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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.
Who pays for the data stored on the Blockchain?
Who pays for those server costs?
Regardless of what you think of crypto, there is some self-sustaining 'business model' there where storage and compute is paid for by the user (transaction fees).
It is starting to look like a universal basic income that motivates people to continue participating in the community, for which the people using the service pay a small tax/fee that nobody can avoid. ๐ง
The server costs can be quite modest. The one big exception is streaming video. If you're willing to give that up, a bunch of Raspberry Pis will get you pretty far. Even further by bumping up to old desktops running Linux.
I've had a project in the back of my head about laying out what a Solarpunk Internet might look like. If you're willing to drop streaming video (or even just drop down to 480p), that version of the Internet becomes a lot easier to setup on very modest hardware that's otherwise considered e-waste.