This wasn’t true in the past and we might simply be experiencing a historical anomaly right now

While our exact pacing might be slightly different from the pure extrapolation, human history has been a long, steady increase in the rate of invention. Access to education has meant that more people are making things, and then the next generations build on top of their work to make even bigger things.

This is actually an incredibly good point. This applies to writing, visual arts, music, programming…

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.

Unfortunately, the way federation works means that a 100 user instance that never grows past that can still see cost increases from the ecosystem growing. The number of network effects involved in all of this makes planning for meaningful sustainability a lot more difficult.

So… it could work. But that’s not going to be consistent, and the federated nature of things like Lemmy makes for some weird structures. Can you give rewards across instances? What if one instance has “gold” at $1, but another has it at $0.50?

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.

Yeah, I’ve tried those out before. It tends to make the game feel weird, if that makes sense? Like, everything is still expecting time to progress.

Really, I want a game like Stardew, but without the hard timeline baked in from the start.

Yep. I love planting things, harvesting them… I want Stardew Valley without the time management stuff.