There is a decentralized YouTube alternative.
Video hosting is notoriously expensive. PeerTube circumvents this problem, because videos aren’t stored on some single server, which would cause high bandwidth cost for the server operator, but largely by the users after they watched them, similar to BitTorrent. This way, the cost of video hosting is distributed among the clients, by using their internet connectivity for sharing.
I believe that PeerTube is an interesting project, and I’d ask you to check it out. It’s cool.
Similar to Lemmy, it’s not a single running server, but rather a software that can be used to set up a server. So there’s many instances. I’m still exploring which instances are interesting. If you have any recommendations, I’d like to hear them.
I could see them just having this as an option in a native client application. It could even let you pick and choose which instances, creators or videos you seed, perhaps even a “Seed This Video” button on the next video endscreen.
I think that less people would agree if it was a sort of “black box” of seeding, but I reckon a lot more people than you would think would go for it if they get to choose.
(Good) Pirates are already used to paying for their content with bandwidth and power usage ;)