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Not a single button to download the app on the landing page. A lot of info about the company who made it, a lot of info about how bad other actors are, and a l

by kuu 2y ago

Not a single button to download the app on the landing page. A lot of info about the company who made it, a lot of info about how bad other actors are, and a lot about requesting funding, but not a single video, neither how to explore the platform or download anything. I guess this is not made for users...

weberer 2y ago
There are buttons for the Play Store and App Store halfway down. Its under the heading: "A very first build, limited by (play & i) stores"
- theandrewbailey 2y ago
  That's 2/3rds down a very long page. Most people won't go down that far unless they're quite interested in the material.
  - aloisdg 2y ago
    You wont install an app if you are not interested in the material
    - Goronmon 2y ago
      None of the apps I've installed in the past are because I was invested in the developer's marketing materials.
    - atomicfiredoll 2y ago
      That's an assumption and not necessarily true. Some users may read it, some may skim, some may come to the page already convinced. For those latter groups, having a fast lane/shortcut call-to-action visible someplace like the top gives them a way to get started before they get overwhelmed/distracted and potentially leave.
    - herval 2y ago
      that's the kind of attitude that makes otherwise successful apps/content/etc created by stiff engineer minds to never experience any success: "they didn't want it anyway", when people literally didn't _understand_ what you were trying to sell.
- wat10000 2y ago
  But not on https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/, which seems pretty important.
- _ache_ 2y ago
  There is another one at the end.
- derekdahmer 2y ago
  Even after reading this comment I went searching for the button and it took a while to find it. And the homepage says in bold letters “The PeerTube mobile app for Android & iOS is out!” but it’s not a link! There’s a link further down but it goes to this article where you then have to scroll. Not every site has to be super conversion optimized but it’s just common sense to put a CTA at the head of an announcement. joinmastodon.org gets it!
aloisdg 2y ago
There is one mid page and one at the bottom. Did you open the link?
- herval 2y ago
  it's a really confusing page. I couldn't find it either...
  - ncr100 2y ago
    Makes me think about dopamine, seriously. Many of the comments here on hacker News are talking about how like difficult it is to find a linked download to get the video so that you can watch the video so that you can go lull and share meme videos about cats playing pianos and what not. Dopamine junkies talk like this. So perhaps there's a need for a dopamine specialist, or a dopamine hit specialty in software development and product management? Certainly marketing exists but marketing has become such a fuzzy wuzzy taboo subject and I think you know we'd like to just inject it all straight into our veins .. .. so how about making a role in open source projects called the Dopamine Optimizer? That way we could celebrate the intention, making a delicious physically resonant software tool? Functionality is a joy, for sure, there's an intellectual Joy to programming, yes, but social acceptance and the delight that comes from having our brain glands squirt out dopamine is an underappreciated aspect of I think the work that a lot of us may do.
    - herval 2y ago
      this is basic design 101. Well designed content works better than badly designed content. If you want someone to read your page and find the button, the onus of making it readable is on you. And there's plenty of pretty basic techniques to achieve that. No need to be a "dopamine specialist".
jchw 2y ago
I think that's mainly because PeerTube itself is software, not a platform. It'd be like complaining "The Thunderbird website doesn't show me how to get an e-mail account." Granted, they can and should do a bit better here by giving people who searched "PeerTube" some directions to go in (including, clearly, adding app downloads.) That said, it's somewhat understandable that it's not a focus: I reckon 9 times out of 10 when someone finds PeerTube in the wild, it's from a PeerTube instance itself. Besides that, having a specific place to go defeats the purpose of federation somewhat.
- _ache_ 2y ago
  Like, "joinpeertube" ? The first result if I type "Peertube" on Google (I'm french, it may be different in USA). https://joinpeertube.org/en_US https://joinpeertube.org/en_US
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - jchw 2y ago
    Checking again, I've made a realization: that's the same landing page. Which does actually have the operative information on it, but it's acting half as a landing page for what PeerTube is and half as a call-to-action for where to go. I think this is a bit disorienting: the two different purposes should be split into different pages and possibly even different websites in my opinion. It'd be ideal if what you got as a user was a couple sentences explaining what PeerTube is and then just an interface to find an instance. I also think a big CTA for "Download App" would be a good addition to the credit of the root comment of this thread.
    - tpoacher 2y ago
      The top of the page has "What is Peertube • Browse Content • Upload video" I mean, it could be a bit more visible, I guess, but it's not exactly invisible. I get the point that maybe have browse content as the main page ... but given that the point of peertube is the network not the videoclient, the current page also makes sense to me.
jillyboel 2y ago
It's a blogpost about the release of their app for peertube. If you don't know what peertube is, just check their homepage...? It's been around for a while.
- engineer_22 2y ago
  Even worse, there's no link to the app on the home page.
jeffbee 2y ago
That is the fediverse disease. Boosters seem to believe that people care about all this inside baseball stuff, when in fact it is repulsive to normal people.
catapart 2y ago
