> YouTube now dominates podcast discovery.

This may be the part I like least. YouTube, and thus Google, have way too much power.

well technically peertube exists & I feel like there must be some easy way of deployment of them as well from what I can think of.

also am not familiar but I think that a lemmy community can be created with podcasts where people can share their podcasts or a mastodon/pixelfed community too.

federated options exists but the people there just don't exist or try to use it in this way.

Maybe a federated instance about podcasting (and a domain name related to it) can be established to become a de-facto (maybe non profit/donation running service) too.

I think that it could scale really a lot on OVH dedicated servers or Hetzner auction boxes and run on quite a substantially few amount of dollars for the infra that the google/youtube monopolistic power can go away.