Youtube could easily just obliterate a channel today, for some video posted 10 years ago if they deem it bad enough. Doubt if you had your own platform you'd delete yourself for something cringe you said 10 years ago

The general "danger" of old videos comes more from people digging up what was said and causing a shitstorm because of it, rather than Youtube themselves going out of their way to delete channels because of old videos. If people want to dig through your old videos and want to cause a shitstorm, self-hosting isn't going to protect you.

I don’t like a lot of the things being done by people who get deplatformed, but honestly I think there should be protections against cutting people off. Before the internet, I never worried about not being able to use the postal service or making a phone call. But now I worry about something stupid happening that obliterates my online life because Google decides to nuke my account.

Start moving to as many non-Google servies as possible. Some things are hard to replace, some aren't.

I think I agree that uploaders face more of a threat from censorious activists reviewing their old material than they do from retroactive deletion prompted by YouTube policy changes, but surely self-hosting would provide some protection, assuming the audience would be willing and able to transition to a different source?

It seems to me that hosting and payment processing companies ultimately present the greater service denial risk for uploaders with an established audience, though YouTube can definitely hamper new viewer discovery, and there is more competition (and therefore more alternatives) in hosting and payments.

Yes, but most people don't build their own server farms, don't have their own internet cable, so basically there is always some company in the middle that could easily cancel you.

It's much harder if you have actual humans on the other side.

> don't have their own internet cable

Owning cable doesn't help much as this cable sooner or later needs to be connected to some router that doesn't belong to you. A better solution is to host in a country where political correctness is much weaker than in the West.