While the fund raising campaign for #PeerTube has reached over 45.000 euro, the developer of PeerTube, Framasoft, introduced a search engine for channels and videos in hundreds of PeerTube instances (currently 533). The name is Sepia Search. This is a long awaited feature. PeerTube instances are due to different policies, not automatically federated with each other. As an example, my current PeerTube instance is federated with only a dozen other instances. This means that if I search on my instance I can only find videos and channels on these dozen instances and not all other instances.

Sepia Search changes all that and now I can find a video or channel that remained otherwise hidden to me. I've tested Sepia Search briefly and I was already able to find a channels of interest. This also means that my own videos can be found more easily and potentially watched more frequently (I'm not making these videos for myself you know).

It's also worth noticing that Sepia Search has handy filter options that enable the user to filter on e.g. license, publishing date or language.

PeerTube is currently a dwarf compared to YouTube but thanks to Sepia Search I became pleasantly surprised by the amount of content already present. Hopefully this will be an important step to disclose PeerTube to a much wider audience. It would be well deserved.