I actually don’t mind subscription services in general. I would rather pay a monthly fee and not get any ads.

The issue is of course with Google is that your subscription cost is not only the money you pay per month. You’re also giving them your data and many YouTubers end up putting ads inside their videos anyways.

Really what we need is a sort of Peertube service with a model that uses ads and optional subscription service (to remove ads) to generate revenue.

This revenue would first pay for all expenses to run the service and then the remainder be split between all content creators relative to how many views or subscribers each content creator manages get.

The issue with current Peertube is that video hosting is expensive. Video hosting at scale is even more so. However, with enough subscribers the math starts to even out. I don’t know at what # this becomes viable.

Open source and transparent services ran by non-profits

I would be more than happy to pay a subscription for this. I donate regularly to lichess and Wikipedia for this reason. We need to support these projects because they’re the only viable path forward, I believe, that doesn’t end in inevitable enshittification.