I wanted something similar from a remote company I was working for. They were pretty good about fulfilling requests, but when I asked for a good kvm switch they said they had trouble in the past and instead recommended a usb hub that can toggle between machines. Then connect both machines to the same monitor and toggle the input. Not ideal, but low cost and functional. Might not suit your needs (would be annoying if you have to frequently toggle back and forth), but if you’re just trying to share your desk space between a work machine and personal, and the monitor input is easy to toggle, it’s worth considering.

I don’t think they have the ux advantage that their wealth suggests due to misaligned incentives. A good portion of their investment is getting users to see as many ads as they will tolerate. Try to modify any privacy settings, for example, and the ux is as garbage as amazon.

Fediverse and self hosted, open source alternatives are still relatively new. Folks have to expect some turbulence. As things grow and more bug reports and contributions can be made, the ux could be superior because they can give users what they want instead of maximizing monetization.

Misskey is a federated facebook alternative I heard about on mastodon recently. I’m not too familiar with it myself, but seems worth mentioning.

It has a “groups” feature that might avoid the “instance per person” lemmy workaround you were thinking about. According to this comparison misskey doesn’t have a like button, but a few of its forks do. Not sure about the upload experience; may depend on the app. I didn’t see any clients listed on their site but did a quick search for an iOS app, which exists, so i assume android, too.

Sorry I don’t have more info, but I hope that’s useful. Best of luck! I’ll be looking for a similar solution in the near future.

From my research, Patreon takes a smaller cut than YouTube Premium. Comparing YouTube Premium to its own ad model is a “Worst Negates the Bad” fallacy. From what I gathered (not easy to find and has changed over time) YT takes 30% from the former and 45% from latter. Seems insanely high. More than taxes. May be why so many creators need sponsors and hawk merch.

YouTube never supporting 3rd party apps seems like a negative.

Lots of suitable alternatives to youtube: read a book, listen to music, go for a walk, hang with friends, play games, etc, but to your point, sounds like a monopoly. Their search was once great, then ubiquitous, now terrible. YouTube Premium is just in the “entice users and creators” phase of its inevitable enshittification.

Don’t mean to dump on something you like, just disagree with the reasoning. If you’re not fine with Premium and hate giving money to google, sounds like you’ll eventually seek out alternatives when they go into profit maximization mode. Hopefully enough resources will have been invested in viable alternatives by that time.

[edit: break wall of text]