CDN’s are quite expensive compared to budget VPS and e.g. Hetzner storage cloud. Their basic purpose is to give quick delivery to regions far from the server, not really to save cost. I don’t know the story with lemmynsfw. It’s basically an onlyfans marketing platform right? Maybe they have some donation scheme in place behind the scenes. Anyway free porn hosting isn’t so much an issue per se (imgur, tumblr, etc are also that,) but for those who don’t want to host porn, it likely creates nonstop workload to clean it up.
Also, besides porn, it’s sad that this beautiful fediverse that might have become an alternative place for actual humans to interact, turns into another marketing space for corporate media. I’d like to put up a text only server. I don’t know if that’s really doable with current fediverse types. But why try to recreate reddit and imgur and maybe youtube? Those all already exist.
People have been sending NSFW pictures one way or another probably since people started making pictures. We have images scratched into the walls in Pompeii. There are certainly issues of consent, abuse, and advertising that need to be addressed, but demonizing pictures of naked people is also a problem.
As for all those alternatives you mention, the vast majority of fediverse applications/instances seem to be "like [insert commercial entity], but hosted by individuals/the community? How many people would be on Lemmy if Reddit was offering them what they wanted? When you have control or alternatives the odds of finding what you like improve. And some of those things people will want to share will be images, videos, and yes, even porn. But even without porn, if the service isn’t meeting people’s needs, which I agree includes no or fewer ads, then it simply won’t survive.
CDN’s are quite expensive compared to budget VPS and e.g. Hetzner storage cloud. Their basic purpose is to give quick delivery to regions far from the server, not really to save cost. I don’t know the story with lemmynsfw. It’s basically an onlyfans marketing platform right? Maybe they have some donation scheme in place behind the scenes. Anyway free porn hosting isn’t so much an issue per se (imgur, tumblr, etc are also that,) but for those who don’t want to host porn, it likely creates nonstop workload to clean it up.
Also, besides porn, it’s sad that this beautiful fediverse that might have become an alternative place for actual humans to interact, turns into another marketing space for corporate media. I’d like to put up a text only server. I don’t know if that’s really doable with current fediverse types. But why try to recreate reddit and imgur and maybe youtube? Those all already exist.
People have been sending NSFW pictures one way or another probably since people started making pictures. We have images scratched into the walls in Pompeii. There are certainly issues of consent, abuse, and advertising that need to be addressed, but demonizing pictures of naked people is also a problem.
As for all those alternatives you mention, the vast majority of fediverse applications/instances seem to be "like [insert commercial entity], but hosted by individuals/the community? How many people would be on Lemmy if Reddit was offering them what they wanted? When you have control or alternatives the odds of finding what you like improve. And some of those things people will want to share will be images, videos, and yes, even porn. But even without porn, if the service isn’t meeting people’s needs, which I agree includes no or fewer ads, then it simply won’t survive.