I have no real feedback on your project specifically, but I’ve had this same concern of YouTube eventually probably going away or being totally enshittified and the videos on it becoming effectively lost, so I’ve been archiving a few of my favourite channels using ytdl-sub. It’s a script wrapper for yt-dlp that downloads the videos along with a bunch of metadata.
Personally I’ve been adding them to my Jellyfin server for now under a separate category (ytdl-sub creates Jellyfin-friendly metadata). Some kind of community archive would of course be best, but there’s many difficulties with that. Most prominently the fact that YouTube isn’t dead or completely enshittified yet, so there’s no driving motivation for the effort. Copyright issues would be the second major problem.
Creating an individual torrent for every video doesn’t seem like a great solution, because the typical channel has lots of videos, up to thousands. Just between the four channels I’ve archived I have about 2000 video files, which is getting in the realm of torrent clients starting to choke on that many torrents.
Also these four channels add up to about 500 GB of data, which is why I pretty quickly started having second thoughts about archiving every channel I’m subscribed to. I mostly went with 1080p quality; settling for 720p would probably help a lot in the disk space department.
Perhaps grouping by year would be a good compromise. The problem, of course, is what to do if you’re wanting to track channels that still actively upload. I’m not sure there’d really be an audience for that though – if the channel is still active, people can just go watch the videos on YouTube directly, no?
Most torrent clients start having trouble at around 10k torrents, forcing use of multiple instances, and that will be fairly easy to hit by seeding entire channels worth of videos as individual torrents.
I feel like most people think of YouTube in terms of creators they like rather than individual videos, and the way the site is structured makes it difficult to cleanly subdivide a creator you like into smaller parts than “all their videos”. Therefore if one archives something, more often than not they’ll probably archive an entire channel, so it’d be easy to end up seeding a ton of videos.
The other option is that they archive random individual videos that mean a lot to them, but I feel like that approach is rather incompatible with a private tracker-style community archive to begin with. It’d be a bit like a music tracker where people just upload individual songs they like.
For stuff like this I wish there was a better option than torrents. If only IPFS was actually practically useful…