No, I’m not wrong. I’m telling you that there is a threshold beyond which a service cannot support the number of users it has without additional funding and that ads right now provide that additional funding, and always have. And now that we’ve gotten to this point with billions of online users using services daily, we’re to the point where in order to provide a service to that many people bills must be paid and to do that one of two things needs to happen. Ad aggregation, or subscription.

The only reason most of the fediverse survives as it stands now is that it has a small userbase or daily users. When it grows too big to sustain in that regard (given that most of its users now do not actually donate to it), it will die or move to a model that pays the bills. That doesn’t have to be ads. But it absolutely could be, in the same way that it could be subscription service.

Grayjay is an example of a competing service that is subscription based. So was floatplane. Both of these service compete with YouTube. Both of them cost money to run. Each of the examples I have been given that don’t run on ads or subs can be supported currently by the user base because the user base is small and people are providing what it needs out of a labor of love because it doesn’t cause them a hardship to do so. That will not remain the case as the user base grows.

The ones like bittorent and such offload the bandwidth cost to the users but that’s only one facet of what we’re talking about here.