I've used PeerTube for years and it has always baffled me how laughably bad its user experience is. Literally so bad that I've never told someone about it without them immediately just asking me stuff instead of getting the information - or even better: videos that the person wanted to see - from the website(s). Maybe the mobile client is a step in the right direction? I can hope! But the fact that I have to tell people "okay, so sepiasearch is kind of like the youtube front page...ish?" is already just infinitely dumb. Make a damn client whose name indicates, in some way, that it's a video website. And then shows some damn videos on the front page. Randomize them if you really can't stand "algorithms", but honestly, just put some videos on a page with "videos" in the url (or something similar), and you can cut down on most of the confusion I've seen. Engineers get so lost up their own asses about this stuff because they can't see that UX is entirely divorced from functional processes. The user needs to do thing X, and the computers can only provide processes Y, Z, etc; forcing the user to reconcile with Y and Z just because they want X is the definition of "programmer design". It's refusing to engage with the very real ways in which users understand and interact with services, for whatever sake the engineers want to make up ("I don't like to obfuscate what is happening", "this is not complicated. users should be able to understand", "it would waste resources to provide a more streamlined experience", etc. These are all terrible reasons to not bridge the interaction gap between developers and users). Bluesky is my favorite example of people abstracting away the complications of this stuff. Yes, they had to centralize some parts to start with, yes they had to compromise on features - but the damn thing is instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with microblog social media. That's all peertube has had to do for years now, and they have just staunchly refused to do it. Like I said, hopefully the mobile app is their first steps in the right direction with this stuff. They've been doing the dev stuff - made it work, made it fast, made it good! Now they just need to do the user stuff - make it simple, make it familiar, make it accessible.
- api 2y ago
  > Engineers get so lost up their own asses about this stuff because they can't see that UX is entirely divorced from functional processes. This is one of the main reasons that open source has never penetrated beyond engineers, IT people, and computer hobbyists. The problem is that when you are good at using computers it's not easy to see how unbelievably confusing they are to people who are not good at using them. The other is that there's no funding system to pay people to do the not-fun parts of programming or to maintain the more user-facing aspects of projects.
KoftaBob 2y ago
It's amusing that the Mastodon creator is German, and PeerTube French, as the user experience on Mastodon can feel strikingly similar to dealing with the labyrinthine bureaucracy of European regulations. On Mastodon, the fragmented network of servers and the need to grasp federation mechanics mirrors the intricate web of European policies, where navigating localized laws and cross-border harmonization can feel like wading through red tape. Both present an ostensibly open and decentralized structure, promising freedom and community-led participation, yet are riddled with complexities that bewilder newcomers.
davepeck 2y ago
Alas, this is par for the course in the Fediverse. Mastodon is the only ActivityPub-using social network I'm aware of that has broken away from this. (Maybe Lemmy, to some degree?) Social networks that focus on people and user experience have a shot. My hunch is those -- like PeerTube -- that focus on technical, political, or philosophical motivations will always be niche at best. (Which is not to discourage experimentation! This seems to be a fantastic moment to experiment with social media design.)
- jonny_eh 2y ago
  > Mastodon is the only ActivityPub-using social network I'm aware of that has broken away from this I tried signing up for Mastodon a couple years back, and failed somehow. Thankfully Threads and Bluesky are easier to use. Hopefully Mastodon has improved, but I'm already using two other competing micro-blogging platforms now.
  - davepeck 2y ago
    Yeah, absolutely. Despite its growth, IMHO Mastodon is still a usability mess in the sense that a typical user will find it needlessly complicated compared to any alternative that is perceived as equivalent. The confusion starts early, with onboarding. I think this is one of the reasons why, for instance, Threads became a larger social network in its first ~24 hours than Mastodon had in its entire 6-ish year run to that point.
    - bagels 2y ago
      I was curious what the experience was like, having never used Mastadon. I searched for "Mastadon Signup" First page is a bunch of rules. I don't mind moderation and decorum, but leading with that sends a signal to me that the moderation is going to be even more capricious than Reddit.
      - archargelod 2y ago
        > that sends a signal to me that the moderation is going to be even more capricious than Reddit That's actually where mastodon (and other fedi-platforms) different from a mainstream social media, because you have a choice: - you can choose an instance with very strict moderation to be in an echo chamber with like-minded individuals. - or if you choose instance with little to no moderation - you'll find yourself on a platform where everyone speaks what's really on their mind, even if it's socially unacceptable. Choosing instance is hard, because popular ones are blocking a lot of small instances (mostly because of spam). But simply choose a server close to your interests, you can transfer your account between instances later.
Animats 2y ago
Right. They even have a nice picture of their SepiaSearch web page, with a picture of the search box. But is it a live search box? No. I have videos on PeerTube, and I never heard of SepiaSearch. PeerTube is a good way to host videos, but nobody will discover them from PeerTube. I put technical videos there, which are referenced in other forums. They play fine. Here's one.[1] I get maybe a hundred plays. I just view PeerTube as something like imgBB, a place to host content that you can't store on a forum that doesn't handle images. Like HN. PeerTube should be used more like WordPress - something lots of sites run for their own videos. What PeerTube does is offload playout to the browsers of others watching the same video at the same time. This allows modest streaming servers to, at least in theory, serve large numbers of users. I don't think any PeerTube video has gone viral enough to test that scaling. Note that this is not like BitTorrent. It's just caching and streaming, not copy distribution. There's one master copy, and peers only host copies while playing. [1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/349011f0-4029-4818-bc41-40fab28c26b4 https://video.hardlimit.com/w/349011f0-4029-4818-bc41-40fab2...
- Tmpod 2y ago
  I was under the impression that you could permanently "seed" videos for others, even if you're not the origin instance, through WebTorrent or something along those lines. Fuzzy memory tho
  - Animats 2y ago
    I don't think so. There's no permanently running client program. The client side is all in the browser.
meiraleal 2y ago
> I guess this is not made for users The finesse of HN. If you don't do marketing like we preach, you hate users.
GTP 2y ago
The announcement has links, maybe they will add those to the homepage later.
agumonkey 2y ago
Maybe a small lack of energy, peertube was quite user friendly, so I don't think they messed up blindly.

