When I tried it in the past, I kinda didn’t take it seriously because everything was confined to its instance, but now, there’s full-featured global search and proper federation everywhere? Wow, I thought I heard there were some technical obstacles making it very unlikely, but now it’s just there and works great! I asked ChatGPT and it says this feature was added 5 years ago! Really? I’m not sure how I didn’t notice this sooner. Was it really there for so long? With flairs showing original instance where video comes from and everything?
Creators upload videos twice, once for patrons who watch them ad-free and once for people who don’t want to pay. That way, people who don’t have money to spend on YouTube can still enjoy their videos and they get a little kickback. Youtubers don’t need Peertube to release videos ad-free, so it doesn’t really change much if Patreon is more than enough.
Furthermore, the inherent privacy issues with peer to peer video consumption (I can easily track what videos you’ve been watching by simply connecting to the swarm) and the huge hosting costs a moderate sized Youtuber would inflict make the premise rather silly.
I think Peertube is great for small channels and maybe for corporate videos within an intranet, but Peertube can’t afford a moderately popular Youtuber.
Some good points I hadn’t considered!