I’m so tired.
That’s an extremely good point: youtube actually does pay out to creators in a way that most other sites do not. Sure, they will often supplement this income with kofi or patreon, but if that youtube income stream dries up, a lot of the youtubers will simply call it quits instead of migrating to other platforms.
Alternatives to YouTube include Vimeo and the fediverse’s Peertube, but I am not sure they qualify as competitors.
Actually, the peer-sharing nature of Peertube makes me wonder if it could handle a sudden surge of users better than the rest of the fediverse.
These kinds of public errors are almost always a hard drive failure.