There is no mandate that YouTube must exist in its current state. YouTube serves two roles, one as a free service to host videos, one as a roulette machine that might pay out money if your "content" is favored by "the algorithm".
A huge amount of videos on YouTube are created for their own sake, with no expectation of going viral or making money off them. PeerTube fulfills the "free video host" role while also being ad-free. I might be naive, but I believe this is how most people saw YouTube around 2012.
The "seeking to make money on YouTube" role is artificially created as a result of a massive corporation running a loss-leader for a decade, dictating what content gets popular through recommendation algorithms, and literally paying people to encourage them to produce more of the desired addicting content.
Who knows what would have happened if YouTube had not been bought out and been allowed to compete fairly with P2P technologies as they emerged.
P2P never really had a YouTube-like creator scene; almost everyone using P2P was using it to download movies for free. YouTube was almost the same way at first until YouTube got spooked by the (arguably baseless) Viacom lawsuit and decided to adopt proactive copyright filtering.
Speaking of litigation, nobody's been sued for watching YouTube. People got sued for BitTorrent traffic all the time; up to and including dedicated settlement extortion operations (e.g. Prenda Law). This is a third role of YouTube we don't really consider: they handle all the stupid copyright stuff so that users don't have to. P2P inherently shoves all the liability[0] onto the users because you dox yourself every time you use it. Imagine, say, someone suing individual P2P users to try and shut down, say, a SSSniperWolf[1] video.
If you took YouTube away today, you'd have creators moving to Nebula or Floatplane, because there's still money in that. There really isn't money in PeerTube. Monetization is the thing that really put YouTube on the map, not free distribution.
Though, to be clear, video distribution is still hilariously expensive. Google considers YouTube to be profitable and has done so for many years, but that is almost certainly because YouTube gets to use Google's favorable peering arrangements with last-mile ISPs. These same ISPs also did all sorts of questionable things to throttle or block BitTorrent traffic back in the day, I imagine they'd come up with new attacks on PeerTube traffic today. The underlying problem is that we don't have any common-carrier regulation on ISPs, so they price traffic based on "value" - i.e. how much they can double-bill the sender of the packets - rather than the cost of that traffic.
If you want a viable YouTube competitor, you want net neutrality regulation.
[0] Ok, before you cite a Ninth Circuit opinion arguing that mere downloading still has liability or something, I'm not saying that you CAN'T EVER be sued for watching YouTube, only that you'd have to sue Google first, and they have big pockets.
[1] Notorious "reaction streamer" that doesn't actually do any reacting in her videos made up of entirely other people's YouTube uploads. Recently infamous for tracking down JacksFilms' physical location and bragging about it on Instagram.
> A huge amount of videos on YouTube are created for their own sake, with no expectation of going viral or making money off them.
It's estimated that there are 1 billion YouTube videos, compared to 600k videos hosted by PeerTube. Thats a 4 order of magnitude difference. Saying that PeerTube can "fill this role" is an outrageous assumption about scaling.
Sure, I should have said "P2P based video sharing like PeerTube". The point is that for videos with no expectation of making money, P2P is a better model than YouTube, as it is both free and ad-free.
I am not saying that PeerTube is better and that people should be using it. I am saying that it is worse, because of the way YouTube developed and made competition impossible.
A huge amount of videos on YouTube are created for their own sake, with no expectation of going viral or making money off them. PeerTube fulfills the "free video host" role while also being ad-free. I might be naive, but I believe this is how most people saw YouTube around 2012.
The "seeking to make money on YouTube" role is artificially created as a result of a massive corporation running a loss-leader for a decade, dictating what content gets popular through recommendation algorithms, and literally paying people to encourage them to produce more of the desired addicting content.
Who knows what would have happened if YouTube had not been bought out and been allowed to compete fairly with P2P technologies as they emerged.