Right, but we all live under capitalism and have bills to pay. It's true that youtubers quite generally rely on sponsored ads to make probably most of their profit, but YouTube ad revenue still is a decent chunk of it. And that's not even getting into hosting an instance.

The only real way peertube works is if it implements some sort of subscription system (I think instance-wide subscriptions following the nebula pattern would be ideal). It's easier for text-based platforms to stay afloat with random small donations from less than 1% of users since the storage requirements aren't as egregious, but we do need to remember that even YouTube operated at a loss last I heard. It was only kept afloat by Google. Hell, even image hosting sites get the short end of the stick sometimes (still mourning gfycat), I can't imagine a free video hosting platform staying afloat at all, let alone pull serious content creators to it.

I'm not too confident in peertube ever going big, if I'm honest. I'm not confident in monolithic gif/image sites either, but that's a lot easier to self-host than a giant library of random videos that could far outgrow your system if you aren't careful. You wouldn't expect a federated free Netflix to work, would you? And yet that's a fraction of the amount of content a successful PeerTube instance could end up with if it goes anywhere near as viral as a lemmy instance. Hell, even if channels ended up hosting an instance each and not letting anyone else upload to their instance, there's some channels/companies that put out multiple videos a day every single day. No way to keep that afloat long term without a strong revenue system. Like it or not, money is always going to be an issue, especially for peertube.