I agree discoverability is not good, but after gathering subscriptions for a while, I do have a decently active timeline. As for the account, yes it is useful to have one on some instance, especially because of the remote subscribe feature that I found is a reliable way to subscribe to a remote channel. I used to have an account on a public instance which at the time allowed to register an account. Now I host my own.

Things that I found helpful to discover content :

• Follow the #peertube and #livestream hashtags on Mastodon. People tend to advertise their peertube content there.

• Use the peertubify browser extensions so than any video you watch on YouTube that is also available on peertube gets redirected. I was surprised to find some extra channels this way

• Search for specific content using Sepia sepiasearch.org