I’ve built a project called PeerTube Browser — a platform that aggregates videos
from (almost) all PeerTube instances into a single interface. The main idea is
simple: improve discovery across the federated network. PeerTube is powerful,
but finding interesting content across instances is still difficult. This
project indexes videos and provides a custom recommendation system that I
designed and implemented myself. It’s still evolving, but it already allows
exploring content beyond a single instance’s local or federated feed. At the
moment, data is collected via a crawler and the public PeerTube APIs. Instances
are filtered using the public whitelist from joinpeertube.org
[http://joinpeertube.org], plus several manual blocks to exclude unwanted
content (pornography and other low‑quality or abusive material). The filtering
approach is pragmatic and still evolving. The project is still at an early
stage. The recommendation system is based on embedding vectors, ANN (approximate
nearest neighbor) search, and user likes. All recommendation logic is executed
server‑side. User likes are currently stored locally in the browser
(localStorage), which allows generating personalized results without requiring
account registration. In the future, I plan to make the recommendation system
user‑configurable — allowing people to influence how results are ranked and what
signals are prioritized. One of the core goals is to implement direct
ActivityPub support, so the system can receive up‑to‑date data from instances in
a more native and federated way, instead of relying primarily on crawling
wherever possible. My goal is twofold: • Help viewers discover videos they
wouldn’t normally encounter. • Help creators improve visibility and overall
discovery within the PeerTube ecosystem. I have many ideas about how this system
could evolve — especially around ranking, recommendation logic, and improving
cross‑instance discovery — but before pushing further, I would really value
feedback from people who actually use PeerTube. If you’re interested, you can
try it here: https://peertube-browser.com/ [https://peertube-browser.com/]
Please test it and share your thoughts. What works? What feels wrong? What would
make it genuinely useful for you? Important note: the service is currently
hosted on my personal workstation. I live in Ukraine, and due to electricity
instability and the fact that I sometimes power down my machine, the site may
occasionally be unavailable. At the moment I don’t have the resources to host it
on a VPS or dedicated server. Despite these limitations, I’m committed to
developing the project further — especially if there’s real interest and
constructive feedback from the community. The project is open source.
Repository: https://github.com/denikryt/PeerTube-browser
[https://github.com/denikryt/PeerTube-browser] For discussions, feature
proposals, and deeper technical feedback, it would be most convenient for me to
communicate via GitHub Discussions:
https://github.com/denikryt/PeerTube-browser/discussions
[https://github.com/denikryt/PeerTube-browser/discussions] I invite anyone
interested in the project to join the discussion there. Thanks to anyone willing
to test it and share their perspective.
Neat but I’m getting errors just loading the page.
A better browsing experience is definitely a nice idea though. I wonder if we couldn’t just improve the UI/UX of the actual peertube web interface though so that all instances benefitted from this work? (For example, allow setting up aggregate indexers on the instance settings (links to json repos) so that channels that exist on other unknown instances can be found quicker.)