Ehhh, I feel it's not just that.

Yeah, people don't think centralized media is an issue, and thus don't join Fediverse, causing it to be a little dead and discourages others from using it as an alternative.

However, YT is a job for the thousands that create content on there, and reasonably so, they need money to make said content and pay bills. Which means ads, cause be real, most people (including me) don't wanna join a Patreon to see their content. I just can't think of many creators who I love enough to drop consistent money on them, never mind several at once.

Lemmy doesn't need to be monetized to entice people, because Reddit wasn't built on that (karmawhoring gets you no money). Even pixelfed could make it as an alternative, because creators aren't paid by ads or Insta themselves, they get money from sponsorships and promoting their shops.

But YT? It's built to make money from putting in ads. So unless creators lived off of sponsors alone and the few who subscribe to Patreon, they're shit outta luck if they join Peertube.

EDIT: Completely forgot the server side of it, but was reminded of that fact by this comment on the Degoogle community about YT:

YouTube is expensive as all fuck to run. This is why alternatives will never take off unless they have a solid monetization model (e.g. floatplane). Sorry, but people on home internet with 100 down and 30 up aren't going to be able to host peertube nodes and stream 4k video to more than a couple people. Text and music work well decentralized, but people start to become a lot less able to contribute when hosting costs become hundreds per month and their home internet is saturated and barely usable instead of single digits with light traffic. This isn't even mentioning content creators' monetization.

Like with fucking, friction is the difference between pleasure and pain. If I click a YT link and the video starts playing, no lag, no buffering, just plays, I will come back.

I tried to watch the French dude describing Texas, hosted on Peertube. It took 17 minutes, 3 attempts, 2 error messages, lag while playing.

Can't change the paradigm with thrift.

To me it's a feature and not a problem to have less people. I had more online human interaction in lemmy than I had anywhere else (except maybe facebook in early times). Look at Reddit now, good luck interacting with real genuine people. Everyone is shilling something and nobody is honest, plus the low quality posts count growing.

I saw some studies a few years ago on how people are less interested in traditional social media and more interested in instant messaging 1to1 and small group chats. Also something about how group chats become dead after they exceed a couple hundred members.

Just to say, I am more happy with the way things are in lemmy. I appreciate all aspects of Lemmy really.