> From a purely-technical lens, that may not seem like a fatal flaw. When viewed through a whole-product lens, it is.
YouTube is an advertising business, Peertube is software. They are like day and night different.
Peertube is developed by a community of developers, governed by a french non-profit called Framasoft. Their primary mission is community governance, establishing a legal footprint, and promoting Peertube, in the same vain as Mozilla, the Drupal Foundation and many others.
According to the Peertube website, 90% of Framasoft's funding consists of donations. Since they don't sell a service, don't have to maintain infrastructure to enable hosting of videos, they don't require a complex organization and large investments.
Sharing the costs of a common good tends to work out on a small scale, and it's a valid alternative to private for-profit initiatives. Reeading tip: ERS's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
> PeerTube's anonymous, censor-proof nature is enough to attract a certain class of content that repels advertisers, but then what? Until the dark side of distributed technologies is addressed instead of touted as a feature, this doesn't have a chance of popular success.
Peertube isn't a single service that contains a "certain class of content that repels advertisers". It's software that allows anyone to set up their own server and hook it up in a federated network of servers.
It's a bit like online fora. Like, PHPbb and vBulletin are just sofware. Anyone can download a copy, install it on their own server, run their own forum and develop their own community. It used to be that there were fora about anything and everything ranging from gaming, knitting, books, history to the less savory topics and themes. Few would argue that these weren't successful in their heyday.
The biggest challenge federated networks face is this: discovery of content. That's what defines how much they will appeal to a large audience.
Centralized services like YouTube are popular because they've perfected the discovery of information relevant to their audience to a fine art. YouTube becoming an ad business is a paradox: they arrived at that point because that's the only viable business model to cover the cost of centralized hosting of billions of videos, and the bandwidth required to serve billions of viewers.
Federated networks don't suffer that problem because the costs of hosting content are shared across the nodes of the network. Peertube leverages WebTorrent as their file sharing protocol. The existence of individual nodes across the network is predicated by local economic conditions. Some nodes may disappear if they can't recoup their own operational costs. But distributed character of the network implies that its enduring success is predicated by the longevity of a majority of nodes.