The fediverse is a return to something bigger, not something new. An influx of users will hopefully help things get to where they should be.
Email never went away, but for some reason has been the only federated protocol with real staying power so far.
If one of your reasons for using YouTube premium is “streamers get paid”, you should probably look into things a bit further.
The vast majority of YouTube premium revenue goes towards music publishers who, statistically, don’t have any relation to the content you watch, and contribute nothing towards it.
The content you watch likely still has embedded advertising because YouTube has some of the worst, if not the worst, rates paid to people who actually create the videos on their platform (this means there’s no such thing as “ad free YouTube” without using an ad blocker, even if you pay for premium)
What do you consider to be “NuTrek”? One issue with the more-recent shows is that they don’t have a lot of continuity, to the extent that they would seem to implicitly contradict each-other (and themselves, between seasons)
with that in mind, there’s no good “viewing order”, as they don’t seem to take place in the same world