Nothing about what makes someone successful on a site like YouTube needs it to be centralised to be possible.
Discoverability is way harder on decentralized systems, as is providing recommendations, stability, etc.
Sometimes HN/reddit gets so starry eyed when anything about decentralized/distributed/open-source systems comes up that any sort of critique of the product becomes like a personal attack. A few months ago someone posted a decentralized "facebook alternative", where you had to download a bunch of stuff, and connect with an FTP client just in order to make a post. My grandma's on facebook, but she's not going to understand how to connect to a MySQL database.
People think that defending decentralized/distributed systems at any cost makes them better, but I think it just makes them untenable in the long term. If you enjoy using a product, then prosthelytize all you want for it, but if you like the idea more than the product, then the product probably should change or evolve.
That's the irony with decentralized services.
Your entire architecture depends on people participating in it. When you make it as humanly cumbersome as possible for people to actually participate, you will not have any infrastructure.
I've seen worms and botnets that were better architected than that. Recruiting and participation were done right, and made easy ;)
I've been a developer and sysadmin since the early 90s. I know how to do almost any sysadmin-type task on every platform, even exotic embedded stuff and niche OSes.
These days if something takes me longer than 20 or 30 minutes to set up it goes in the trash. The only exception are things that are very very high value or that I simply must have to do my work. The need has to be burning for me to wade through a multi-step convoluted install/maintenance process. I also instantly discard "Rube Goldberg machine" style things (lots of disjointed dependencies) and messy haphazard snot ball things.
It's not because I can't deal with it. It's because I view it as a sign of bad design and bad implementation and a preview of what using and maintaining the system will be like. I also have outright contempt for what I view as the mentality behind it. I don't want to reward the people who create these things with my attention.
It's not really that hard to design systems that are at least somewhat easier to use. Getting to iOS or Facebook ease of use is hard, but getting to something that isn't painful isn't too bad. I really do think the main reason so many projects are so painful to install and use is that nerds actually have a fetish for it. There's still this obnoxious residue of "real men don't need UX" in computing. It's always been there... I remember the phrase "point and drool" for "point and click" back in the 90s implying that people who "need" GUIs were somehow dumber than those who did everything on a green screen with text.
This mentality desperately needs to die. It's a major factor holding back open source, open systems, and decentralized computing. Not only does it prevent regular people from using these systems but it also holds us (nerds) back by wasting our time.
I'd been becoming gradually annoyed with this mentality for years, but the thing that tipped me over the edge to outright contempt for it was switching to Apple around 2007. I was so much more productive. I realized that all that hard to use "real hacker" stuff was preventing me from doing better things. I was spending hours futzing around with already-solved problems like drivers and graphics resolutions and package woes instead of doing new things. With a computer that "just worked" I could spend almost 100% of my time innovating.
I still use Linux on the server side but I don't really love it anymore. If there were a cleaner easier to use alternative I'd switch as long as it didn't come with onerous costs or limitations. I've been checkout out FreeBSD. Alpine Linux is also nice since it strips out a lot of over-engineered trash.
You want me to go through how many steps to do X? Might as well write it myself... (almost)
Why do you assume they have to choose?
A creator could upload to YouTube to get access to their audience, but then also encourage people to use PeerTube to get their videos.