I don't think a change in testing on YouTube for the last few days made any difference to the number of people who used PeerTube last month.
I like PeerTube and use it where I can, but it's still basically the content problem, which is to say there's no content on PeerTube from anyone I follow on Youtube with the exception of one dude. (Hi Jan Beta!)
I watch mostly tech/retro tech/retro gaming/random old crap Youtube stuff so it's a big overlap in user bases, but, well, no monetization means there's no incentive for people who do that as a job so there's still... nothing there.
Youtube won't make a critical screw up that'll tilt the scales meaningfully in the favor of other platforms unless they massacre payouts to the point that Patreon and sponsor funded creators no longer care about Google's pennies, and will be more receptive to at least parallel uploads to other platforms.
The user experience is unlikely to enshittify enough that creators decide to bail from the google money, no matter what they do.
My gut reaction about lack of content in peer tube is because the platform is ethical. It’s my understanding that popular video platforms started by pirating content, marketing campaigns and other shady things . This obviously is a not a good thing here.
This creates a cascading effect where only people who are more ethical ( rather than less ethical) post videos there. And only ethical ( more or less) people watch the videos there for more or less political reasons ( not national politics but belief how things should happen)
There are probably ways for them to jumpstart content there , but are dismissed, never to be used because it’s against the spirit of the idea. Hopefully someone can solve this by doing something that fits into the vision !
That's serious stuff if true. I would often the upload date to avoid reuploads and regurgitated (and lower visual quality) content. It's also extremely useful to know how outdated some advice or guide is.
The amount of April fucking 1st videos that would now be indistinguishable from normal videos alone makes the idea of upload date removal outright dangerous in my opinion.
great... now I can watch a 10 minute long video on how to fix something, just to find out that it's utter garbage (bc of missing dislike) AND uploaded 10 years ago. Great!
Tbh I go back to peertube any time I hit a performance issue. Which is more often then you would think, but I think it's because I'm a Firefox user with adblock.