by kuu 2y ago

weberer 2y ago

There are buttons for the Play Store and App Store halfway down. Its under the heading: "A very first build, limited by (play & i) stores"

theandrewbailey 2y ago
That's 2/3rds down a very long page. Most people won't go down that far unless they're quite interested in the material.
- aloisdg 2y ago
  You wont install an app if you are not interested in the material
  - Goronmon 2y ago
    None of the apps I've installed in the past are because I was invested in the developer's marketing materials.
  - atomicfiredoll 2y ago
    That's an assumption and not necessarily true. Some users may read it, some may skim, some may come to the page already convinced. For those latter groups, having a fast lane/shortcut call-to-action visible someplace like the top gives them a way to get started before they get overwhelmed/distracted and potentially leave.
  - herval 2y ago
    that's the kind of attitude that makes otherwise successful apps/content/etc created by stiff engineer minds to never experience any success: "they didn't want it anyway", when people literally didn't _understand_ what you were trying to sell.
wat10000 2y ago
But not on https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/, which seems pretty important.
_ache_ 2y ago
There is another one at the end.
derekdahmer 2y ago
Even after reading this comment I went searching for the button and it took a while to find it. And the homepage says in bold letters “The PeerTube mobile app for Android & iOS is out!” but it’s not a link! There’s a link further down but it goes to this article where you then have to scroll. Not every site has to be super conversion optimized but it’s just common sense to put a CTA at the head of an announcement. joinmastodon.org gets it!

aloisdg 2y ago

There is one mid page and one at the bottom. Did you open the link?

