Well that didn’t take long. Looks like they’re going the discord route and locking uploads + basic customization behind a subscription. You know, because we don’t already have enough of those.
Bluesky is working on a premium subscription that will add features like higher-quality video uploads and some profile customization options.
Those costs don’t go away by being spread out. Decentralized or not, hosting costs money. Many fediverse hosts are scraping by or out of pocket, and they’re spending their free time on maintenance and administration. We’d be hugely ungrateful to them by pretending that’s not the case.
I’m not making an argument for big centralized social media, or I wouldn’t be here – but I’m a “premium subscriber” to my Lemmy instance.