Spending an hour on Reddit or Twitter means downloading a few megabytes of content.

Spending an hour on YouTube means downloading a few gigabytes of content. The cost to serve that is massive.

YouTube lost money when Google bought them. It continued to lose money for years. It was only after YouTube finally got large enough and their ad targeting got good enough that they started to turn a profit on YouTube.

I’m really skeptical that anything other than a big tech company could provide a similar platform like that for free.

Sure, it could work if you could get people to pay $10/month, like YouTube Premium, but people wouldn’t do that without there being enough content to make it worthwhile. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. The only way to get past that point is with a massive amount of initial investment.

On the software side, we already have PeerTube. It’s just the logistics of hosting video are way too expensive for most people to be able to cover:

• You need drives to store all those videos, preferably in several quality and codec variants so everyone can watch them.
• You need the bandwidth to serve all those videos. PeerTube can “smooth over” the initial new upload bump by using WebTorrents, which is the least worst solution if you quietly ignore all the “but muh IP address” people, but once people stop watching at the same time, you’re back to square one.
• Transcoding requires powerful and specialized hardware. Nobody in their right mind will serve videos the same way they’re uploaded, especially with the rise of new codecs like VP9 or god forbid AV1, which you simply can’t encode on a consumer CPU unless you’re fine waiting hours/days for a single upload to go through.