With Reddit shutting down its API setting a precedent in the corporate tech world (and Reddit was a major outlier in that a ton of their users are technical minded and support third party clients, YouTube does not have that kind of userbase and will not get backlash for it), Twitter doing whatever the fuck they’re doing, and Google already hellbent on destroying ad blockers, the days of Newpipe, Invidious, and Freetube are numbered. Wouldn’t be surprised if they implement Netflix level DRM tomorrow that makes alt clients impossible. I say savour your alt clients while you can guys, you won’t be able to soon.
The problem is that hosting videos at scale is hard and expensive.
We can migrate from Twitter to Mastodon or Reddit to Lemmy, but what PeerTube instance is going to be able to serve videos for content creators like LTT or MKBHD?
I have hosted a PeerTube instance and surprisingly the storage is not a problem because it is very cheap these days.
About the bandwidth, if you enable PeerTube’s p2p tech (WebTorrent) you can have a fair number of users streaming at the same time (but it’s not great for privacy).
I have proposed a network of PeerTube instances to a group of youtubers each with tens to hundreds of thousands subscribers and the benefits/costs ratio looked pretty good to them. It didn’t work for other reasons.
Notice that youtubers earn basically nothing from YouTube except those with millions of subscribers. They are on YouTube just for visibility but if enough creators move at the same time they can also move a good percentage of the userbase in my opinion.
I’d never expect channels this big to do it, because yeah, that’s a whole lot of server load