By operating youtube at a loss for many years Google acted anticompetitively to kill competition or stop competition arising. Now that they've achieved that they can do what they like. Don't feel bad using ad blockers against this anti-capitalist company.
Sure, a service that manages an infinitely smaller amount of content and complexity. It is a situational tool, hardly a YouTube killer... the banner presented on the homepage professes that it's expensive to run and please donate.
https://fediverse.party/en/peertube/ << before you complain understand the technology behind. Everyone can basically provide a instance and it's decentral. As more people participate / as more instances are provide as better for all and as cheaper. If you really want to step away from services like youtube and want to have it sustainable (aka not depending on business) than it's your best choice. If you just want someone else to have the saying and replace one company with another good luck.
Do you know of PeerTube? It's not mainstream at all either, but it seems more known to me.
It's also in the fediverse, and isn't accused of the same moderation issues (though idk if PeerTube is really better than Odyssee at moderation, I suppose it's just a difference in policy).
Edit: I read a bit about it, and I can see I was wrong about Odyssee being less known than PeerTube. It's strange, I never heard of it, but anyway. Odyssee also includes some crypto bullshit, so yeah...
OK, so a bittorrent tracker site with a video player built in with comments underneath and you can get perks from content creators for seeding. Then of course some kind of voting system and etc. Then a creator can just get a seed box to start hosting their own videos.
It's a very difficult business model to make profitable without an already massive userbase. In fact, I think YT was actually losing money for Google for a while after they bought it. I could be misremembering though.
YouTube was operating at a loss under Google for years. The only reason it is able to exist is because a massive entity like Google was able to absorb that without folding, and keep providing a free service until it becomes profitable (is it even yet? I'm not sure).
I mean fuck Google, and yes a big enough non-profit (or even government) could do it (probably better), but unfortunately that's not the world we live in right now.