A lot of this self censoring is algorithm voodoo. Nobody knows what makes these platforms mark your videos as age restricted, so people do silly stuff like say, “unalive”. I’ve seen many videos where people use the word kill that aren’t age restricted.
Exactly. Federation means no single instance needs to serve millions of users. If one gets too big and becomes too commercialized, you can move to a different one that shares your values. If large instances cost more per user as they scale up, we just need more instances.
I also think people are vastly overestimating the cost to serve users on Lemmy/kbin. Last time I calculated it, lemmy.world costs were around €0.01/mo per monthly active user. That can be maintained with 1% users donating €1 a month.
I’m not convinced statistics can be used like this on big questions where we know so little. Just because we believe the universe to be massively large and ever expanding doesn’t satisfy the basic premise that underlies the assumption that there is so much stuff that some of the stuff must be alive. I don’t think we know enough about the universe to make the assumption that because it is so big, it must be infinitely variable.
But what do I know, I’m just some idiot on the internet.