I feel like it would be best to proxy YouTube, or subscribe to paid indie channels like nebula, but without a user base and without ad revenue or subscription revenue I don’t know how quality content can come to PeerTube. Maybe I’m just missing the content but when I’ve checked it’s all very low quality, just random unedited webcam vblogs mostly.
I’m old enough to remember a time before YouTube. When YouTube started, it wasn’t about making money. There were no ads. No subscriptions. No sponsors. In the early days of YouTube it was just backyard videos. But it didn’t take long for the connect to start getting good because it was the first of its kind, and everyone started using it. The problem now is, to convince people to use something else that, essentially does the same thing, but doesn’t make people money. Good luck with that.
Money corrupted YouTube. And now, the idea that people can be “content creators” for a living means that there will likely never be a mainstream, ad free, subscription free video platform, where people just make videos in their spare time. Peer tube is cool, but your not going to see high quality, curated content like you get on YouTube. An I think that’s probably a good thing.
YouTube was founded by 3 former PayPal employees and bought by Google for $1.65 billion just over a year after its creation. It launched its partner program in 2007 which is when people could start directly making money from the site - but for most big people on the platform, making money was the eventual goal anyway. There was always a plan for YouTube to make oodles of cash and for people to make money making videos on it.
If PeerTube doesn’t have some type of monetary incentive, nobody except for mild hobbyists making subpar content are going to migrate over.
I like that YouTube has higher quality content now and I don’t mind that creators expect to be compensated for what is now much more work. I do mind that YouTube treats them like second class citizens and can take however much of the pie they can get away with.
I remember it too. I just also remember how much of a quality improvement career YouTubers made. It’s still a good and valid thing imo, they make good videos for money. All platforms should facilitate that. Not facilitating that brings us back to an internet I honestly don’t think had a lot of value, just random family videos mostly.
With instance subscriptions you could cut out the huge cut Google takes and make creator unions essentially much easier to make.
I loved the early days of youtube. Brought us such gems as Chicken Police and Crazy Rainbow Lady.