Sepia Search

Sepia Search is a video search engine for PeerTube. It is developed by the French association Framasoft.

Overview
Sepia Search was launched in September 2020, by the Framasoft association, to serve as a single portal to search for video on hundreds of PeerTube instances.

However, according to the association, this portal is not intended to be exhaustive or to centralise research on all bodies:Notre objectif, avec Sepia Search, n’est pas de présenter l’intégralité de ces contenus. Nous voulons simplement vous montrer l’espace d’autonomie qu’ouvre PeerTube, en respectant les valeurs de transparence, d’ouverture et de liberté que nous défendons depuis plus de 16 ans.

Timeline
The instance search capacity of the Sepia Search portal has grown from around 500 PeerTube instances in September 2020 to almost 800 instances listed in March 2021.

Operation
For any keyword, the service returns results found on all the federated instances.

For a more specific query, it is possible to apply a sorting according to: 1) the date of publication, 2) the video duration or 3) by filtering contents considered sensitive.

The look and feel of this portal is therefore deliberately similar to that of other video platforms for the general public such as Dailymotion, YouTube or Youku.

This service is based on two complementary elements:
 * a search engine (the Sepia Search source code is hosted by framagit and is accessible to all);
 * JavaScript software, serving as a presentation interface for the page (search bar, processing of the request and results display, specifying the name of the instance to which the user goes when he or she clicks on "see this video").