IMO, PeerTube will never become popular due to its decentralized nature.
Decentralised is really the only option for an informed humanity. In the long run, this has to be the answer.
You need a minimum amount of moderation to remove the least desirable groups of people from posting content.
I would ask, where is the crime here? Is it that you saw something terrible, or that something terrible occurred? Should we be focused on the prevention of immoral acts, or the representation of those immoral acts on video?
Does your not knowing about certain immoral acts make it better or worse in reality for those suffering by them? If the reality is that there are racists and pedophiles, is better to address the issue openly, or behind closed doors?
In my opinion, it is better to enshrine freedom of speech, and to address issues openly. Having things 'managed' privately may mean that it is ok, as long as no one finds out about it. Its definitely a difficult one, but I am not for hiding reality.
Yes, technically it's not illegal to allow those kind of fringe statements but by doing so you implicitly allow that content to rise to the top and it can make your site unsafe for racial minorities and children.
There is only one Reddit instance. Subreddits may have quasi-independent moderation (Reddit admins can always intervene if not doing so would cause bigger PR problems than they're willing to ignore or deal with in other ways) but there's no real way for one subreddit to disassociate with other subreddits.
PeerTube (or Mastodon or PixelFed or Lemmy) instances can disassociate from other instances that have incompatible moderation practices, though. Either through allowlisting or denylisting depending on the operators' risk models.
Using Mastodon as a case study: Gab tried to pivot to ActivityPub-based software (I think Mastodon) and yet they were denied the ability to federate with most instances because it's a deeply toxic community.
We elect government democratically, and through that create laws and police. If the internet is full of criminals flaunting laws then the problem is right there in the lack of laws and police, not in the lack of control from a small group of companies.
Not if police intervenes, at least for the pedos there exist established international relations between agencies that works efficiently - there is a reason why you won't see pedo content on the clearnet for long.
ActivityPub is federated and has moderation pretty much built in by design.
that implies that "an informed humanity" is something that society wants. I really doubt that.
The reality, is that 'society' is made up of individuals. Individuals are substantially real. Individuals need to choose for themselves whether they want to be informed or not, according to their conscience.
Individuals should also step out of other people's business, ie stop trying to manage 'society'! But that's another story.
Myself and a few people are actually working on a video site with freedom of speech values and grandma level usability, feel free to follow along (https://project49476.com/).
The problem is the next step because there is no video of a panda falling over, but that's not related to the peertube implementation or UX.
Even when I eventually find peertube.ch (Which I guess is right, because there are a ton of links on joinpeertube to other "instances") there's no videos with pandas at all there, though I don't actually know if this example was intended to be possible.
I do not think my parents would pass this test, even if the video existed.
There is a huge field between 'sustainable' and 'populist' and if we want choice and quality in the world we need to vote with our feet and dollars and ballots for alternative solutions that are big enough for people to not giggle at, but small enough that they can maintain some conceptual coherence.
We need an 'Apple' (a 10% competitor that has enough quality and mindshare to go on for years or decades) in lots of verticals if we want to keep a market place for new ideas. Better still if we had a 5% and a 10% alternative.
The 10% guy you have to watch and emulate. The 5% guy you can audit occasionally looking for ideas to cherry pick. The 85% still benefit from what the 15% are doing.
As a consultant I have frequently been in a situation where each member of 'my' team was only outnumbered about 6:1 by the customer. That can be directly managed. As a business owner, I can afford to have a personal relationship with a few percent of my customers. I can cherry pick. As a medium application developer, each of my employees might represent 1000 users, and even zone defense starts to crumble. I have to start treating them as numbers, and that causes new types of problems.
I see the sorts of compromises we often have to make at hundreds of thousands of users, and I'm grateful that most of the verticals I'm interested in wouldn't ever have 600 million users, let alone ten times that much. There are verticals where form and function are tightly aligned, and I think those can scale much higher. Torrents and Discord, off the top of my head, I think resemble that remark. Infrastructure like nginx or Consul, maybe. Linux... well, it's 5 million lines of code so it might be 'failing' in that manner.
Reddit, on the other hand... I'm glad I'm not responsible for Reddit because I'd probably hate myself half as much as my users claim to.
Some comedian had a bit years ago about how he wanted to be 'Bruce Campbell famous'. This is a guy who is a god in a niche. If he wants his ego stoked, he just needs to be in the right room, and he can make that room happen just by asking for it. Meanwhile he can go out to dinner at a nice restaurant and there is a reasonable expectation that he might get to eat in peace. I think I could deal with that level of success.