Hi, Spectra Video admin here. We actually use two plugins for “Original Publication Date” sorting:

• peertube-plugin-originally-published-at
• peertube-plugin-sort-originally-published-at

The reason we ended up doing this on our instance is because people were reposting their old videos to get them to the top of the index, which made searching for new content a little bit useless. This wasn’t entirely their fault, some people were syncing their entire YouTube archives with PeerTube through an account connection feature, so forcing videos to be sorted and displayed by their original creation date was a punitive action to help correct this.

We probably need to take another look at using these plugins, as they’re extremely old at this point.