If you just want the video call part you can use https://call.element.io/ and get E2EE calls by sharing a link. It has worked pretty well for me.
There was one bug a few weeks ago where new participants wouldn’t show up but that seems to have been fixed.
But that’s my point. If these creators on different sites charged between $0.26 and $1.30 I would have subscribed to a bunch of them. But when they are charging $5/month that is quite a different amount to pay. Something that I would only really be considering for my absolute favourites.
I would love to see some easy built-in monetization system for PeerTube. Ideally this could be “micropayments” style subscriptions where you could pay a small amount to subscribe to a channel or a small-amount per video (with batched payments to avoid too high of fees). I would also love to see a “pay what you want” subscription option and tipping.
It would probably need to be plugable so that different payment providers can be used, but even just starting with one would be exciting.
PeerTube doesn’t have a monetization story aside from sponsorships which means that it won’t be a real competitor from YouTube. There are lots of “for fun” YouTube channels but what enables so many people to publish so many videos is the fact that they can profit off of them. PeerTube is great, I follow a handful of channels, but it won’t be a YouTube competitor until people can actually run a business on it.
I love creators hosting their content on more disparate platforms, I would love to see less centralization. But the problem is that these all cost so much. YouTube Premium is $13/month and I get access to a huge variety of channels. LTT on Floatplane is $5/month for one collection of channels (which are available on YouTube, maybe with some bits cut). Corridor Digital is similar at $4/month.
Very few channels actually provide me $5/month worth of value. This is only really reasonable for the biggest fans (which admittedly I am not of either of these). Even if these channels have a few videos a week (maybe LTT is over daily with all of their different programs) that is a lot to pay for little variety.
I understand the problem here. Only a tiny number of users are actually going to sign up anyways, so you need to extract more value from them. Say LTT makes $0.50/month from the average subscriber on YouTube. If they charged $0.50/month for their Floatplane channel they would actually loose money, because the people that sign up on Floatplane are going to be above average subscribers. So they need to charge more to even break even (let’s say they value control enough that they aren’t looking for increased revenue). But as they raise the price along the curve they are even more heavily filtering for the biggest fans, which were bringing them in top percentile revenue on YouTube, making the problem even worse. This means that these platforms are always going to be priced to profit off the whales, rather than the casual users who enjoy watching some videos from these channels. Maybe in some beautiful feature where publishing on separate platforms becomes normalized this will change, but it is very far in the future and a huge roadblock to getting to that future.
Maybe, but some of my favourite channels do YouTube as a full-time job. Maybe they would still post part-time if they couldn’t profit off of but the videos would almost certainly be less-frequent and be made with tighter budgets.
But even then I find it hard to believe. I subscribe to a bunch of seemingly for-fun channels but most of my favourites have by this point become full-time video creators. GCP Grey, Captain Disillusion, Technology Connections, Tom Scott, Veritasium…
It is true that money can corrupt, but in this world you also need an income, and if you need to devote a lot of time to get income from a different source then that only distracts from the time and energy that you can put towards making videos.