I think you are mostly right about the lack of content. The limited selection you see on the hot page is basically all that's released from the top 30% of all peertube channels (the one's that federate with me, anyway). I could include more in the index (and probably will, just to get some more breadth) but for now, the content is going to remain thin.
I am also a little careful about indexing because the third problem PeerTube has is the large amount of low quality content. YouTube has this as well, but they have sophisticated algorithms to keep the sludge hidden from you.
I also run the main instance https://peertube.watch/ as kind of an experiment how better discoverability would help the browsability of PeerTube. For example, I only federate with the top 30% of fediverse channels (keep the quality up), then do automatic language detection and some light recommender systems work to give sensible video recommendations. Default PeerTube's video recommendations are all over the place. I know people are skeptical of any type of recommendation algorithm, I feel like as long as it's not personalized it should be ok. Also, if you dislike how a specific instance does its recommendations, a user could always just go to a different instance.
For example, https://peertube.watch/w/s9v7ZS8axHDRhXfnY5LyKt shows recommendations for similar linux-related videos. I believe that my recommendations are pretty much the best currently available and I am still unsatisfied with the discoverability.
Hey, I just created an account because I am the person running https://search.peertube.watch/ :)
A few thoughts:
I think you are mostly right about the lack of content. The limited selection you see on the hot page is basically all that's released from the top 30% of all peertube channels (the one's that federate with me, anyway). I could include more in the index (and probably will, just to get some more breadth) but for now, the content is going to remain thin. I am also a little careful about indexing because the third problem PeerTube has is the large amount of low quality content. YouTube has this as well, but they have sophisticated algorithms to keep the sludge hidden from you.
I also run the main instance https://peertube.watch/ as kind of an experiment how better discoverability would help the browsability of PeerTube. For example, I only federate with the top 30% of fediverse channels (keep the quality up), then do automatic language detection and some light recommender systems work to give sensible video recommendations. Default PeerTube's video recommendations are all over the place. I know people are skeptical of any type of recommendation algorithm, I feel like as long as it's not personalized it should be ok. Also, if you dislike how a specific instance does its recommendations, a user could always just go to a different instance.
For example, https://peertube.watch/w/s9v7ZS8axHDRhXfnY5LyKt shows recommendations for similar linux-related videos. I believe that my recommendations are pretty much the best currently available and I am still unsatisfied with the discoverability.