Haven’t had an FP6 in my hands yet, but I’ve been using FP since the Fairphone 2, am currently using the FP4 and besides the ethics in sourcing their materials and manufacturing (which they genuinely attempt to provide, and while there is no ethical consumption in capitalism, there are still degrees of fucked-upness.), I do enjoy the repairability, longevity and long-term support. They are also decently supported by de-googled-android and even pure Linux phone operating systems, if you want to experiment there, and come without a lot of bloat that nowadays is ubiquitous with most smartphones.

Yeah, that is very varying from instance to instance, I try to keep outright porn completely out of mine, for example, but allow non-sexualised nudity (within reason), both for my own server and content I federate with. Others, like peertube.wtf don’t allow porn on their server, but allow it in the federated content. Others again just outright ban NSFW content altogether.

I think you do bring up important points, and ads are indeed a de-facto impossibility (even though, technically, there’s nothing stopping someone creating a plug-in that shows ads, the dynamics you describe would make platforms using it isolated quickly). I would add that, personally, I don’t want to ever have PeerTube go down the ad rabbit hole, it comes with a lot of dynamics that almost make enshittification inevitable - although I heard some Fedi platforms had some success with very selected and limited sale of hand-curated advertisement spots, that really isn’t scalable in the same way.

But while this makes PeerTube uninteresting to the really big players that want or need to maximise their income - I think there is still a lot of potential left. Two of the other big revenue streams are still available - sponsored segments in videos can work basically the very same as on YT. And Liberapay/Patreon/Ko-Fi are still available as well, with Framasoft mentioning looking into enabling better integration for services like it in the future. Another possibility I imagine could work, would be Nebula-like platforms utilising the technology eventually, with local content on the server being fenced-off to paying subscribers, but those registered local users still able to also reach the bigger, free network of videos in the Fediverse beyond that.

There are a lot of mid-sized YT channels, and channels not wanting to compromise on satisfying ad guidelines, that basically only make pennies from YTs normal monetisation strategies and completely rely on sponsoring and patrons. For those, PeerTube is a genuine possibility in the future, after more organic growth. And that growth will have to follow the usual stages of alternative platforms, with currently enthusiasts and hobbyists being the “moss and lichen” to enable growth of “grasses” in the future, to use a metaphor.

this really feels like the kind of software project that has the end state of getting “adopted” by a corporation and the major devs hired on as consultants.

I can understand the fear, but from what I know of Framasoft - if they were prone to sell out, they would not have “wasted” decades on their passion projects, and stubbornly delaying to do more dynamic, non-local, non-French marketing of their “de-google-ify” suite.

EDIT: Good exchange indicative of this I just (at the time of this edit) witnessed on Mastodon: