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, 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:
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
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
I invite anyone interested in the project to join the discussion there.
Thanks to anyone willing to test it and share their perspective.