Why would people that benefit from forced labour want to end it? Cheap labour benefits the wealthy - more money to make money with. And to those who think criminals should face actual punishment and pay back society - well: Why would they have a problem with forced labour. And, we have the political spectrum nicely tied up there - at least a majority of it.

If you want to get reform in: You need to address two groups - the “tough on crime” crowd, and the “abuse of prisoners is unacceptable” crowd - and that CAN be done. We need some core changes:

1. Restrict Solitary Confinement to violent outburst - and restrict it’s use. After all, our goal is to encourage people to participate not drive people into nonfunctional insanity.
2. Create base rate pay that is tied to minimum wage (like 2/3’s of it) with 1/3 going towards a savings fund, and 1/3 for the individual to use on whatever is allowed for them to buy. In effect: There should be a reason to work.
3. Increase base rate of repeat offences BUT tie in a labour + rehabilitation program participation as a way to reduce that sentence across the board.

Those three things - increase penalty for uncooperative individuals; It creates an environment of owning responsibility for actions; and it means that prisoners aren’t being paid a fraction of the minimum pay rate of the 1960’s. We can go even further with this:

1. The 2/3 of minimum wage is for low security prisoners.
2. Medium security prisoners have a lower rate of pay - say 1/2 of minimum wage, with the difference going directly towards restitution costs.
3. Violent criminals and high security prisoners gain no rate of pay for 10 years or until restitution is fully paid - whichever comes sooner, and their pay rate is 1/3 of minimum wage with the difference going to restitution costs.

In this way: There is a STRONG incentive to take actions, and efforts that will get you transferred to a lower security prison. We can also do things with half-way houses - and support training programs, and perhaps even voluntary association with a case worker post conviction for individuals that FEEL like they need extra support avoiding re-offending. This is not about reducing, or removing the existing system - but expanding it.

In effect: This entire set of changes is not about reducing the punishment on crime, nor straight up reducing the incarcerated population. Instead: It’s all about PERSONAL responsibility. And maybe, you could actually get THAT kind of reform through.

Ok: PeerTube is interesting. But: in terms of replacement? No. non-viable.

The problem you have is multifold - and one of them is constant content availability, and total bandwidth. The value of Youtube is on demand streaming - you click a video, it plays, basically anywhere in the world. The other value is… copyright: Because of the way youtube is set up, you don’t have the same kind of copyright problems as you would without the back end negotiating and systems youtube as put in place. You can think copyright as it stands is oppresive and sucks -and I agree; but with the law the way it is - youtube is the best work around that is feasibly possible.

Mirroring all of youtube needs piles of terrabytes of new storage DAILY. and it’s in the hundreds of thousands as a low end estimate. You need the computational power to do the transcoding. You need the distribution of servers to load balance and avoid over saturating and d-dossing any given server cluster.

The reality is the Torrent protocol has been around forever - and there is a reason it never really took off, despite live watching while streaming was feasible: It has too many pitfalls.

And then, there is the content creator side: If you want to make money - youutube is kind of the place to put your content up with youtube premium sharing, ad revenue sharing and so on once you can monetize your channel. And while there are all kinds of BS in regards to what can and can’t be monetized - there really isn’t a replacement, not for the average person just getting started - and not if you are trying to build your following.