My favorite instance on peertube.

The only one I can find is TILVids, which has a few of the bigger Linux content creators but not much more than that. Content worth watching is really the one thing PeerTube is lacking, and that has to come from users, but that's really a catch-22. You need more quality content to bring in more users, but you need more users to provide that quality content.

On top of that, not many unique users are going to be drawn to a platform that can't provide avenues for monetization and which costs money to run on top of that, even with all the policies at YouTube all these creators whine about in every other video, which they only mostly whine about because it affects their monetization. So it's either live with YouTube's policies reducing your potential income or live with a negative income to set up or join a PeerTube instance: slightly reduced profit vs guaranteed loss. They'll pick the slightly reduced profit every time.

Even further, the ones who get kicked off of YouTube and need to find an alternative or care enough about "free speech" to branch out are... mostly niche creators, to put it politely, and the unique content they provide to these alternative platforms tends to discourage other creators who still have YouTube channels from syncing their channels from YouTube to PeerTube in order to not be associated with those more niche creators. Other platforms such as Rumble and Odysee have similar issues. That said, PeerTube does have an advantage over Rumble/Odysee in this regard, in that instances that want to avoid that type of content can moderate and set up their federation to limit that association, but at that point they may just find it too much effort to put into bringing in too small an audience to be worth it.

The Fediverse appears to work well enough for user generated content that doesn't take much effort or expense to provide, such as Twitter, Facebook or Reddit-type content, as the rise of Mastodon and Lemmy are showing, but when users have to put in the work and expense of publishing a video, the return on investment of PeerTube (in both money and views) compared to just staying on YouTube may just be too small to work.

Have you seen Sepia Search? https://search.joinpeertube.org/

YouTube got traction before Google bought it and before Google bought it they tried to make Google videos and failed, what peertube lacks is contributors