Imo, one form of investment anyone can do is adoption. No use being the best option available if no one uses it. And Peertube channels are treated as communities on Lemmy/PieFed, have native RSS, and Grayjay and the *Pipe apps have integrations for it, so plenty of ways to follow. Then as adoption grows, so does relevance, and the more relevance there is, the higher is the chance is for people with the perfect alignment of interest, skills and time to improve the engine to appear.

Direct financial investment also helps, though that grows expensive fast, so worth being careful not to overspend in supporting. And as the local saying goes, if something is free, you are the product, which helps being ever more suspicious of how platforms like Youtube stay afloat indeed. So the better option, for those willing to support with money, is also to go slow and steady.

On a last note, Odysee's open source? Never heard of that.