Everyone wants "free ad-free no tracking no payment" Internet. Nobody wants to compensate anyone for it, and therefore nobody wants to host it.
Then the people who have not viewed an ad or paid a subscription in 20 years complain that the internet sucks and we need to go back to IRC and chan boards. As if ideologically non-paying customers have a voice worth listening to.
This isn't even close to true. The people who are serious about privacy and the open Web, and in the technologies posited to bring that about (such as self-sovereign identity and federation), tend to spend much more money.
They buy servers to self-host services, extra hardware to store data locally and domain names to let others find them. Those who cannot afford it sometimes join niche communities like the Tildeverse as an outlet for the interest.
In my experience it's largely the 'just not interested' camp who always go for the free webmail and whatever free messaging service comes with their phone.
> "As if ideologically non-paying customers have a voice worth listening to."
Do people who ideologically refuse to spend money on meat-foods have nothing worth listening to about animal welfare? Who don't spend money on airline flights have nothing worth listening to about climate change? Who avoid companies which use slave labour in their supply chains have nothing worth listening to about human rights?
'Money talks' but that doesn't automatically mean money has anything worth listening to; markets are manipulated by money as well as using it for signalling, and as a goal-seeking mechanism they are prone to local maxima like other things are.
The thing is that they still use the services/products. It's just ad-blocking and piracy.
So to follow your analogy, they eat meat by stealing it, and feel like they are sending a message about animal welfare.
The only reason why I ever use these services is because they killed off any alternatives through anti competitive practices. And I hate it every time because they are awful and disrespect me every single millimeter of the way.
You are arguing on the premise that ads would somehow be a fair exchange. That is simply the opposite of the truth. Ads are parasitic. Services with ads are almost always worse than services without, not just by having ads but also in every other way. Ads do not incentive quality, they incentive treating your users as prey and feeding them SEO slop.
I want to compensate people for actual beneficial work they do. But with most for profit internet services that is simply not possible. If you give them a finger they will take your whole arm. For exampme I want to buy good movies. But I simply cannot. All I can "buy" is a pinky promise from them to let me watch a movie under their conditions which they can change at any time under their sole discretion and they can just revoke that possibility for me completely at any time. Would I pay for Netflix they would only give me 720p no matter how much money I give them, because I have to much control over my own hardware for them.
There are exceptions to this that I happily pay for, but those are all niche services that cater to the small group of people like me.
Vid.me was the salvation from YouTube, showing up around 2015 and actually pulling creators from YouTube. They gained traction and were well known, at one point even surpassing YouTube on /r/videos.
But they went bankrupt in 2017.
Why? Because people don't want to view ads and they don't want to pay a subscription. Vid.me was unable to monetize and collapsed.
Nebula is a more recent example. Creators falling over themselves to promote it, yet conversation rates are still <1%.
It's not anti-competitive practices killing these companies. It's childish entitled users who get offended when asked to compensate.
I paid a subscription to Amazon Prime Video. Amazon Prime introduced adverts.
But I suppose expecting ad-free video streaming 'just because I paid for it' is also entitled and childish, because to people who use those things as putdowns, everything other people want, is. It's like "everything I don't like is woke" in that sense.
You pay for an ad-subsidized version of amazon prime video.
The ad-free version is available if you cover the cost of lost ad revenue.
Just because you pay doesn't mean there will be no ads. And just because there are ads doesn't mean there is an ad free service available.
This is how smart TVs can be bought for $300. It's a $600 TV but you pay for half of it in smart TV ads.
> "You pay for an ad-subsidized version of amazon prime video."
Apparently so. But that isn't what I signed up for. That isn't the product I started out paying for. And that isn't the product I agreed to switch to, except by some weasel words on their part.
Your original argument is that people don't pay for things because people are crybabies. My counter argument is that people do and did pay for things and companies abused that, and now people are "once bitten, twice shy" not "entitled". People paid for NetFlix and then when that became a success, content companies pulled their content and made their own streaming services. People paid for YouTube Premium to avoid ads and then YouTube showed 'sponsorships' which are ads in all but name.
https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/18ll7y6/i_have_you...
The web is bloated. Costs have exploded because what used to be done in a few megabytes now takes hundreds. You COULD host much of the modern web for much, much less, but you'd actually have to get your webdev house in order.
IRC has pretty much always been free without ads. You make it sound unworkable when it's become so much easier to run over time. And tons of forums are in the same category.
Also there isn't a way for people to pay their share of server cost for services like that. For your average non-video communication service your options are paying 0x or paying 50x.
IRC doesn't offer multi device, high availability log archives. IRC doesn't offer a lot things, actually. Fairly sure the standards don't offer persistent identity.
All the things you describe are achieved via 'bouncers' or dedicated clients living in a server that an impermanent consumption device like a mobile phone might be able to connect to.
No, they're not native to the protocol, nor are they required. However it's an open protocol. You are free to pick from a number of solutions that compose that goal.
I don't want to compose anything and neither does 99% of the world. It's a non solution and we're having the Dropbox announcement discussion 15 years later.
Then buy from a commercial service, just like many do for email. (Many more just use gmail in that context.)
Commercial IRC services? IRC Cloud comes to mind as one I've seen others use. Couldn't tell you how much it costs, how good it is, or if it leaks data.
Adding that doesn't take many resources though. It's because IRC is old and somewhat neglected, not because it would be burdensome to provide for free.
And some networks provide bouncers so they basically do have that. And maybe some IRCv3 networks, I haven't looked into that much lately.