Warning: This is a rant.
I don’t really know how to describe it but the content isn’t quite where reddit had been for me. Also the comments are kind of weird at times, like they type of person here doesn’t quite seem as ‘normal’ as what I’m used to from reddit.
There’s a lot more open source and privacy focused people and conversations. A lot of people seem to hate on big tech and big companies in a sort of toxic-ish feeling way to me (not to say the other relationship isn’t toxic… just saying). Random conversations go into: “omg your privacy is lost cause you used a Google service.” Then we have the ‘if we don’t defederate with Meta the world ends’ conversations. I personally would like to see what Meta does in the fediverse… maybe it will make it more normalized…idk. Then the: “if your app isn’t open source its awful and terrible for the world” people.
Like that stuff is all fine, but it just isn’t quite my cup of tea.
These things remind me of that one person in my comp sci classes in college who I just couldn’t stand talking to. He would try to make you feel like an idiot by trying to sound all self righteous and smart. (Honestly he would fail and would generally look like a dingus).
The bulk of the content that gets comments seem to be mostly meme atm. At least on all (7/10 of the current top for me are memes). I like my memes, but would like some more breadth/depth.
Like I hope Lemmy continues to grow and hope it gets better, but it leaves me missing reddit at the moment.
In a perfect world I wish reddit corp wasn’t such assholes and this whole thing didn’t happen the way it did.
I’m completely skipping the UI and stuff not being as familiar and the various outages/bugs/etc since that’s to be expected with something at this stage.
Please don’t hate me :) Just sharing my unpopular opinion. Though I genuinely wonder if others feel the same way.
/Rant
Unfortunately it’s really hard even for huge companies to reliably and profitably host video, youtube bled money for decades before they added the insane amount of advertising and changed their content policy to be as ad friendly as possible. I’d expect reddit was profitable, I or near break even at the least, before they added video hosting. VCs definitely wouldn’t have let reddit bleed for 18 years on large losses, it’s just not part of the business model. The problem is, after they accepted VC money they were likely pressured into adding video as a way to copy tiktok. It would really difficult for instance hosts running on goodwill and a bit of donation money to pay for video hosting without bankrupting themselves. The amount you need to pay for data transfer and server infrastructure is exponentially higher.
That said, I’m not sure how scalable peertube is irl, maybe it could be done with good peertube embedding support or something? That probably be the ideal solution because it forces users to give something back in return for being able to watch video due to its P2P nature.