And if you don’t watch often enough for ad-free viewing to be worth a few bucks a month to you, then why get so worked up about having to sit through an ad every now and then?

There is an awkward gap where most services (not just YouTube) don’t offer reasonable pricing for consuming small amounts of content. So if you consume a lot of YouTube, the subscription price is justified. If you consume very little YouTube, you can probably suffer through some ads. But if you’re somewhere in the middle, there isn’t a great option.

YouTube probably makes fractions of a cent off of ads on a single video it shows me, but I can’t pay fractions of a cent to watch one video.

I’d consider this to actually be a pretty widespread problem across the internet, where it’s frustratingly difficult to buy small amounts of content for a reasonable price. It’s either the subscription or nothing for a ton of services.

Hard agree. It’s the instability of the user experience that really sucks here.

I do think this kind of thing may solve itself given more time. Instances will establish reputations and their behavior will become more predictable and dependable over time. Right now, users basically have to gamble when joining an instance, or be willing to juggle multiple accounts.

I’d assume it’s better to stay away from small instances though, unless you know the owner. Small instances are very vulnerable. Who knows if that owner will keep maintaining the instance? If it disappears, so does your account.

It will take more time to establish norms. Other instances will certainly defederate and folks will become more accustomed to what that defederation means.

Instances are very vulnerable right now. There’s not much ability to trust or predict how the owners of your instance will behave, because there isn’t a long history of past behavior to look back on, so understandably some users will be frustrated by the lack of stability.

I do see one huge issue with how people are being instructed to join lemmy, which is that most resources tell people it doesn’t matter which instance they join. That becomes fundamentally untrue with defederation.