YouTube might be the biggest challenge yet given the extraordinary amount of storage needed to recreate it.

Its also getting the content creators onto the new platform. Thats a bigger challenge I think, without creators it’s a dead site really, and making videos is significantly more difficult than image or text posting.

For storage, if we assume the format would be WebM at 1080p, 60fps and 20 minutes in length, it turns out to about 1GB. Even a cheap VPS instance usually offer 50GB of storage (with not too expensive storage upgrades).

So if its distributed evenly, we can host a good bit of videos (nothing compared to YouTube though).

Let's not forget that there's money to be earned by being a youtube person. Creating a model that would make this possible in a federated approach would be bonkers as hell and probably just invite predatory dipshits who then lure creators with seemingly good offers and then start to hold them hostage in ways YouTube hasn't dared so far.