@phantasus honestly, I do only have very little experience. I have installed an instance on my Raspberry Pi 5 on my home network. Conversion of videos is not very performant there. Anything else is running fine. Once the videos are rendered in the various resolution levels, the most important part in terms of performance is the bandwidth of the network connection and pf course storage.
For a small instance with a few users only who do not upload dozens of videos at once, a relatively small virtual private server should serve you well. For larger instances you may want some didicated, more performant server.

@phantasus I can't help personally, but what I would do if I were in your position is to go through https://joinpeertube.org/instances and contact a handful admins for an idea of what it takes to run such an instance. Also, @FediTips may have ideas...?

@phantasus
I have a personal instance on a STRATO VPS Linux VC1-2 (1 core, 2gb ram) with #yunohost.

Was super easy to setup. 2GB is just enough. When uploading videos you need a bit more for transcoding. For this I have a remote runner on a pc at home. I just didn't want to pay more as I don't upload that often.

I just upload stuff that I recorded my own, so no copyright problems.

I've no direct experience with Peertube but other Fediverse Platforms. My educated guess is, it will be quite demanding since ActivityPub is rather chatty and you're also streaming, converting Videos.

If federated Video hosting is what you want, Peertube is probably still your best option. For all other purposes, there are more lightweight alternatives.

@phantasus

@phantasus If you're in germany it is actually not allowed to give you legal advice without being a lawyer. So all we can tell you on that note is to get a lawyer and ask them.

But in case you've more of an academic interest I'd get a legal and a liability insurance. But it's not worse than when you post the same things here, so that is more or less a general precaution for doing stuff on the internet...

@phantasus the #peertube tag may help your question get to those that have some experience.

@phantasus

I run a PeerTube through managed hosting, it's very easy as the hosting company does all the techy stuff. Instances start from around 10e per month upwards through managed hosting. Some good ones include @Cloud68 and @fedihost

You might get storage cheaper if you're running manually maintained instances instead of managed.

I can't comment on legal matters, you would need a lawyer of some kind from your jurisdiction.