I kinda miss when places would host their own videos instead of relying on youtube, but that’s the problem of a centralized internet, the majority of people won’t want to leave yt/ig/fb/tiktok/twitter/reddit in order to watch or read whatever you posted.
People don’t want to deal with the heavy costs and load of hosting their own content. That’s unfortunately the sacrifice. Google is big enough to house it all, whereas, we’d probably see content from a creator last for a finite amount of time before they end up having to close up shop or beg for donations.
Centralisation and large scale has it’s benefits. There were also many problems with everybody hosting their stuff by themselves. Enshittification is results of private companies having to go profit first (and google being google of course), not so much because they are the only game in town. Being the monopoly merely enables the shitting on users for profit. I see youtube and many google services more like internet’s utilities that are privately owned and that is causing problems, not that they have gotten so big.
So in other words this is a tech issue.
As someone who’s written in-browser player and transcoding/server code…the lemmy/mastodon etc. version of this can work, especially if flexible bitrate handling is baked into it (i.e., bitrate offer/acceptance matching over a protocol). You can get this down to YouTube interface + install some software + open a port on your firewall.
Tech issue, infrastructure issue, content issue, financial issue…
Hosting text like lemmy is several orders of magnitude cheaper than video.
