The article makes some good points, cooperation can easily get greedy when their platform gets too large. It does feel like it tries to connect FOSS to privacy, though, and that’s a bit more controversial, especially when it comes to the Fediverse. For a platform like Lemmy the most important thing is to share the post that you published, there is limited development time, security is hard, and when things go wrong it is hard to point at someone.
For example, sending private messages often leads to these private messages being readable by the admins of the instance. In the same way, instance admins can also see the email address that you provided. So we just have to trust the instance admin to be capable enough to protect our data and not leak it out on the internet.
Of course, these issues also exist in companies that want to push out new features to attract users instead of spending time to test if everything is secure. It simply is a difficult point for both FOSS and commercial software, and we need to hold both FOSS and commercial parties responsible for respecting our privacy. At least with FOSS, we can switch to a fork if a maintainer does not do their job well.
Yup YouTube makes it very easy to receive money from adds and people that have YouTube premium. Having a YouTube premium subscription means that you are at least supporting the creator of every video that you watch a little bit (from what I can find 55% of what you pay is going to the creators). Yes YouTube takes quite a large cut, but video hosting in high quality costs a lot of money.
I think it will be very hard to do this on a decentralised platform. People don’t trust just anyone with their money, so it could lead to people abandoning smaller servers and you can be sure that bad actors would pop up and try to abuse the system. And even if you do this the right way, you would have to build this system entirely before you can convince creators to move to this platform.
It will also be really hard to offer the same quality and reliability that YouTube offers, without taking a larger cut than the 45% that YouTube takes. Hosting a large video platform is expensive, and many of the Fediverse users are anti-adds and will run an add-blocker and maybe even sponsor-blocker.