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A reminder in the age of the Fediverse: if you're not the customer, you're still the product.
(slrpnk.net)
OP was taking about Tumblr, but I think it applies even more to the Fediverse: users need to develop an ethos of paying to support the sites they use. Otherwise advertisers pay the bills and call the shots.
Devil's advocate here - as soon as you introduce monetization to the use of a service you have locked in it's potential as an income stream which will inevitably lead to the downside you are afraid of.
Fediverse services being distributed means no central host has to bear the entire weight. I could probably take on all of the server load that I use if I repurposed my PleX server:
https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1592223884107218944
This is not about money, it is about control.
Monetization of users will never be enough. They will also want to sell ads and paid promotional content.
Source: Back in the day, Imgur was a paid service. You paid $2/mo and you could upload more than 200 images, you could link directly to them, and they did not expire. End of transaction. I paid for imgur and used it as described. But they wanted more. Instead, they cancelled paid accounts, and made it free*. No more direct linking, instead you had to go to their ad-riddled site and also be exposed to the community comments on any image. Eventually they changed the UI to 'trap' people into doomscrolling through images while showering them with ads.
Yep. It's simply not how greed works.
They'll never say "Oh since we're making millions of dollars a month, we don't need to sell user data". They'll just do both, because there's always greedy people at the top pushing for every penny of profit.
It would be nice to run some nodes attached to your favorite instance to distribute the bandwidth cost.