I was navigating to the LibreOffice extension repository. Because I do not head there often, I do not know the link off the top of my head. For that reason, I entered “libre office extensions” into Brave Search. Brave Search, like other search engines, will often include videos along with regular links in its search results. That is not surprising. But what did surprise me was Brave’s first video for my query.
It is admittedly hard to see in the image, but if you follow my illustrative red arrow (thank you Kolour Paint), you will notice that the first of the three videos is not a YouTube video. That first video is from a French PeerTube instance. What is PeerTube? PeerTube is to YouTube what Mastodon is to Twitter and Pixelfed is to Instagram, decentralized social video sharing software. Setting my general qualms about mimicking proprietary social media, PeerTube is an interesting project that I have not had too much opportunity to explore. It is neat to see Brave recommend a PeerTube video before YouTube videos for my search. However, because I do not speak French, I fear that I would not glean much from the content (the fault is my own). I am not sure how the PeerTube video made it to that lofty status, however, I checked the “videos” tab for my query and it was occupied 100% by YouTube videos. Is Brave Search somehow pushing some PeerTube instances? I wonder. Perhaps I will have to explore at some point in the future.