There’s plenty of people willing to release good content regardless.

But there really aren't. They would be all over the free platforms that have existed for years. But Peertube is nearly bereft of quality content, there are maybe a dozen regular creators that make anything interesting enough to 50% of the population to watch.

Nebula has more and is cheaper. I had some interest in Floatplane. Last time I looked at it, Youtube was cheaper for my use case and them not listing creators up front is bad news.

you are not seeding by just leaving the window open on any peertube page. you are only seeding the specific video you have opened, if you have opened one, and probably not the complete video just the last segments you still have cached. this p2p sharing is mostly for when a certain video gets popular, to help with peek load, and for live streams. if the video was buffering for a long time it's probably because the server did not have enough upload bandwidth, and no other viewer had the video segments.

there is another load balancing system that peertube supports, they can clone videos fromneach other and help serving them: https://docs.joinpeertube.org/admin/following-instances#platforms-redundancy

It never buffers for me, but I do have a full gig and super low latency

all its time buffering.

Could be a zillion reasons for this. Need an actual instance to debug

Some channels use Ghost instead of Patreon, including one of my favorites Anders Puck

liberapay can do that already. but apparently they don't have the necessary API for integration: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/1586#issuecomment-459100710

Like I said, Nebula does it and it's pretty good. Hard to get on as a creator unless you have a proven follower base elsewhere though. They're still mainly using YouTube as a farm league.

Might be interesting to see Nebula set up a fund for PeerTube creators and start using that as a farm league, but I don't know that they have the subscription revenue for that yet.