I think it is possible, either by charging money, or by decentralizing like PeerTube. The thing is, it doesn’t matter. YouTubers won’t switch, they just don’t care.

I’m talking from a viewer’s perspective. There is very little I can watch on PeerTube. Now, if I wanted to share videos on the internet as a hobby PeerTube would be the obvious choice. But as a platform to spend time in, it falls short.

It’s not PeerTube’s fault, it’s just sadly Google can walk all over YouTubers all year long and they wouldn’t even consider publishing on multiple platforms. It’s quite telling that only YouTube competetor that got any traction at all is one with a video library mirroring tool so that the channel owner never has to touch it.

PeerTube is a hard sell. Finding things to watch on there is a pain since most instances are trash. Only ones I can think of that are worth using are diode.zone and tilvids. Tilvids is nice but a lot of their material is uploaded from YouTube and the sponsorships are still embedded. If Sponsorblock was configured to work with it though it would be interesting.