As someone who’s written in-browser player and transcoding/server code…the lemmy/mastodon etc. version of this can work, especially if flexible bitrate handling is baked into it (i.e., bitrate offer/acceptance matching over a protocol). You can get this down to YouTube interface + install some software + open a port on your firewall.
So in other words this is a tech issue.
As someone who’s written in-browser player and transcoding/server code…the lemmy/mastodon etc. version of this can work, especially if flexible bitrate handling is baked into it (i.e., bitrate offer/acceptance matching over a protocol). You can get this down to YouTube interface + install some software + open a port on your firewall.
Tech issue, infrastructure issue, content issue, financial issue…
Hosting text like lemmy is several orders of magnitude cheaper than video.