I block all advertising myself, but sponsors I think are ok. The creator can control who they sponsor with, they can write a funny ad skit that is entertaining (the best ones I have seen are the ones by squishy boi) and the creator gets paid directly without fucking us with an algorithm.

I’m happy to watch those kinds of ads as I know the creator is getting paid from them, and e.g. YouTube isn’t taking a cut.

We need more than this.

We need a way to make sure that the internet can’t be owned, physically.

We need some kind of easy to use and fast and robust open source alternate internet that we can all use.

Something that somehow costs nothing to run, that has enough storage and bandwidth for everyone and everything.

Something that has interoperability built in. Every platform should confirm to openid or openauth or activitypub or something like that.

And you know what? we have the technology!

We all have spare devices lying around. Old PC’s, old laptops, old phones - they could all be running some kind of node in a distributed platform of some kind of open source AWS equivalent, and let anyone host anything and post anything without getting ad-raped or data stolen.

It’s a pipe dream of mine, and I’m sure others… but with a will and a movement we could just take it all back, all at once.

This is the biggest design flaw of lemmy.

Instances should host separate content, and aggregation of separate instances should be up the client.

Instead we got the worst of all worlds. It means that lemmy can never truly scale performance wise or survive legal wise.

Hopefully they solve it in some way, but I don’t see how unless they do the above and totally remove cross instance caching