An interesting quote from @geerlingguyJeff Geerling .

The TL;DR is that — for him to use PeerTube or any other Fediverse alternative to YouTube — he would need to be able to make a living from it.

He is not the only one who has expressed this sentiment.

This is something I have been thinking about and talking a lot about for a while now.

(I know I am not the only one.)

RE: jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/sel

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I've been slowly uploading my back catalog to my channel on Floatplane, though not all my content is there yet.

Some in the fediverse ask why I'm not on Peertube. Here's the problem (and it's not insurmountable): right now, there's no easy path towards sustainable content production when the audience for the content is 100x smaller, and the number of patrons/sponsors remains proportionally the same.

I was never able to sustain my open source work based on patronage, and content production is the same—just more expensive to maintain to any standard (each video takes between 10-300 hours to produce, and I have a family to feed, and US health insurance companies to fund).

YouTube was, and still is, a creative anomaly. I'm hugely thankful to my Patreon, GitHub, and Floatplane supporters—and I hope to have direct funding fully able to support my work someday. But until that time, YouTube's AdSense revenue and vast reach is a kind of 'golden handcuff.'

The handcuff has been a bit tarnished of late, however, with Google recently adding AI summaries to videos—which seems to indicate maybe Gemini is slurping up my content and using it in their AI models?

Maybe the handcuffs are fools-gold, and I just don't see it yet.
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