Host covers self-hosted and federated video — and publish: catalogues, live streams, and light static publishing without a single company’s ranker (cf. ActivityPub). Privacy by Default for hosting means you can leave with your files and your audience graph.

Surveillance and profiling. Watch history, pause points, and who you share a clip with become advertising and ranking features. Closed apps often demand more device access than a browser tab.

Recommendation lock-in. Opaque feeds decide what billions of people see. Creators optimize for the ranker, not for an audience they can take with them.

Hosting monopoly and takedowns. A policy change or a false claim can erase a channel overnight. There is no portable identity and no federation to another operator.

Compute and transcoding concentration. Live and on-demand video is expensive to encode. Platforms keep that pipeline in-house; independents pay cloud rates or give up resolution.

Capture and hardware lock. Cameras, streaming boxes, and SoC decoders that only talk to a vendor cloud make even recording a subscription.

Visual privacy. Street video, protests, and background faces are treated as content to scrape. Few consumer tools let you mask people before a clip leaves the device.

Browse the projects below — each hits a hosting layer: federated catalogue, encode offload, scale, short video, light publish, VoD, or live.

	PeerTube is the Fediverse video host: run an instance, federate over ActivityPub, and keep catalogue + audience graph under operators you can leave — not a single company ToS.
	PeerTube Remote Transcoding offloads heavy encode to workers you choose, so a small origin host can still offer multiple resolutions without a hyperscaler encode bill.
	PeerTube Scalability spreads a PeerTube deployment across nodes and eases moderation at institution scale — universities and broadcasters stay off YouTube for capacity alone.
	Loops hosts ActivityPub short video so a For You page is not owned by one ranker; clips federate like other Fediverse objects.
	Hyper 8 publishes video with a light self-hosted catalogue — static-ish hosting when a full PeerTube instance is more than you need.
	MistServer Video-on-Demand adds distributed cache and transcode nodes to an open media server so on-demand delivery is not automatically an AWS invoice.
	Owncast is self-hosted livecasting with Fediverse reach: OBS in, chat and stream on hardware you run — leave-ability versus a Twitch-shaped ToS.

Reference points — not recommendations.

YouTube is Google’s catalogue plus ranker: hosting, search, live, and ads in one silo.

TikTok is short-form ranking as a product. Leaving means losing the graph.

Twitch is live-plus-chat as a company service; moderation and discoverability stay on Amazon’s terms.

Instagram Reels ties short video to Meta’s identity and ads graph.