You will probably get the best answers from the peertube community so I suggest you crosspost your question there.

That said, I host a peertube instance. It is the same as any other fediverse service but it is very young so dont expect it to be on par with mastodon and lemmy in terms of usability.

As with all other services, you can make an account on an instance, seeing only what that instance allows you to, either by specifically allowing or disallowing other servers.

So if you want the user experience, check joinpeertube.org for a rather well connected (and or maybe large) instance and join if you want to upload content. If not, you can just use your mastodon account to follow creators or comment on their videos.

If you want freedom to do as you please, you need to get a server that is online (as in not in your home network or at least exposed but treat with caution). You can then install a peertube instance of your own, ideally with a custom domain. Then you can join the network and federate with who and whatever you like.

In any case, framatube is a great company imo but their marketing just isnt that good. Peertube has so much potential and it could be further along by now.

But dont get me wrong. It is still great and here to stay.

Good luck.

I host peertube.wtf and make sure the instance follows as many other instances as possible. I’ve also enabled global search, so that you can get search results from every instance on the list at instances.joinpeertube.org.

I’ve also made the front page of my instance, show some of the interesting channels to follow.

Content on PT is sparse though. It needs more content creators AND users.

Every time I've clicked a peertube link it's loaded like shit so I just avoid the links now. Waiting for another alternative I guess.

I have a channel on my instance where I post videos about PeerTube. Here is one example video on how to subscribe to other instances:

https://tube.jeena.net/w/b5DBfFwPU8FCWW24gCU7TY

It works a lot like Lemmy. Everything's federated, you get to see your local traffic and what the local people on your note are following.

The problem is, peertube is resource intensive. To get the torrent style benefits, you need multiple people watching a given video at the same time.

If you click a link and you're the only person watching it You've got to wait for that one person's hosted instance to stream you the data which is not necessarily performant.

Lacking options for monetization, and poor performance on less reviewed media are stumbling blocks keeping it from going more mainstream. YouTube is also starting to block people from trying to sync to it which will be another problem.

I suspect once YouTube gets its ad blocker blocking sorted out you might see a resurgence in peer tube as people repost popular YouTube videos around the net without ads.

It's also kind of a pain in the ass to stand one up from scratch. I scrapped one together in a VM the other day while I was at work, I gave it self-contained redis and postgres and when it got up to the final install step it demanded that I have the URL already lined up and working and you're not allowed to change the URL after just really disappointing honestly.

I have an account at tube.tchncs.de and just paste the url from accounts on other instances into the search there and then follow them, that works most of the time, sometimes you have to follow them at their instance when the search brings up no results. I wish more creators would use it, I think you can also stream with Peertube?