Yeah it needs to have some kind of Blockchain really, user accounts need to be distributed so you can move between them all and not lose your account.
I picked LW because it was big, I assumed if it was big it was more likely to last and must be big for a reason... I now see the incentive of smaller instances and it makes it difficult to commit to this site not knowing the future of each instance and therefore the communities that go with them, plus on top of this you can have bad instance admins, and all the defederation rubbish.
If you don't mind paying though, just pay for YT Premium?