Not just this, it’s AH. Not… terrible, but super hype-y from what I’ve seen.

Knowing what I know about the costs of streaming video, I really want to know what the alternative is for a platform that can’t just throw money down the drain. To my mind, there are only two options here - people watch ads (within reason, but 2 hour ads aren’t resonable), or people pay YouTube (a la Premium).

If you want things for free, the only way to make that happen sustainably is ads right now. Donations simply will not work, especially for something with the costs that video incurs - to say nothing about being able to compensate creators for their time and effort.

Money is going to be the deciding factor in the long-term health of the entire Fediverse. More users on each instance means more costs – and to some extent, even users not on that instance will contribute to cost. That money has to come from somewhere, and eventually, if the Fediverse is going to scale up to even a sizable portion of what we’re moving away from, we need real, consistent money involved. It doesn’t have to be full VC corpo junk, but eventually, some instances are going to need a team.

I want this stuff to work great, but expecting the people running it to pay the cost forever isn’t sustainable.

Because that dip isn’t due to the blackout. Reddit was pretty hard down for about an hour.