I saw it mentioned somewhere that when you see subscriber counts for a community those counts only reflect the amount of subscribers from your instance. At least that is the way I understood it. I know that's not related to comments but there seems to be some ways that the federation work that is not great. Could it be that the comments are from an instance that your instance has de-federated from?
I have been using the freetube client for years to watch videos across multiple platforms. Maybe we could incorporate their method of having youtube be a first choice but allowing the user to pick other providers if they prefer?
It's likely all this will change as the user base grows. However there are some distinct advantages.
Having instances focused purely on certain topics or ethics makes it so you can join the communities that align with your ideas. while all these communities federate having a home base that aligns with your ethics is important. Also if any particular instance becomes overly trollish there is the option that your instance can defederate from them. While this is not ideal having smaller instances with a more homogeneous community means that it will be easier to lobby for things like that than a monolithic service.
people at the moment are focused on building something that is community oriented and that people will want to use. Right now we have mods, power users, tech enthusiasts, and community leaders mostly. We don't have a ton of trolls yet. This will change but I think we can adapt to it.
There is a sense of comradery. People are dusting themselves off after the collapse of a former community of bolstering each other. This will wear off. however hopefully by then the service is robust enough that people will have found their new communities and groups that they jive with.
this is a great idea. They could code it that if someone does post a youtube link that it just fetches the peertube equivalent or gives the person the option of what platform they prefer to watch videos on in their settings.