Here’s your solution: YouTube, but backed by blockchain. Instead of hashing or whatever nonsense happens on blockchain, your “mining” actually does something mildly useful and serves videos. You get coins or something. Since there’s no real value in blockchain products and everything is completely fabricated, you can show people their coin value is going up, because why not. So they can continue to “invest” with their compute.

Been feeling inspired by the SBF case lately.

Jokes aside, distributing compute to users is one way to avoid having expensive servers, which tend to be powered by ads, if not direct payments. There is the fediverse. Not sure how well that would work here, but there’s probably some potential. And before that there has been e.g. torrenting communities that require certain seed ratios. Basically: the product is “free” but you need to participate in some form that adds value rather than just leeching. The distributed model is established, I just don’t think it will ever outcompete a centralized one, if for no other reason than distributed communities have strategy and cash flow problems. As in, they don’t really have any functional mechanism to build, fund, and execute on a competitive strategy like YouTube can. All they can really do is make a product and hope people like it. But competing on merit is never enough.