Depends on whose problem you're trying to solve. Jeff Geerling probably transcends YouTube. His followers would go with him if he hosted video elsewhere. The value of YouTube is it gives the millions of other people trying to be Jeff Geerling the illusion that they too might someday have success like that.

It's not like any specific platform created celebrities. People making this kind of content with these kinds of followings existed before. Someone like Bob Vila was the Jeff Geerling of 40 years ago. The difference is then you needed to win the blessing of a television studio. Today, you need to win the lottery of dumb luck to go viral and you still need the blessing of whatever opaque algorithms YouTube uses to surface specific videos. For whatever reason, people with channels feel like they're more likely to do that compared to getting their own television show, presumably because it's at least easier to publish something nobody will watch rather than trying to pirate broadcast your own stream on airwaves you don't have a license for.

Though I can see the oversimplifation the parent post did, they have a point.

What are YouTube's network effects? Discoverability and deliverability.

You can overcome the deliverability challenge with a CDN of your choosing.

The discoverability issue can be worked out by good SEO and POSSE[0] principles.

Yeah, it's not the same, but you own your media. Freedom costs money.

You can't/Don't want to pay? be subjected to Google.

This is still a free world. Free as in freedom, just not free as in free beer.

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[0]: https://indieweb.org/POSSE

I would argue that YT's network effect is producers, consumers, and content, which are in a feedback loop: Users default to youtube, because it has the most content. It has the most content because producers upload there. Producers upload there because it's where the users are. You can spend money on either the producer or consumer side, but it doesn't break the cycle.

If that is what you need then the alternatives are TikTok and Instagram

If only there was some website which could find, and gleam metadata from videos, and provide such info in a list, with a text based query.

Oh wait! Google!

Well surely as an independent search engine with no desire to exhibit anti-trust practices, they do spend as much time developing algos for scraping for independent video.

And as a search engine, working with webmasters to provide easy scraping of metadata, and better integration into their search results.

And ranking it higher than youtube when sensible.

Right?

I don't think it's the network effects on the user side that is the real problem for YT. I saw a creator do a breakdown YT vs a bunch of other options and YT by far pays better per view. That would be the actual problem because if other platforms paid the same it's almost zero cost for a creator to post on both and see what happens. With YT paying a lot more every view elsewhere is a loss. That would make this a classic raising rivals cost competitive moat strategy not a network effects thing.