Peertube isn't based on the assumption that as a content creator you have to run your own instance (and pay for it), but rather that a community can pool together resources as part of a non-profit organization and host many content creators at once, without centralizing everything. For example: skeptikon.fr for french-speaking science/critical content, kolektiva.media for social struggle / anarchist content, etc...

So of course content creators can chip in, eg. if they accept donations, and especially if (not on the two instances listed above) they are paid to advertise content and products. But users can chip in, too. Overall, hosting costs are cheap because:

- they're mutualized between artists - there's no tracking apparatus like Youtube hooked to a machine learning model to keep you addicted - there's no advertisement to serve or complex upload filter to make sure your public domain recordings bring money to the copyright cartel [0] - if a video becomes popular (eg. a cool livestream) a sufficient portion of people will seed it via WebTorrent (torrent + WebRTC + STUN), considerably reducing server load [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27004577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325 etc

[1] I've heard faithful reports from fellow sysadmins that their small VPS handled load for hundreds of simultaneous viewers on livestream thanks to a few people seeding (by just "viewing" the video in their browser with default settings) from a home fiber connection

Time is never free my friend. There’s always a cost model at play.

I absolutely fail to see how bittorrent et al can't solve this part?

> only because YouTube is a free service

Nothing is free, if you don't pay for the product YOU are the product.

That's right. Cos money is the root of absolutely all all evil, everywhere, for all time!