Restricted to the whole site or just that user? The user tools are pretty powerful on their own.

Why is stuff like that included not included in every plan by default? As a European, I can't even imagine paying extra for that. If I want to hotspot my data, my operator can kiss my ass and simply allow it, I'm paying for the data anyway.

For anyone out there, I recommend giving Tidal a shot and for podcasts, I recommend a FOSS app called AntennaPod. This is the combo I use myself, I've been using Tidal for a bit over two years now and just recently switched to AntennaPod.

The problem is that only conglomerates can eat the cost of running such a platform. Ads will be the end of free interne, that's for sure.

My most frequented community (/r/hockey) didn't even try to move, so I have to stay because I love hockey and it's the biggest community. But goddamn is Reddit filled with so much more dumb shit now, just all kinds of weird self posts, people asking if a free game is worth it, why X thing is happening (and it's something they're doing wrong) and so many subs have just turned into random people with default usernames posting about things because they don't know how to Google it. It's so much worse since the downturn and I hope the admins feel it.

It's literally like that shit from Ready Player One where the guy suggests that you can fill up the VR screen with like 80% ads before the user gets sick from it. That's what they are doing now, they will push ads until people either stop watching or not enough people subscribe to Premium. The fact that you can't even skip ahead in a video without getting more ads, even if you just got the pre-roll ads. It's completely unacceptable and I think that there should be laws that would prevent that type of consumer abuse.

Even if they federated (which I doubt they will do), someone would have to foot the bill for those servers. Same thing on lemmy, someone's eating the server costs here even if it isn't a major corporation.

While this is an asshole move, companies like Ferrari do stuff like this too. They, for example, do not allow certain modifications on their cars and if they find out that you have done them, they will ask you to restore those parts back to originals. It is unreal how much car companies try to get from us.

am not a lawyer

Well fuck me, why? Why oh why? It's such a clean and simple app, no weird shit and of course it gets axed. I think I may just stop listening to podcasts then, much easier than switching to an app I have no interest in.

Some people on here will never realize that only paid devs putting in full days will make a platform like Lemmy grow to even a fourth of what Reddit is right now. Part time, unpaid devs will never grow this platform to that size and one way or another, those devs will want to be able to support themselves and that is either through donations or somekind of monetization, which may or may not include monetizing user data. It's just honest facts that it costs money to run servers and that money has to come from somewhere. It takes time to develop an app and in the case of Sync (probably Boost as well) it's just one dev and that takes a lot of his time. Nobody would do that amount of work for free.

Anyone who thinks about this idea for more than 30 seconds decides it is a really bad idea

That's because of all the problems your idea would cause. Identity theft would run rampant, stalking would become easier than ever before, tracking people down would just be one search, etc. I mean you truly did bring up an unpopular opinion, I'll give you that.