That’s the point. They started their own game studio when Stadia was launched and shut it down about a year later.

They also paid a lot of money for some of the licenses they got in the early days of Stadia. And then someone a pay grade or two above decided to stop this and suffocate the little bit of momentum the platform had gained.

It’s an ok price if you use YT Music for streaming music.

I’m not sure if this is really feasible (even though I’d be happy to see a working libre search engine). The problem I see is that a search engine is incredibly expensive to run, which makes it hard to maintain servers on a donation model.

Yet it would be interesting to hear, why this shocks you so much. :)

Is it because you don’t think search engines are a service worth paying for or because Google, Bing, DDG … are free?

The problem with all those search providers is: Someone still has to pay for infrastructure. You can either donate/pay for the service or accept ads and tracking.

(I know that YaCy works a bit differently, but honestly even though I really like the idea of the system: This “novel” search engine is almost 20 years old now and never really worked very good.)

So the law works.

Yet there is some truth to the comment. If we want a better less ad-dependend web we will have to address the topic of financing the infrastructure.

I think at least for me it would be cheaper to rent or “buy” movies à la carte on YouTube and similar platforms than subscribing to that amount of services.

I know that. That’s why I wrote “in the long run”. What I meant is this: If more users register on different servers in the long run more communities will spawn on those servers. If everyone just registers on lemmy.world, new communities will find their homes there.

You’re right. On the other hand, beginning to use smaller instances might help to reduce the overload of lw in the long run. It might also make the Fediverse more resilient. Reducing the dependency on big instances in my opinion is a good thing.

I think things could get a lot more interesting if other software that is more like classic bulletin boards and forums would implement ActivityPub. I mean, such online forums are still able to thrive in their respective niches. If such forums would become compatible with Lemmy, Kbin or Friendica, it could bring a whole new dynamic to this part of the Fediverse. At the same time, it would help these niche forums get more attention (even though I’m not sure if all or even most of them are interested in that).