Then the problem of scale and incentive applies. There's no incentive to create/host interesting content if there's no way to recoup the costs for creating it

Then the problem of scale and incentive applies. There's no incentive to create/host interesting content if there's no way to recoup the costs for creating it and/or distributing it. I do agree that non-monetized things are interesting, however a lot of interesting things happen because there's an actual budget and means of supporting oneself and family. I say this as someone who ran a netlabel that gave away all their content for free, and still regularly gives away plenty of content that isn't directly monetized. The moment a tune saw any kind of popularity, bandwidth for free downloads became a problem in terms of scale (could no longer self-host from home) and then ultimately cost. Something could be decentralized and FOSS, but also allow you to inject your own ads. That isn't a difficult problem to solve, but PeerTube has no interest in doing it, yet would be a sure-fire way to turn it into a big deal.