Many creators that I follow reached a level of professionalism that comes with significant costs. You need expensive cameras, microphones, lights, high-end computers, drones, personnel costs for cutters and people that help with research. They have travel costs, sometimes rent for offices etc. All that just to produce the content.

Not everybody needs that. You can still produce good content without spending thousands of dollars on all of that. In fact, swinging the level of professionalism too far can alienate an audience. It’s all about manufacturing authenticity.

On top, there are significant costs for hosting. I mean YouTube is hosted on multiple data centers rather than a bunch of servers or even home computers. Already Lemmy, which is mostly text and pictures, is a decent financial burden to instance owners. Not to mention the time for moderation and administration. And even here, in a place full of hardcore FOSS supporters, it’s not like admins are drowned in donations.

I agree. PeerTube is neat, but I don’t think it’s there yet. Even with peer-to-peer options, it doesn’t really work when there are more video posters than viewers.

If YouTube ads and product placements are the only source of income for content creators, then the only alternative would be that consumers directly pay for the content and the platform.

You mean Patreon? YouTube ads are no way to make a living, so Patreon has taken over as the revenue source for most creators. Eventually, they want more money and start taking product offers, trying to sell you G-Fuel or whatever disreputable product lands in their inbox.

Okay, fair enough. I use Dark Reader myself.

Here’s an instance that does follow spectra.video > https://peertube.wtf (my instance), but I also only follow a select few instances, because there is a lot of crap being uploaded to the videoverse and that just makes for a worse experience.

That’s also Sean’s experience with administrating Spectra.video. And that’s one of the main problems, isn’t it?

With Lemmy, the posts are well-moderated and most of the good content bubbles up to the top, on the highest-populated servers. Both community moderation and instance moderation are working well. Everybody is federated with almost everybody else because, with only a few exceptions, the community is healthy and thriving.

With PeerTube, there’s so much random crap being uploaded, with no real community-based moderation (like upvoting). The top servers are either European politics, non-English content, or gore-related. There’s also a lot of people that are more concerned with using PeerTube as a backup outlet than actually serving content to users.

There is nothing however that would keep you from searching for or following any channel, on peertube.wtf because global search is enabled.

That doesn’t tie into the home or discover videos page, though. Any random user that wonders into YouTube might be searching for something specific, or might just be clicking on random videos on the home page. Eventually, YouTube customizes the content to fit the user’s tastes. I don’t even have to specifically look at my subscriptions. The main home page already gives me good recommendations.

If PeerTube is going to take off as a YouTube replacement, it needs to find a way to keep new users from immediately clicking away when they browse the home/discover pages.

This is not true at all:

• Libre Video does not link to my channel
• TILvids does not link to my channel
• The same with neat.tube
• Or Blender videos
• Or PeerTube.io
• Or P2J
• Or Move IT Tube

Why? Well, let’s look at the top servers. The first hit is a French server, with mostly French and European content. The first US hit is bestgore.fun, which based on its name alone, I would exactly call quality content. The next one is swebbtv.se, which claims to be in the US, but is clearly a Swedish server, and immediately assaults you with a donation screen when you go to the first page. It also does not have any federation.

The next US one is phijkchu.com, which appears to be somebody’s personal instance with just their videos? It also doesn’t have a lot of federation. Then there’s pony.tube, which appears to be mostly My Little Pony content?

You have to go pretty far down the list to find something like diode.zone, and even its federated list is only 25 or so instances.

What do you define as “big instances”?