It works a lot like Lemmy. Everything's federated, you get to see your local traffic and what the local people on your note are following.

The problem is, peertube is resource intensive. To get the torrent style benefits, you need multiple people watching a given video at the same time.

If you click a link and you're the only person watching it You've got to wait for that one person's hosted instance to stream you the data which is not necessarily performant.

Lacking options for monetization, and poor performance on less reviewed media are stumbling blocks keeping it from going more mainstream. YouTube is also starting to block people from trying to sync to it which will be another problem.

I suspect once YouTube gets its ad blocker blocking sorted out you might see a resurgence in peer tube as people repost popular YouTube videos around the net without ads.

It's also kind of a pain in the ass to stand one up from scratch. I scrapped one together in a VM the other day while I was at work, I gave it self-contained redis and postgres and when it got up to the final install step it demanded that I have the URL already lined up and working and you're not allowed to change the URL after just really disappointing honestly.