Comment by Shawnj2

I think YouTube might be the exception to this because of how expensive video hosting is. Mastodon is actually doing a great job funding itself but it and Lemmy/Kbin are all text based protocols. The only other sites even close to YouTube’s scale that served videos anyone could upload used to be maybe adult video sites, but even then that’s not really true anymore because of the (good) new verification policies that exist now to help curb abuse and also the second category is far more profitable per video than YouTube is. Something like 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every second and I’m not sure if donations would easily cover the costs at that scale.