As others have alluded to, hosting videos is not cheap even with webtorrent enabled. There probably needs to be some sort of subscription model or at least a large enough donation base to run this sustainably. And it is also hard to attract content creators when the incumbent competition is actually paying people for it.

At least the latest released added automatic mirroring of YT channels so that maybe some content creators will at least put up a mirror on a PeerTube instance.

I really like peertube. Making any alternative to youtube is very very hard. Videos do take a huge amount of storage, that’s just a fact of life and no better system could help with that.

I think the business model where peertube really works looks something like a creator co-op. I think Nebula works under a similar system.

Does it make sense to host your own content instead of upload to someone else’s?

I don’t think peertube could ever be a replacement to youtube, at least not to the “new” youtube which main goal is commercial content creation. Peertube cannot pay the content creators the way youtube does, because, for ones, it doesn’t make any money from adds nor is owned by a corporation.

What peertube can aim to, is to be like the older youtube/dailymotion/etc were people posted videos of the things they liked, without monetisation or influencers. Because it will never fully attract influencers.

@thursday_j Can I comment here from Mastodon? Let’s try it…