Hacker News Reader

The audience of HackerNews is vastly smaller than the audience of YouTube.

It's a decent audience, plenty of mainstream products started with a HN audience. reddit, dropbox, etc.

PeerTube is not trying to replace YouTube. So the target markets don't have to overlap or even look similar.

If PeerTube is successful YouTube will most likely still exist and be dominant.

> It got to the top of HN. That speaks to a tremendous demand.

No it doesn't. It might just mean that enough people found it "neat" or interesting, but nobody should mistake a HN frontpage spot for "tremendous demand". It might also just mean that they used the right hype buzzwords at the right time.

To put a number on that tremendous demand: 540 people found the idea worth discussing with like-minded people.