P2P never really had a YouTube-like creator scene; almost everyone using P2P was using it to download movies for free. YouTube was almost the same way at first until YouTube got spooked by the (arguably baseless) Viacom lawsuit and decided to adopt proactive copyright filtering.
Speaking of litigation, nobody's been sued for watching YouTube. People got sued for BitTorrent traffic all the time; up to and including dedicated settlement extortion operations (e.g. Prenda Law). This is a third role of YouTube we don't really consider: they handle all the stupid copyright stuff so that users don't have to. P2P inherently shoves all the liability[0] onto the users because you dox yourself every time you use it. Imagine, say, someone suing individual P2P users to try and shut down, say, a SSSniperWolf[1] video.
If you took YouTube away today, you'd have creators moving to Nebula or Floatplane, because there's still money in that. There really isn't money in PeerTube. Monetization is the thing that really put YouTube on the map, not free distribution.
Though, to be clear, video distribution is still hilariously expensive. Google considers YouTube to be profitable and has done so for many years, but that is almost certainly because YouTube gets to use Google's favorable peering arrangements with last-mile ISPs. These same ISPs also did all sorts of questionable things to throttle or block BitTorrent traffic back in the day, I imagine they'd come up with new attacks on PeerTube traffic today. The underlying problem is that we don't have any common-carrier regulation on ISPs, so they price traffic based on "value" - i.e. how much they can double-bill the sender of the packets - rather than the cost of that traffic.
If you want a viable YouTube competitor, you want net neutrality regulation.
[0] Ok, before you cite a Ninth Circuit opinion arguing that mere downloading still has liability or something, I'm not saying that you CAN'T EVER be sued for watching YouTube, only that you'd have to sue Google first, and they have big pockets.
[1] Notorious "reaction streamer" that doesn't actually do any reacting in her videos made up of entirely other people's YouTube uploads. Recently infamous for tracking down JacksFilms' physical location and bragging about it on Instagram.
Speaking of litigation, nobody's been sued for watching YouTube. People got sued for BitTorrent traffic all the time; up to and including dedicated settlement extortion operations (e.g. Prenda Law). This is a third role of YouTube we don't really consider: they handle all the stupid copyright stuff so that users don't have to. P2P inherently shoves all the liability[0] onto the users because you dox yourself every time you use it. Imagine, say, someone suing individual P2P users to try and shut down, say, a SSSniperWolf[1] video.
If you took YouTube away today, you'd have creators moving to Nebula or Floatplane, because there's still money in that. There really isn't money in PeerTube. Monetization is the thing that really put YouTube on the map, not free distribution.
Though, to be clear, video distribution is still hilariously expensive. Google considers YouTube to be profitable and has done so for many years, but that is almost certainly because YouTube gets to use Google's favorable peering arrangements with last-mile ISPs. These same ISPs also did all sorts of questionable things to throttle or block BitTorrent traffic back in the day, I imagine they'd come up with new attacks on PeerTube traffic today. The underlying problem is that we don't have any common-carrier regulation on ISPs, so they price traffic based on "value" - i.e. how much they can double-bill the sender of the packets - rather than the cost of that traffic.
If you want a viable YouTube competitor, you want net neutrality regulation.
[0] Ok, before you cite a Ninth Circuit opinion arguing that mere downloading still has liability or something, I'm not saying that you CAN'T EVER be sued for watching YouTube, only that you'd have to sue Google first, and they have big pockets.
[1] Notorious "reaction streamer" that doesn't actually do any reacting in her videos made up of entirely other people's YouTube uploads. Recently infamous for tracking down JacksFilms' physical location and bragging about it on Instagram.