I don't have an idea on how to do cascading OBS instances. I should write some software to make this easy though. I want to make 'self hosting' as easy as possible. I think https://github.com/glimesh/broadcast-box will fill that gap for now.
What I would like to see is a Twitch like experience but within your own space, aka what a website is for the web, and the hoster is nothing more than a facilitator. So you pay for the basic tech and maybe bandwidth but the rest is up to the streamer. Would be great to have a real alternative to Twitch that’s completely your own. People could still federate, but there is also a mainhub (broadcastbox.com or whatever)
What if you create extra facilities on a unified website? I would pay for that. Maybe sub functions, chat functions and so on. You need that for more discoverability I think.
For my own usage I run WebRTC servers and have them 'replicate' the video traffic. LiveKit did a write up on this with some good graphics https://blog.livekit.io/scaling-webrtc-with-distributed-mesh...