I have given up on accessing youtube, peertube, odyssey, dailymotion, and whatever else in the browser. Now it's exclusively GrayJay because I can't be bothered to search for videos on different platforms, create accounts on multiple platforms, subscribe to creators on multiple platforms and then check each feed individually. GrayJay just united them all for me.

But I see your point. For being supposedly federated, I don't get why peertube requires pasting links into the search bar. Why can't I find them with, you know, the search? It's baffling. They had to invent https://sepiasearch.org/ for searching across all instances it seems, but it still requires pasting the link into the searchbar of your instance.

It does look like old youtube mix with some parts of newer youtube, I'll give you that. To me, that's what I like about it. It's pretty much low-bullshit, but my eye is not for design.

Are there any well-populated instances you would recommend? I could be convinced to give it another try.

Unfortunately, I don't browse through instance homepages anymore but through the GrayJay app, so my feed is a mix of videos from about 10 different video platforms and at least 3 peertube instances.

If you want to find instances, Join Peertube allows sorting by number of local videos and number of total videos. Dalek.zone, Makers.tube, and peertube.wtf seem like the most active or have the most users and the most videos.