I’m down to fuck around and find out, of course. Mastodon and Lemmy were a slam dunk for the Fediverse given how Twitter/Reddit had cataclysmic events to drive a spike of adoption and how easy/smooth the experience on Mastodon and Lemmy is for new users. This is the first thing that Youtube has really done to make users angry, and it’s mostly still small potatoes. In addition, I feel like the early stages of p2p video are going to be a harder sell to the few people that are actually thinking about moving - people mostly just don’t want to think about the platform they are using. If their video stutters or doesn’t load nicely sometimes, they’ll quickly head back to Youtube.

In my non-expert opinion, we’ll need better global internet and potentially even a next-gen video codec (AV1 might be enough) before video hosting is viable for someone other than like 7 companies. Peertube is technically scalable but I feel like the introductory growing pain stage of its p2p swarm network is going to be really rough for driving adoption. The home server will probably need to be the main seeder for a while until the network matures, which means hosting costs will be more restrictive for new Peertube instances.

I have near-zero experience with Peertube though, so if anyone thinks I’m way off the mark let me know!