It got to the top of HN. That speaks to a tremendous demand. Most startups fail not because of money raised but because they don't have product market fit. People want this product to exist, but... the question is, will they actually use it. lol.

> It got to the top of HN. That speaks to a tremendous demand.

No it doesn't. It might just mean that enough people found it "neat" or interesting, but nobody should mistake a HN frontpage spot for "tremendous demand". It might also just mean that they used the right hype buzzwords at the right time.

The audience of HackerNews is vastly smaller than the audience of YouTube.

PeerTube is not trying to replace YouTube. So the target markets don't have to overlap or even look similar.

If PeerTube is successful YouTube will most likely still exist and be dominant.

It's a decent audience, plenty of mainstream products started with a HN audience. reddit, dropbox, etc.

To put a number on that tremendous demand: 540 people found the idea worth discussing with like-minded people.

That would be a very good 1 year salary for Spain. In most parts of Spain (except the big cities) you can easily live 2 years with that. I expect France to be similar price-wise.