Who says Peertube needs to take off to be good?
I like, prefer, and use the fediverse in its current state personally.
Oh the other side, I miss the era of low volume content of passionate people. I didn't live such an era for the internet, but I did for smartphones. Back in 2009, you didn't need "have 25 people test your app" requirements, because people pushing apps cared about their apps. You didn't need to go through a dozen of apps before finding one with a usable amount of ads. Heck, runtime permissions weren't required because developers were reasonable in their usage of permissions
I'm not much a fan of videos, so I don't really know whether the same happened with youtube. But the way I consume the few youtube videos I watch is just to "follow" people [1], there is way too much meaningless content in youtube to even glimpse at what there is, and those algorithms really don't favor high-quality content, just baiting ones. So I feel the fediverse wouldn't have to grow much for me to replace YouTube.
[1] I also look at tournesol.app recommendations, but they are /waay/ too oriented towards their very own microcosm, and even though I'd like to contribute it takes quite a lot of time. That being said, I recommend taking a look at tournesol.app because there is real democracy research behind it
The fact that it's a video-watching site and that means it needs people to upload videos onto it.
> The fact that it's a video-watching site and that means it needs people to upload videos onto it.
It's not a video watching Website. It's a video serving platform in the fediverse. You can use it to host videos independently. It's not necessarily meant as a platform with a single entry point for users to find any kind of video like YouTube. It's more comparable to WordPress maybe
Offering free and open alternatives is often met with the criticism of "this will never take off and it's not really an alternative because it doesn't do what the multi-billion dollar corporate competitor does to a tee."
It's actually much better than it used to be. Since it's roots are in startup culture, there has always been an under-current favoring capitalistic stances. Those currents have weakened over time though. At one point things like dark patterns for user engagement were given a more neutral response than you would see nowadays.
All those who don't remember we are in Eternal September.