If anything, spread that info to the content creators who are not in the top 500. They make basically nothing from youtube itself and rely on patreon or other platforms for their actual revenue.
this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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Fedibridge
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The challenge is that top youtubers do this for a living, it's how they put food on the table, and peertube has no monetization and also no path towards ever having monetization. Unlike other forms of social media with federated alternatives, videos are high cost/effort to host and produce. Its not like mastodon or lemmy where its mostly just text that people throw out into the void for their own entertainment and to socialize with other people.
There are ways you could maybe implement some form of monetization that architecturally respects creators and viewers more, but I'm pretty confident they're not things peertube as a project would ever implement.
As it stands, it would be kinda like asking professionals to donate their work for free on an ongoing basis.
Unfortunately it feels like peertube is unlikely to ever really offer the same thing YouTube is, in contrast to other fediverse projects that offer a similar experience to their counterparts just at a smaller scale. But producing much of the content people enjoy on YouTube is a career, and peertube can't really be that without monetization :/
That's the right attitude to have for sure. It'll make things happen.
I don't mean to be rude or shut down your idea, I'm sorry. But I think it would be difficult to find a successful strategy for growing peertube without understanding the challenges involved.
Personally I think you might have better luck asking smaller youtube creators who don't make videos as their only source of income. Many of those folks are still frustated with YouTube (though it's less of a big deal if it's not their income), and have more reason to consider a platform where they'd be publishing things just for the sake of putting stuff out there
But asking top creators on YouTube to consider peertube as a potential future option is a really difficult sell if it fundamentally can't provide them with income they're currently making by publishing on YouTube. It might mean they don't have to worry about demonitization or copyright strikes or whatever, but there's no reason those upsides would really matter much if they can't make a living there. For top creators YouTube is a job, and a demanding one at that.
I think it'd be cool to see peertube consider ways the platform could be monetized if it could be done well, with instances being able to enable it. I'd love to see optional, maybe opt in advertizing with robust controlls for users and creators. But those things are all extremely complicated to implement organizationally without money warping the nature of the project, and from what I know about framasoft I don't think they would ever even consider anything along those lines.
And the product of that is that peertube can likely only really be a place to host videos that people just wanna put out into the world for their own entertainment. It can't be a platform for the same kind of high effort, highly produced content that a lot of folks watch on YouTube.
Patreon is kind the only thing that could fill that gap for creators, maybe that helps make it a more real consideration, I don't know. Patreon/merch is a huge part of income for content creators. I'd love to be wrong and see a couple big creators start publishing on peertube too
I’m just a lurker in these things, but it seems to me that what you need is a way to find YouTubers who don’t want to be paid, who think their message is important and who don’t rely on video revenue. Who seek new communities to grow their audience.
Religion of all types fit this bill. Especially the aggressive sects of Christianity, Islam and Hindu . Especially the nationalist sects
Sure. Spread some awareness, that's never a bad thing. I'll doubt the top creators will do it, though. So don't be disheartened. A lot of them do this as a living. Their goal is to pick the platform that has the biggest reach, so they'll have a big audience. And the platform that maximises their income. Which seems to currently be Youtube. I've seen some creators experiment with alternatives like Odysee, back in the days. But that didn't really take off. They also don't have any big incentive to join Peertube, either. At least that's my take. I don't want to be negative or anything. I just think that's the way it is. So I think it'd be a good thing to spread awareness. But one shouldn't expect too much from the top creators. It's more likey we're going to convince someone who is nice, but doing it for fun (or something like that).
I'm not sure about all of them, but I'm pretty sure we can get the privacy aware and FOSS ones here. Maybe even PewDiePie, with the recent pro linux videos. Most popular channels there, are there because they make money from it, so it is probably not possible to get them over to PeerTube.
Maybe we can get permission from the creators to mirror their videos on PeerTube though, which would be pretty good.