Data privacy is all the rage and people want to have an internet where companies need permission to sell your data and where you can use the FREE service without letting them tell advertisers what you actually like.
There are only 2 possible models for the internet
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A free internet where websites, browsers and search engines make money by selling your data to companies who want to sell their products to users.
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A subscription based internet where you companies don’t use your data but charge a fee to use a specific website, browser or search engine.
I can guarantee that all these people complaining about “muh privacy” would not like having a paywall restricted internet.
Good luck? You think the nerds who run servers don’t have money for it? There is an infinite supply of nerds with both expertise AND money.
You aren’t even right, either. Linux package manager repositories?? Torrenting clients and the act of torrenting? Just to name some classics.
Open source gets income through sponsors, profit-earning partners, foundations of profitable interests whose success depends on it. Their continued earnings & livelihoods incentivize funding it.
No one’s success depends on services like lemmy, so there’s no compelling incentive for it.
If you can somehow arrange such a dependence for social media (of mostly garbage memes & idiotic opinions) to economically sustain itself, then you’re a genius & humanity will owe you a debt.
Mostly piracy under constant legal threat unreliably distributing possibly unsafe content.
Depending on the charity of others for a service that doesn’t yield some obvious incentive to keep that going seems unsustainable. It wouldn’t surprise me for the system to strain with load & eventually fail. It already strains in my experience.