of content discovery is also hard (maybe the hardest) and probably will turn into it's own set of services with some fairly sophisticated tooling but in the short term while that niche remains unfilled Lemmy and Mastodon seem like the natural choice.
Like I said, I think they should wield their expertise towards making alt implementations of Mastodon and Lemmy that support multiple ways of video—paywall or otherwise—because the primary problem with video is always distribution and engagement. Miming YouTube more directly will always fail. It has for two decades now.