> There's plenty of software and means to host your own video platforms.
There's plenty of ways people can start their own countries and currencies too.
There's plenty of ways people can start their own countries and currencies too.
Video hosting is as easy as hosting Piwigo, GNU mediagoblin, Lychee, Zenphoto, or tossing something together in PHP. All that is free and open-source.
I think you vastly underestimate the amount if bandwidth video takes.
It's free in the sense of all the software being available to do so for free (OS, webserver, php, media software), and free as long as you have something to run it on; chances are anyone reading this can use the same device to run the server.
Whether or not the people watching the videos from the server will have a good experience is something different :p But even a low-speed broadband connection in the US today has enough upload to handle small sites and I can vouch for this on measly 1MB/s upload (I've self-hosted videos over years with all the mentioned software).
YouTube is a provider that has the resources to allow people to upload videos, and watch them for free. It's their platform, and they have usage rules.
My point wasn't against self hosting your own content either, but rather that this is absolutely not an alternative to YouTube in any way because scaling to YouTube's level is extremely expensive.
The draw of YouTube is also the user made content, not stuff you can buy off the shelf, rip and then host. This means those users would never use a decentralized platform because discoverability is nearly impossible.
The fight you are fighting is a nobel one, but reality means it's always going to be a niche solution that nerds use.
If you say that is inferior to Youtube... well, you see why people don't move. In this case Youtube simply outcompeted you.
Traditionally, by violent means.