Android

Good, I'm glad advertising will suffer. Even on YouTube, creators don't make shit from platform advertising. Their best shot is either premium user watch time, or direct sponsors (heavy emphasis on the latter).

The number of instances is relevant because it illustrates that this is already a maturing project, not a proof of concept. It's not even the only federated video ~~platform~~ project.

As for the how; I'm not going to sit here and develop a roadmap for you just because you think I'm being reductive. Yes, it's complicated, but it's also not magic. Adoption breeds innovation (more eyes, more devs, more complaints), and necessity breeds refinement. Want to reduce file sizes and make the most of bandwidth? Develop/refine codecs (see h.264 vs AV1). Not satisfied with the speed of encoding, or want to squeeze more frames out faster with existing hardware? Refine the encoder. Don't want latency for distant users? Make sure the app knows how to find closer peers. These are just natural refinements made over time, same thing YouTube did.

Which brings us to monetization; First, maybe advertizers /should/ be a little picker, and more careful. Hell, there are news stories alleging that Google itself isn't being totally honest about how ads are being shown, or to how many people. And also, fuck advertising. I'll pay for a well run federated instance (or run my own) before I give YouTube one cent after all the shitty things they've done (their terrible handling of DMCA comes to mind).

Being hard doesn't mean it's not possible, or not worth it. Even if it's slower, or lower resolution, or "only" 24/30fps, it's well worth it to get out from under these fucking monolith providers we've chained ourselves to.