> I don't know if the complaint here is that no one else will do it for me for free, or that no one else will just hand me viewers for free.

Devil's advocate: Which paid video-website with community created content the size similar to Youtube may I join?

That's where the "de-facto" monopoly claim comes from, I guess.

It’s not literally just hosting. That’s not that hard. It’s distribution, discovery, promotion, accessibility. Right now, if you want your video to be seen, you need to be on YouTube.

> I have so many options to host videos, least of which is just housing itself on my own damn server!

Peertube is precisely about hosting videos on your "own damn server". Except Peertube is designed in a way that fellow instance operators can seed your content, and that clients viewing a specific videos will also seed it. This means your server can now serve video to more remote places, and will be more resilient to view peaks (a very small VPS with limited bandwidth can handle hundreds of parallel views).

If you don't go the Peertube way, you are usually giving up on serving video to remote areas where you don't have good connectivity to, and crossing your fingers so that your videos don't become too popular. Or you end up building your own mirroring/CDN infrastructure like media.ccc.de and others do, but by then the costs and complexity are much higher than operating a Peertube instance.

> > de facto monopoly on video hosting > How do people believe this is even remotely true?

I think if you add "...that people actually visit and watch", it's more accurate. Sure, I can host my own videos or put them on Vimeo or PeerTube - but YouTube is going to get me more eyeballs more quickly (assuming I play the promo games.)

They mean if you care about reaching wider audiences, we are aware of the various options to upload videos of those nights when you felt adventurous