> Methinks this is not a viable competitor to YouTube.

It is not.

I'm French and I have known about the different FramaSoft software for years now. They are all terrible alternatives.

Their approach is completely wrong, they think that being "libre" (free) is enough to acquire market share, and they completely ignore the user experience, feature parity, and innovation. All of their tools are therefore terrible, to the point of being unusable.

They are a paragon of oblivious French mediocrity.

PeerTube specifically has existed for almost a decade and has never been used by anybody. It is an empty shell of a website kept alive just to burn public money.