So what's different between Peertube and Youtube, is that Youtube is a single entity with considerable hosting/network resources. They are building their own CD

So what's different between Peertube and Youtube, is that Youtube is a single entity with considerable hosting/network resources. They are building their own CDN (developing points of presence across continents), which makes their infra expensive to run, and also reproduces real-world power imbalances such as access to Youtube being real slow (or even impossible) from some countries/regions (eg. sub-Saharan Africa). Peertube, on the other hand, encourages distribution of content in a peer-to-peer manner. As a person, you can use your favorite Webtorrent [0] client to help seed content from far away servers to your neighbors. As an instance operator, you can opt-in to seeding for another instance (with a disk quota limit) from your own network, helping videos published on the other side of the world reach your local audience. Example: take three hypothetical FLOSS-oriented instances floss.fr (France) floss.cn (China) and floss.ml (Mali). If those instances all "follow" one another, with sufficient disk quotas, all videos will be replicated across the 3 servers, and video streaming will be smooth from those 3 locations (and neighboring regions). In all cases, even when initial streaming is slow, Webtorrent scales well because most clients (unless they opt-out) will seed videos via Webtorrent protocol (WebRTC + STUN) so as a video becomes more popular it becomes easier/faster to access without placing the infrastructure/economic burden on the Peertube instance. Clever stuff. [0] There is a reference Webtorrent client, but libtorrent recently started implementing Webtorrent support so that should become more broadly available "soon".