PeerTube is decentralized video sharing software that works with a federated protocol but not enough people choose to host their content on PeerTube. The problem isn't Google or the law on copyrighted content and who can make copies of it. The problem is people choose centralized content hosts like YouTube and all that it entails because it is more convenient than running and federating PeerTube nodes.
Does Peertube address all of the moderation / illegal content problems enumerated here, as they relate especially to video? https://telegra.ph/why-not-matrix-08-07
PeerTube is a useful form of decentralization. Each video is stored on its home site, but playout is distributed by making the browsers of people watching it share the streaming load. So if your video on your tiny PeerTube-connected site goes viral, your tiny site will not overload. All the viewers become redistribution nodes. At least in theory, this scales. The highest view count I can find on PeerTube is around 5K recent, not concurrent, views.
I put technical videos on Hardlimit on PeerTube, because Google's ads are annoying and I don't need "discovery" or "followers". The videos are linked from discussions and papers.
This works fine, but is not the usual use case, where people are seeking fame, fortune, or at least attention.
I remember an interesting project in 2009 from Opera called Opera Unite. Its goal was to turn the browser into a server so that you can share back out into the web. They had a few demos "apps" built in but sadly it never went anywhere. It's interesting to imagine how the structure of the web would have evolved if that idea took off. Here's their original post about it: https://dev.opera.com/blog/taking-the-web-into-our-own-hands...
