Before that setting becomes default, the "Hot" algorithm needs to get a major overhaul. It keeps spamming the top of my front page with posts that have zero comments and around ~1-10 upvotes as the results from federated instances start trickling in.

Any prior RIF users with some advice for which app to switch to for Lemmy that's the most similar?

I’m truly surprised there hasn’t been a successful YouTube competitor in the last decade or so.

Running a video service the size of YouTube carries astronomical traffic and storage costs. Google is probably one of the only companies in the world that can stem that.

There's smaller video sharing sites, like DailyMotion, but those would probably instantly crash and burn if their userbase were to suddenly grow to the size of YouTube's.