We really need to do this. Leave them to their own devices and let them reap the results of their politics instead of shielding them.

Right! Even where you can monetize your hobby, if you’re not in it for the sake of your own personal passion, what’s the point?

Great art comes from passion and artistic integrity, not from trying to slap together some garbage to make a buck. If you happen to make money in the process, awesome, but if that’s your whole motivation it’s going to come across in your work and put a bit of a stink on the whole endeavor.

There’s a world of difference between art being enabled by commerce and art being created for the money. The second is self-defeating.

I’d say it’s more that we’ve been paying out the nose in the form of offering up our data and digital autonomy, and by allowing not only the Internet but our societies at large to degrade and polarize. We’ve paid dearly for our ‘free’ services, in the case of the US with everything from our reproductive rights to our connections with our own families and communities.

I’d much rather pay the price of an extra latte now and then for real internet communities than deal with actual Nazis and orbital Teslas for some shitty undermoderated ad feeds infested with trolls, AI, and literal societal saboteurs on the payrolls of Putin and Winnie the Pooh.

I could see a legitimate service being made out of something like an extra private lemmy, or a lemmy with additional features. Sort of like you’ll see these suites of services from Proton or Nord. Yeah, i can set up my own SMTP server, even encrypt my data, but it’s a lot easier to pay a few bucks to have a reliable service do it.

With federated services eventually becoming mainstream, i wouldn’t be surprised to see some companies offering packages that do things like provide additional privacy or larger amounts of storage.

Or like I’d imagine sustainable video hosts will have to monetize somehow just to pay for the storage space.

This is a big part of the shift in mentality that needs to happen. Something doesn’t have to be the biggest to be better. We don’t need millions of concurrent users per server to enjoy connecting with other people and sharing ideas and art.

Like, a local cafe doesn’t need to beat the profit margins of a Starbucks, it just needs to make ends meet. And it’s probably a lot better experience in the process.

It really does sometimes seem like a lot of people just go through life working and killing time. There are definitely people living their lives for themselves, but I think it’s a pretty foreign concept for some folks who’ve bought heavily into a commerce-focused culture.