I think Peertube is the best, not immediately but in potential. Given that, I'd suggest sticking around, interacting, making contents yourself and sharing stuff from there with your friends, so the environment gets traction and so those interested in improving the engine, the environment or just doing the same you did for traction, gravitate towards.

Personally, I'd say it's the same as people saying Lemmy wouldn't go anywhere when Spez was going coo-coo some years ago. While Lemmy itself is more or less stagnant, it was a good kickstart then. And now, from what I saw in statistics some weeks back, comments are increasing on the "threadiverse" even if posts are slowly decreasing, which afaik is a better sign of organic growth.

As far as I know, there is no plataform/software on the fediverse with the features to make monetization of videos/livestreams doable.

We have peertube. You can post videos and do lives on it, but I don't think it's possible to do it as a source of income

in my search for a youtube replacement i have found a few small yt-like alternatives that are fractured and niche in content. which at the moment is the only model available against a monolith like yt.

the problem is that once any of these smaller site were to gather as much content as yt they would have to use that advantage like yt does to make it profitable to keep the servers running and the support/dev staff happy.

so i haven't seen a path forward away from yt until that basic issue becomes solved. perhaps lots of small yt niche sites gathered under a federated website i don't know

Peertube for long tech videos. You'll find lots of linux people here. Sure, there's pretty much everything else too, but that's what I use Peertube for.

Odysee for a wide range of videos in general. Many youtubers have backed up their videos here.

Loops for short videos... more like a tiktok clone really.