I know.

Well here we are sharing textual communication on fedi.

Text takes less storage space and bandwidth then videos.

Two issues:

1. Most people have asymmetric connections, can download faster than upload.

2. It’s cheaper to provide bandwidth to a datacenter connected to the backbone than it is to someone’s house.

Like, from a purely-financial standpoint, if one wants to pay for access with bandwidth and storage, it’d make more sense to have a structure where people somehow contribute to running PeerTube instances in datacenters, as you get more bang for your buck.

It’s been tried, somewhat.

BitTorrent uses tit-for-tat high-priority bandwidth resource provision. Some BitTorrent trackers have (or had; I haven’t looked recently) a longer-lived, albeit crude, credit system for maintaining ratios.

Mojo Nation, which is what Bram Cohen did before BitTorrent, had a longer-lived credit-tracking system.

But the larger problem there is that they were basically exploiting a quirk in ISP billing. ISPs normally have flat-rate billing – you can use as much bandwidth as you want, and only pay a flat rate. ISPs just average out costs across users. Light users subsidize heavier users. But…that creates a misincentive for people to figure out how to monetize, even if it’s very inefficient, their bandwidth, and saturate it constantly, which basically makes light users pay for things above-and-beyond the heavy users’ regular bandwidth. It’s economically inefficient, leans on the fact that the billing system has that subsidy built into it. Like, it’s not the system that you’d want if everyone were doing it, as you’d want to have content in datacenters, one way or another.

I do kind of wonder how practical it would be for it to be the norm for people to have some kind of VPS of their own. That’d let them do some things that aren’t really economical or practical today, and provide some more-privacy-friendly options for one person to provide services (well, privacy-friendly as long as you trust your VPS provider).

It might be possible to compete in an area where YouTube (presently) has content restrictions. I assume that YouTube doesn’t allow outright porn, and that that’s how PornTube and friends can exist.

Dangerous business to enter, though, because if one day YouTube decides to enter the market (or decides to create a differently-branded service that shares infrastructure) that does do porn, I assume that that’s gonna put those smaller competitors in danger of getting wiped out. An investor in such a venture is at risk of losing their investment then.