Fuck AI

Self-hosting is ideal if you have the spare hardware, but you can still post to public instances if you don’t.

Posting where there is actually an audience is most ideal.

But distributing content only on your own site would also kill all income

I agree with you. I think many baskets is better than guessing that you're exclusively picking the right basket. The key question is how you (and from here on I am referring to "you, as a creator" not "you, personally") are allocating your effort across the many baskets. Even acknowledging that there are many baskets and options is a necessary starting point. If you are treating the options with lower population and lower views as second class citizens and just throwing your content up there too without any additional thought or attention that's fair, given where they are right now, and at least it's a step in the right direction, but you need to start thinking about the next step too. If you look at Peertube and see a waste of your time that has no future, you're entitled to your opinion but I'd respectfully disagree. I think it pretty clearly is the future or at least a step towards it. If you think we'll simply never escape Youtube, then by all means bend the knee to them and don't waste your time anywhere else.

But remember that Youtube was new and disruptive once too and people said it could never succeed at what it was trying to do. And now that it's succeeded, we think it could never fail, it's too big to fail. Things don't succeed until they do. Things don't fail until they do. It doesn't happen overnight, it happens gradually but if you realize things are shifting early, and spend your effort wisely in the places where your efforts will become most valuable, you'll be ahead of the curve and in a really good position to maximize the benefit. Or by the time you realize it's happening, you're already falling behind and you'll be scrambling to make the transition. And if you're completely wrong and the alternative just quietly dies as they sometimes do, your effort is wasted but you're otherwise not really any worse off than you already are.

Is any alternative video platform worth investing your time and effort in? Not based on what any of them are today, no. But based on what they will be? I think so. You have to think so too, if you want them to succeed. Will they succeed? Can Youtube ever fail? Only time, and you, each and every humble individual content creator, will decide.

Be the change you want to see in the world, don't wait for it for it to happen to you.

I know. It's why I said "Well-known instances" when talking about PeerTube as those instances tend to haves rules against it and take it very seriously.

Nebula is awesome and is one of many paths that lead away from Youtube. I like and recommend any and every path that leads away from Youtube. The more paths away from Youtube there are, and the more that get taken, the better. Every creator should explore as many of these paths as they can.

Totally true, but existing creators need a way to do subscriptions and raise money to fund the channels, which Floatplane provides.

Right tool for the job and all that.