And that also is not healthy

The correct tools are those small plastic containers or a cheap grease gun. You can get the grease better into the bearing with them and don’t have the risk of smearing cotton fiber in there. They are of course more expensive than a q-tip, but you can get one for unter 5€. Seriously, if you do this even a couple times a year, buy one.

(This is also a great example why environmental regulation is so tricky: It totally makes sense to prevent one of the worst polluting product to be phased out or replaced with a better solution. But then there are edge cases (how many people have even greased a bearing in their life?) where the new product might be worse, but that still is not an argument for mass pollution on our beaches or against that regulation)

Come on, let’s not doubt that eating car tires is unhealthy.

Why would you grease a bearing with a q-tip? Use a proper tool for that!

Peertube won’t cut it. Those people in the article have thousands of hours of videostreams there. If you’re streaming at 1080p, that will be around 1.5GB of storage per hour. 4k will be worse. So if you have 5000 hours of videos like the one guy in the article, that is a neat 7500GB or 7.5TB of video. There is no instance around that will allow you to save that amount of videos.

So hosting your own instance would be the only way. Looking at Hetzner storage box, 10TB of data will cost you 25€/month or 300€/years. That is money, but should be possible to pay out of your own pocket.