herval 2y ago
it's a really confusing page. I couldn't find it either...
- ncr100 2y ago
  Makes me think about dopamine, seriously. Many of the comments here on hacker News are talking about how like difficult it is to find a linked download to get the video so that you can watch the video so that you can go lull and share meme videos about cats playing pianos and what not. Dopamine junkies talk like this. So perhaps there's a need for a dopamine specialist, or a dopamine hit specialty in software development and product management? Certainly marketing exists but marketing has become such a fuzzy wuzzy taboo subject and I think you know we'd like to just inject it all straight into our veins .. .. so how about making a role in open source projects called the Dopamine Optimizer? That way we could celebrate the intention, making a delicious physically resonant software tool? Functionality is a joy, for sure, there's an intellectual Joy to programming, yes, but social acceptance and the delight that comes from having our brain glands squirt out dopamine is an underappreciated aspect of I think the work that a lot of us may do.
  - herval 2y ago
    this is basic design 101. Well designed content works better than badly designed content. If you want someone to read your page and find the button, the onus of making it readable is on you. And there's plenty of pretty basic techniques to achieve that. No need to be a "dopamine specialist".

jchw 2y ago

I think that's mainly because PeerTube itself is software, not a platform. It'd be like complaining "The Thunderbird website doesn't show me how to get an e-mail account." Granted, they can and should do a bit better here by giving people who searched "PeerTube" some directions to go in (including, clearly, adding app downloads.) That said, it's somewhat understandable that it's not a focus: I reckon 9 times out of 10 when someone finds PeerTube in the wild, it's from a PeerTube instance itself. Besides that, having a specific place to go defeats the purpose of federation somewhat.

_ache_ 2y ago
Like, "joinpeertube" ? The first result if I type "Peertube" on Google (I'm french, it may be different in USA). https://joinpeertube.org/en_US https://joinpeertube.org/en_US
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jchw 2y ago
  Checking again, I've made a realization: that's the same landing page. Which does actually have the operative information on it, but it's acting half as a landing page for what PeerTube is and half as a call-to-action for where to go. I think this is a bit disorienting: the two different purposes should be split into different pages and possibly even different websites in my opinion. It'd be ideal if what you got as a user was a couple sentences explaining what PeerTube is and then just an interface to find an instance. I also think a big CTA for "Download App" would be a good addition to the credit of the root comment of this thread.
  - tpoacher 2y ago
    The top of the page has "What is Peertube • Browse Content • Upload video" I mean, it could be a bit more visible, I guess, but it's not exactly invisible. I get the point that maybe have browse content as the main page ... but given that the point of peertube is the network not the videoclient, the current page also makes sense to me.

jillyboel 2y ago

It's a blogpost about the release of their app for peertube. If you don't know what peertube is, just check their homepage...? It's been around for a while.

engineer_22 2y ago
Even worse, there's no link to the app on the home page.

jeffbee 2y ago

That is the fediverse disease. Boosters seem to believe that people care about all this inside baseball stuff, when in fact it is repulsive to normal people.

catapart 2y ago

I've used PeerTube for years and it has always baffled me how laughably bad its user experience is. Literally so bad that I've never told someone about it without them immediately just asking me stuff instead of getting the information - or even better: videos that the person wanted to see - from the website(s). Maybe the mobile client is a step in the right direction? I can hope! But the fact that I have to tell people "okay, so sepiasearch is kind of like the youtube front page...ish?" is already just infinitely dumb. Make a damn client whose name indicates, in some way, that it's a video website. And then shows some damn videos on the front page. Randomize them if you really can't stand "algorithms", but honestly, just put some videos on a page with "videos" in the url (or something similar), and you can cut down on most of the confusion I've seen. Engineers get so lost up their own asses about this stuff because they can't see that UX is entirely divorced from functional processes. The user needs to do thing X, and the computers can only provide processes Y, Z, etc; forcing the user to reconcile with Y and Z just because they want X is the definition of "programmer design". It's refusing to engage with the very real ways in which users understand and interact with services, for whatever sake the engineers want to make up ("I don't like to obfuscate what is happening", "this is not complicated. users should be able to understand", "it would waste resources to provide a more streamlined experience", etc. These are all terrible reasons to not bridge the interaction gap between developers and users). Bluesky is my favorite example of people abstracting away the complications of this stuff. Yes, they had to centralize some parts to start with, yes they had to compromise on features - but the damn thing is instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with microblog social media. That's all peertube has had to do for years now, and they have just staunchly refused to do it. Like I said, hopefully the mobile app is their first steps in the right direction with this stuff. They've been doing the dev stuff - made it work, made it fast, made it good! Now they just need to do the user stuff - make it simple, make it familiar, make it accessible.

api 2y ago
> Engineers get so lost up their own asses about this stuff because they can't see that UX is entirely divorced from functional processes. This is one of the main reasons that open source has never penetrated beyond engineers, IT people, and computer hobbyists. The problem is that when you are good at using computers it's not easy to see how unbelievably confusing they are to people who are not good at using them. The other is that there's no funding system to pay people to do the not-fun parts of programming or to maintain the more user-facing aspects of projects.

