A large amount of small creators do this today only because YouTube is a free service. A lot of people will use their free time to make videos, but not if a portion of their disposable income has to be dedicated to hosting them.

Peertube isn't based on the assumption that as a content creator you have to run your own instance (and pay for it), but rather that a community can pool together resources as part of a non-profit organization and host many content creators at once, without centralizing everything. For example: skeptikon.fr for french-speaking science/critical content, kolektiva.media for social struggle / anarchist content, etc...

So of course content creators can chip in, eg. if they accept donations, and especially if (not on the two instances listed above) they are paid to advertise content and products. But users can chip in, too. Overall, hosting costs are cheap because:

- they're mutualized between artists - there's no tracking apparatus like Youtube hooked to a machine learning model to keep you addicted - there's no advertisement to serve or complex upload filter to make sure your public domain recordings bring money to the copyright cartel [0] - if a video becomes popular (eg. a cool livestream) a sufficient portion of people will seed it via WebTorrent (torrent + WebRTC + STUN), considerably reducing server load [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27004577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325 etc

[1] I've heard faithful reports from fellow sysadmins that their small VPS handled load for hundreds of simultaneous viewers on livestream thanks to a few people seeding (by just "viewing" the video in their browser with default settings) from a home fiber connection

Time is never free my friend. There’s always a cost model at play.

For most people, the time/money tradeoff isn't very flexible. Only few have the choice of working fewer hours for less money, while even fewer have the choice of working more hours for more money.

So much goodness out there exists in spite of this. Local model railroad clubs is one that comes to mind. I’d rather that than Walmart, which has mastered its cost model.

Yes. Time invested given for free at the expense of other endeavors. I’m not arguing against doing any of these things. Just simply stating that time = money. I’d rather spend my money/time on model railroad building too. z scale ftw.

I absolutely fail to see how bittorrent et al can't solve this part?

Well you are commenting this on a thread about PeerTube, so

> only because YouTube is a free service

Nothing is free, if you don't pay for the product YOU are the product.

I certainly feel like ‘the product’ of pirated software, whatever that means. At least I didn’t pay for that.

Are you drunk?

Oh please, not this crap again.

You know that YouTube belongs to Google right?

Opening the Net to commerce was digital original sin

That's right. Cos money is the root of absolutely all all evil, everywhere, for all time!

If Money=Might then your absolutely right, however i would not say forever...there is still Star Trek where one can have Might without Money ;)