Well, if you're comparing against all YouTube users, or even all YouTube users who have ever uploaded a video, then yes, it's a lot. On the other hand, compared to most content being viewed on YouTube, it's not even tiny, it's minuscule. There are many niche hobbyist communities or individual hobbyist singers getting much more than that. 20 subscribers basically means that not even your friends and family are looking at your channel.
I have a random "a vs. b" video on my personal channel with 150k views. A few thousand views is obtainable by accident just naming your video a certain way.
> 20 subscribers basically means that not even your friends and family are looking at your channel.
I agree with your interpretation overall, but there's other factors at play:
- Peertube isn't trying to force everyone to have an account like Youtube is
- the Peertube federation is much younger, and some would say it reached maturity for broader usage very recently (this year)
- view count does not account for people downloading the video directly using HTTPS direct connection and/or Webtorrent, only those using the default web client
I think there is a slight misunderstanding. The numbers from my GP were about YouTube subscribers and views, not PeerTube. The point being that this is a minuscule YT channel that is moving to PeerTube, one that is hardly representative of anything.
For comparison, here [0] is the YT channel that has moved to PeerTube, and here [1] is a random musician's channel that I happen to follow. The second is many times larger, even though it is a single person's channel.