KoftaBob 2y ago

It's amusing that the Mastodon creator is German, and PeerTube French, as the user experience on Mastodon can feel strikingly similar to dealing with the labyrinthine bureaucracy of European regulations. On Mastodon, the fragmented network of servers and the need to grasp federation mechanics mirrors the intricate web of European policies, where navigating localized laws and cross-border harmonization can feel like wading through red tape. Both present an ostensibly open and decentralized structure, promising freedom and community-led participation, yet are riddled with complexities that bewilder newcomers.

davepeck 2y ago

Alas, this is par for the course in the Fediverse. Mastodon is the only ActivityPub-using social network I'm aware of that has broken away from this. (Maybe Lemmy, to some degree?) Social networks that focus on people and user experience have a shot. My hunch is those -- like PeerTube -- that focus on technical, political, or philosophical motivations will always be niche at best. (Which is not to discourage experimentation! This seems to be a fantastic moment to experiment with social media design.)

jonny_eh 2y ago
> Mastodon is the only ActivityPub-using social network I'm aware of that has broken away from this I tried signing up for Mastodon a couple years back, and failed somehow. Thankfully Threads and Bluesky are easier to use. Hopefully Mastodon has improved, but I'm already using two other competing micro-blogging platforms now.
- davepeck 2y ago
  Yeah, absolutely. Despite its growth, IMHO Mastodon is still a usability mess in the sense that a typical user will find it needlessly complicated compared to any alternative that is perceived as equivalent. The confusion starts early, with onboarding. I think this is one of the reasons why, for instance, Threads became a larger social network in its first ~24 hours than Mastodon had in its entire 6-ish year run to that point.
  - bagels 2y ago
    I was curious what the experience was like, having never used Mastadon. I searched for "Mastadon Signup" First page is a bunch of rules. I don't mind moderation and decorum, but leading with that sends a signal to me that the moderation is going to be even more capricious than Reddit.
    - archargelod 2y ago
      > that sends a signal to me that the moderation is going to be even more capricious than Reddit That's actually where mastodon (and other fedi-platforms) different from a mainstream social media, because you have a choice: - you can choose an instance with very strict moderation to be in an echo chamber with like-minded individuals. - or if you choose instance with little to no moderation - you'll find yourself on a platform where everyone speaks what's really on their mind, even if it's socially unacceptable. Choosing instance is hard, because popular ones are blocking a lot of small instances (mostly because of spam). But simply choose a server close to your interests, you can transfer your account between instances later.

Animats 2y ago

Right. They even have a nice picture of their SepiaSearch web page, with a picture of the search box. But is it a live search box? No. I have videos on PeerTube, and I never heard of SepiaSearch. PeerTube is a good way to host videos, but nobody will discover them from PeerTube. I put technical videos there, which are referenced in other forums. They play fine. Here's one.[1] I get maybe a hundred plays. I just view PeerTube as something like imgBB, a place to host content that you can't store on a forum that doesn't handle images. Like HN. PeerTube should be used more like WordPress - something lots of sites run for their own videos. What PeerTube does is offload playout to the browsers of others watching the same video at the same time. This allows modest streaming servers to, at least in theory, serve large numbers of users. I don't think any PeerTube video has gone viral enough to test that scaling. Note that this is not like BitTorrent. It's just caching and streaming, not copy distribution. There's one master copy, and peers only host copies while playing. [1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/349011f0-4029-4818-bc41-40fab28c26b4 https://video.hardlimit.com/w/349011f0-4029-4818-bc41-40fab2...

Tmpod 2y ago
I was under the impression that you could permanently "seed" videos for others, even if you're not the origin instance, through WebTorrent or something along those lines. Fuzzy memory tho
- Animats 2y ago
  I don't think so. There's no permanently running client program. The client side is all in the browser.

meiraleal 2y ago

> I guess this is not made for users The finesse of HN. If you don't do marketing like we preach, you hate users.

GTP 2y ago

The announcement has links, maybe they will add those to the homepage later.

agumonkey 2y ago

Maybe a small lack of energy, peertube was quite user friendly, so I don't think they messed up blindly.