And this is why peertube will never actually take off outside of a Utopian future of unlimited energy and a future where everything is perfectly distributed

Who is going to pay the hosting costs? Who is going to pay the bandwidth costs? Let’s say magic happens and the users donate enough for that. Who is going to pay the creators who that is their main source of income?

Now what will happen when people demand 4k content everywhere, and then 8k after that? That quadruples the cost of the bandwidth and hosting costs.

I absolutely hate hate hate subscription models and hate ads. There has to be a subscription model for any video hosting platform, and YouTube doesn’t split up into exclusivity deals like shitty steaming services to screw over the consumer for profit. So at least there is that.

Decentralized systems work extremely well for text and even audio-based services. Video is a whole other beast, especially long form video at high resolutions.