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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.
That's just text, not video or audio.
Text can be done stupidly and wastefully. Sharing videos, for more than a decade, has been doable thanks to P2P. I remember the early days when everyone was sharing everything with everyone, the amount of stuff and the speed at which we got it was unrivaled.
Noawadays peertube works and any good torrent will have more speed than netflix.
We could run most of the internet on donated resources. We just decided we preferred ads-funded centralization, which is a shame.