Because they act as a portal and distribution service. The same reason freelance journalists don’t print their own newspapers but instead publish via either a s

Because they act as a portal and distribution service. The same reason freelance journalists don’t print their own newspapers but instead publish via either a syndicate or directly through papers. The paper has the brand, distribution, ability to monetize and pay journalists for their content, layout staff, etc. Similarly say YouTube is YouTube in the same way the NYT is the NYT - people go to YouTube for content, it provides hosting and distribution as well as ways to promote your content, monetize it, they provide a UX and technical infrastructure, etc. There is nothing stopping anyone in any RFC or other technical standard from hosting their own content on equal footing with YouTube. People do host stuff on their own machines and sites. You’re just not directly aware of it because it’s basically impossible to find relative to the ease of content discovery on YouTube. No one is getting rich or even paying their bills because on self hosted because beyond having no funnel monetization of content is actually kinda hard. Case in point, politics aside, Parler and Truth Social were basically formed based off similar thoughts. Why do we let these big companies make content moderation policies? I’d like a place where I can be abusive and racist or whatever without fear of censorship. I’m after all entitled to hold those views and say them. But, it turns out, it’s hard to provide the quality of service of say Facebook on the premise of absolute freedom - especially when it’s so toxic most people are turned off. This gets to the point: you can host yourself, but if you want to build a “free YouTube” you probably need to ask why did YouTube, a for profit entity, take the positions it has in the market? Because the market rewards them for making a family friendly middle ground platform that provides easy access to personalized content and a simple experience for content creators to distribute and monetize their content. Do that on your own systems, and you’ll probably do alright - except one thing. They have the most users. Acquiring users, or in news papers, subscribers, is not easy or cheap. So, that’s why things are the way they are. But you’re absolutely able to self host. Just don’t expect everyone to show up at your random website.