Chocobozzz
Add social context to video posts
Describe the problem to be solved
I think it should be possible to "mention" a video, user, or channel in the metadata of a video. This could help with content discovery, inspire more posting activity, and improve the quality of interactions within and across Peertube instances.
Example: mentioning a video
Bob posts a video asking viewers to respond to a question. Bill answers this question in a video of his own, and includes the URL to Bob's original video. Bob receives a notification when Bill's video is published. A small embed of Bob's video is shown below Bill's video in or near the comments section, and vice versa if Bob approves.
Example: mentioning a channel
Hannah posts a video documenting a project that she has been working on with collaborator Emi, who has their own Peertube channel. Hannah includes URLs to Emi's channel. A channel miniature embed is shown on the page for Hannah's video in or near the video description, and Emi receives a notification when Hannah's video is published.
Describe the solution you would like
I can imagine two ways that this could be implemented.
Video object property: Video objects could have one or more properties that take Peertube URLs. When the video is published, users are notified that their video or channel has been mentioned.
Pingbacks when a custom Peertube HTML tag is used: In general, it might be nice if users were automatically notified when their account, channel, or video is embedded on a Peertube instance, e.g. on someone's home page. This would essentially function as a "mention". From there all that would remain is to enable custom Peertube HTML tags in video descriptions.
If this feature proved useful I can imagine further developments for user-friendliness, such as:
- a button on video pages that says "reply to this". This would essentially be the same as the video reply feature that existed on Youtube before it was bought by Google.
- ability to mention a user or channel by their @ handle. I can also imagine this feature one day extending to mentions across ActivityPub platforms.
I've spent more time testing and here's what I understand at this point about how mentions work in the latest version of Peertube:
- It’s already possible to mention a local user or channel using @ in comments or descriptions, but only comments generate a notification.
- Does not work with users or channels on other Peertube websites. There seems to be something that’s trying to make it work - it generates a “redirect” link - but it doesn’t know how to parse the handle so it just opens a .json file with an error code in it
- Same thing happens when mentioning an account on a different ActivityPub platform
- But it seems to work quite nicely if the comment originated on Mastodon? e.g. comment under here: https://peertube.intrapology.com/w/tfsP1pCxkwVBenF9Txvw1J
- Mentions of Peertube accounts that originate on Mastodon do not seem to generate a notification in Peertube.
I also investigated some possible workarounds that might have facilitated something like the video reply feature I'm imagining:
- I cannot leave comments using my Mastodon account if I’m logged in with my local Peertube account, so generating a non-local mention that way is not convenient
- Video URLs in comments do not generate an embed or mention, so posting a video as a comment isn't satisfying
- Peertube embed html for Home page does not work in video descriptions, so I can't add previews of other videos manually
Especially mentioning a video would be fantastic! I think mentioning a title can get tricky so does each video have an ID number or something that can be referenced?
