Mike McCue - Hello Fediverse. I’m posting this tonight from my federated Flipboard profile! We’re now testing our #ActivityPub integration starting with my account. You can follow me here to see all the stories I’m curating about things like startups, photography and of course, the #Fediverse. Curious to hear your thoughts on how this is working. We’ll incorporate your feedback as we make more progress on federating Flipboard. Stay tuned for lots more soon.
Does Peertube implement ActivityPub?
Yep, PeerTube instances are all part of the Fediverse.
Can you actually #access PeerTube #content from other #instances? As a Kbin user, I can see both Lemmy threads and Mastodon microblogs and I know Mastodon users can tag Lemmy (and maybe also Kbin) magazines to make threads there. Is there a way to interact with PeerTube like that?
Short answer: yes. But as with most things the exact mechanism depends on where you’re at.
For example most people following my PeerTube account are on Mastodon. Those people see my videos straight in their Mastodon feed and can comment and favourite and boost as normal. Comments and favourites show up on the PeerTube side pretty flawlessly. The videos also show up in a hashtag search from Mastodon servers where I have a follower. Everything just works, it’s great for discoverability.
On Lemmy, you can subscribe to a PeerTube channel (not a whole account, as far as I’m aware), but it doesn’t seem to work as smoothly. For example here’s my channel viewed through my Lemmy instance, lemm.ee. It shows up as a community in my subscriptions list, and new videos show up both in subscriptions feed and in All.
HOWEVER, as you can see there, new videos just sort of stopped federating a month ago. If we view it through lemmy.world instead, there are more recent videos but again not all of them, and some older videos are showing up with more recent dates.
Neither Lemmy server seem to be pulling in comments, just the videos themselves. I’ve not tested whether comments left here actually make it back to PeerTube.
So TLDR there probably is a way to view them on Kbin as well, I’m not sure what the exact mechanism to search for them would be but do bear in mind federation might not be super slick. If you’re on Mastodon though, that’s great for sticking all your PT subs into a list and having it all just right there.
Well, after messing around a little, Kbin seems to be able to do both. I can #follow your PeerTube #user or #subscribe to your #channel. Interestingly, PeerTube seems to allow you to create multiple channels under a username which is kinda similar to Kbin’s #collections or Mastodon’s #lists.
Yeah the account vs channel thing was confusing as a new creator signing up there. On Mastodon you can follow either, but the videos are always posted by the account first and then just boosted by the channel.
Following an account means you’re automatically subbed to all the person’s channels so most prefer to do that anyway, whereas obviously following just a channel is just that channel. This has the vaguely amusing side effect of making channel sub counts absolutely tiny, even if the account has a lot of followers.
I kind of get the impression accounts were supposed to be analogous to YT channels, and channels to YT playlists. But then there’s playlists too so honestly it’s a bit of a mess. If any future PeerTube creators are reading this just make sure your account name is the actual brand! Don’t make the same mistake I did lol.
Actually, I’m quite fond of this #account-#channel formation. It lets people have different channels for different content. Like how some YouTubers have a main channel and a second channel with low quality videos or how some streamers have a VODs channel.
Yeah it works fine, once you know that’s how it works. But I expect a lot of creators would be like me and assume the account name is just the account name, and videos will show as published by the channel name. So more of a PSA that everything gets published by your account and to be aware of that when setting things up :D
Does kbin add # to words randomly? Confused on why those words have them
Oh, I just use #hashtags on my posts to make them easily #searchable. So someone looking to see what people are saying about collections can search “#collections” and find my post.
Who’s going to search for #user or #hashtags though? Seems like it would make much more sense to only # keywords relevant to the topic of the thread?
I try to use hashtags for topics specific to my comment and not already covered by the thread, the comment(s) I’m replying to or the magazine in general since people know they can look under that thread to find more of that topic anyways. Now admittedly, I may not be that consistent with this and might make some tags that fall a bit outside the topic but that’s at least my goal. I wasn’t using Twitter that much before my Reddit migration and I first started using hashtags with Kbin so I’m not sure how exactly they should be used.
I added a test comment here, so you can know what happens if someone comments from Lemmy.
https://lemmy.world/comment/5798346
Thanks! It doesn’t seem to have shown up on the PeerTube side sadly (neither in my notifications nor on the video itself). But let’s see if it makes its way over there given enough time :)
Orly. Hm, may try to setup some kind of support/mirror instance. I don’t have a lot of space but could be helpful maybe.