I'm wondering how they plan to get decent content. I just searched two of my interests, climbing and canoeing, and only a handful of uninteresting videos popped up. Are there specific topics that have engaging communities on the site?
But it is mostly a discovery problem. Once you have found a channel that you like it is easy to follow via RSS or ActivityPub. I would love to see discovery services built on top of PeerTube, it seems natural to separate the viewing infrastructure from the recommendation service.
A content creator producing quality content has spent a lot of money in order to produce the high quality content. How much? Estimates from YouTube creators who are currently in the top creators get us numbers like $25,000-$1,000,000 per video. If they do not reliably make more than that much from trying to produce at that quality, they cannot survive while doing so.
So a larger problem than content discovery is that by default people producing quality content will die.
There is a huge difference between "there is lots of crap content to wade through to get to the good content" and "I can't find content that isn't crap". My foray into Peertube over the years is that the latter is much closer than the former.
Well, most of everything in the Universe is “crap.” But, to each their own, and I find YouTube to be a treasure trove of educational content, among other things.
Similarly, most people on YouTube are not expecting to strike it big with videos of their cat, or their hobby project, or whatever.
What's the point of self hosting if you still need Google?
Maybe you don't like that, but that's what software freedom looks like