Posting video on someone else's hardware is not a human right.

> Posting video on someone else's hardware is not a human right

Straw man. Nobody in this thread argued it is.

has anybody tried to argue this here? who are you replying to?

That's the general problem of economic inequality, though. It's not specific to the Internet.

Disadvantaged groups will already have less free time to share content, less exposure to the technical skills needed to do so, less attention, respect, and opportunity from doing so, etc. Advertising places a fig leaf over unequal access, but really makes the inequality worse by centralizing wealth and control in the hands of a few rent-seeking operations.

> That's the general problem of economic inequality, though. It's not specific to the Internet.

Yes, but advertisement showed that it wasn't a structural limitation and that other options were available. Even if said options themselves had downsides.

Donations were and are a thing for covering hosting costs in many communities.

Not if the site serves videos and has 2024-levels world traffic.

Cap it at 720p and ask for donations. 2024 levels of traffic should mean donations scale too

> This silences a large number of people

I'd argue advertising silences many more.

Any niche topic is already so SEO'd to death with keyword rich but contentless content that those with something truly relevant to say are unlikely to ever be heard.*

* Unless commenting in a niche subreddit, a web-ring indexed by small web engines, or the like, where the audience are like minds who've previously found the niche.

The thing is, if your community is small costs are probably in the couple dollars a month range. An order of magnitude lower than the costs of hardware like your computer. If communities are large where an individual cannot trivially bear the costs, donation models have worked where the community itself funds its hosting.

Not nearly everybody on the Internet has ever bought their own computer. There's schools, public libraries etc., to say nothing of the billions of people that have only a smartphone and no desktop or laptop at all.

So what? Takes nothing from the point that hosting is in the dollars a month paid for by a half hour of work in most of the western world. I’m sure developing countries have cheaper hosting costs to match to purchasing power in these locations.

I'd happily provide hosting to a whole lot of media that I enjoy myself and would love to share. I might have bandwidth limits each month, but within reason, I'd share.

predatory lawyers and greedy creators is the reason I don't.

Honestly, when the internet was younger the costs to host content were basically zero. Anyone could run a web server on their own PC and run a website for zero costs. Many ISPs offered shell accounts and provided basic webhosting at no additional cost. These could be scaled up as needed, but everybody with a modem and an ISP had the opportunity to take part in sharing content on the internet.

> Anyone could run a web server on their own PC and run a website for zero costs.

On dialup?

Yes. Websites back then didn't have hundreds of MBs of javascript bloat though so it wasn't as bad as it sounds. The internet over 56k was surprisingly usable.

Maybe in terms of bandwidth, but unless you were fine with never being able to make or receive any more phone calls, how would hosting a website have worked without a second dedicated phone line?

In addition to that, dialup was paid per minute where I grew up, so either option would have been prohibitively expensive.

It did need a dedicated line. Same with the people who ran a BBS out of their home. I knew people who had 3-5 dedicated phone lines running into their houses to support that. Paying per minute for dial up was thankfully not something I had to deal with (unless I was calling into a PoP that was long distance). I can see how the costs of that would get insane very quickly.